We truly believe here at FantasyLabs that we have the most unique tools and data available to DFS users. However, we also realize that those tools and data are only as awesome and helpful as our ability to effectively communicate how to use everything. As such, we will continually listen to feedback of what you need and try our best to teach our subscribers how to use all of the cool things we have to offer.
With this in mind, we’ve begun a “Trend of the Day” series. Every weekday we’ll walk our subscribers through an important trend for that day’s slate of games.
Two weeks ago, we created a trend for players who had seen an increase in salary on the year, but a decrease in salary on the month. A player’s performance is something that is factored into their salaries and we can place some trust in the idea that a player’s salary will increase when they are playing above expectation and that it will decrease if they are underperforming. The purpose of that trend from two weeks ago was to find players who may be performing poorly of late, but that we could reasonably expect to return to form. Targeting players like can be a solid GPP strategy when looking for low ownership paired with potentially high upside.
I was sitting around and doing some thinking last night (no big deal) and I thought it would be interesting to see that trend reversed. How about the players who have seen a salary decrease on the year but an increase on the month? You may think that this feels like we are venturing towards the hot hand fallacy, but I do think there are better ways to look at that than with the trend we are about to build. The hot hand fallacy is a topic that maybe we will tackle another day.
The old trend may have assisted in finding players who were under-owned while this trend probably won’t lead us in that direction, but I am curious to see which trend has historically performed better. This is one of the beauties of the Trends tool – if we have a question, it can quickly be answered. I don’t have to sit around and hypothesize which of these two trends would present more value, I can just open the Trends tool and bing, bang, boom – there is our answer.
I think it will be interesting to include the results from the previous trend, so I will make note of that as we go along. Enough chit chat; let’s get it poppin’.
Trend: Players with a Salary Decrease on the Year and a Salary Increase on the Month with a Positive Projected Plus/Minus
Step 1: Fantasy Season Filters > Season Salary Change > Set to “-4100 to -100”
Alright, now we have narrowed our search down to players who have seen their salary decrease since the beginning of the season. We have a large count of 14,755 and a Plus/Minus of +1.56. Next, we are going to take a look at which of these players have seen an increase in salary over the past month.
Note: when at this step for the old trend, we were looking at the opposite of this (players with an increase in salary on the year), and we saw a count of 19,728 and a Plus/Minus of +0.63.
Step 2: Fantasy Month Filters > Monthly Salary Change > Set to “100 to 2800”
We have now introduced players who have seen their salary increase over the past month, but have had their salary decrease over the season. This has brought the count down to 3,321 and brought the Plus/Minus up to +1.56. Holding true to the trend from a few weeks ago, we are going to use to “Proj. +/-” filter to narrow the search down to players who were offering at least a bit of value.
Note: when at this step in the previous trend (players who saw a salary increase on the year and a salary decrease on the month) we saw a count of 4,320 and a Plus/Minus of +1.14. The count was a bit higher, but the Plus/Minus of the old trend is still lower than our new trend.
Step 3: Projections > Proj. +/- > Set to “2 to 22.39”
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Adding this filter has brought our count down to 1,308, but it has brought our Plus/Minus up to +3.86.
Note: when at this step for the old trend (yearly increase in salary, monthly decrease in salary, and Proj. Plus/Minus of at least 2) we had a count of 1,460 and a Plus/Minus of +4.18.
When factoring in players who had some perceived value by adding the Projected Plus/Minus filter, it shows us that the previous trend does perform better than this one. With that said, this trend is still good. When finished with this step, we should be looking at this.
This is a pretty good trend, with a count of 1,308, a Plus/Minus just below +4, and a consistency of 64.6% – it is a trend that I will probably save. Now, let’s take a look at our current matches.
Note: when doing the old trend, we had a longer list of current matches, so prior to viewing out current matches we then decided to introduce another filter that set Bargain Rating to “60 to 99”. I do not think that is necessary for this specific trend.
Before sending you off with a ceremonial “Good Luck,” I do want to mention that this trend is being created very early in the morning. If you are creating a trend or looking at Pro Trends early in the morning, you should be aware that a player could potentially be added to or subtracted from the current matches for a trend. For example, in this trend we have Brandon Knight as a current match. He has a projected Plus/Minus of +2.9. The FantasyLabs NBA team does an excellent job of updating the projections to reflect to most recent news. If news was to come out and Brandon Knight was to have his projection dropped by a full point, he would then drop out of this trend. I have been asked that question on a few occasions and I feel this is a good example to show how it could happen.
Good luck!
