With our Trends tool, you can see current and historical matches for players in matchups that meet the specified criteria. This makes it pretty easy to track performance within the result set. In this series, I thought it might be cool to take it one step further. I will be creating a Trend early in the week, playing the “Current Matches” in my lineups throughout the week on FanDuel and then reviewing the Trend at the end of the week.
This Monday, I created the following Trend:
Description
On Wednesday’s Trend of The Day, I took a look at Karl-Anthony Towns, whose price was at an all-time high. Even with the elevated price point though, Towns had a very high Projected Plus/Minus value, meaning we still expected him to easily exceed his implied point total that day. The Trend I looked at this week in my Trend Testing Series is somewhat similar – I’m not necessarily looking for great values, but still trying to identify strong matchups.
At this point in the NBA DFS season, most people know where a player’s average price point should be and it’s sort of easy to recognize when a player is relatively over or underpriced. Since I enter teams into GPPs for this series, I thought it would be interesting to create a Trend that more or less ignores Bargain Rating. Perhaps ownership will be down because people don’t want a “bad deal.” I might not want a bad deal in cash games either, but it might be worth taking the chance in GPPs. Here is the overall rating for the Trend:
The filters I used were:
• Bargain Rating is Between 0 and 50
• Player’s Projected +/- Percentile is 90-99
Results
The screenshots below are from teams I entered into FanDuel’s $5 Layup
2/22
Before we get into the results, I’m going to go on a quick aside. If you don’t think the model you are using is all that important, consider this: using Phan’s Model on 2/22, all four of Giannis, Towns, Russell, and LeBron ranked as top-10 plays because Bargain Rating is weighed lightly in that model. By increasing Bargain Rating to 40, only Towns remained as a top 10 play. Make sure you know what your model is looking for before you start using it!
Anyway, here were the matches from 2/22:
Three of four matches exceeded value, with LeBron being the lone exception. This was a seven-game slate and each player had a fairly high ownership level. That’s really not what I was hoping for, but it probably makes sense, as I will address later.
Despite coming with inflated price points on FanDuel, Giannis and Towns had no problem easily exceeding their implied point totals due to their strong matchups. The Lakers have been arguably the premier team to target all season long and Boston’s interior struggles are pretty well documented.
2/23
Next, we have a five-game slate with one match, Jrue Holiday vs Washington.
We have another huge ownership number and in Jrue’s case, he was able to very slightly exceed his implied point totally based on salary of 31.01. That’s fine, but it’s not going to really move the needle in GPPs. To that point, although Holiday appeared on nearly one-third of all teams in this tournament, he did not appear on any of the top-five teams.
2/24
On a Wednesday’s 10-game slate, the only match was Hassan Whiteside. Whiteside was severely underpriced on DraftKings, which left him with a terrible 13% Bargain Rating on FanDuel. Still, he was only the sixth-most expensive center on FanDuel and he was coming off of two 50-point games with a favorable matchup on tap. In a vacuum, Hassan was by no means a bad play on FanDuel. But if you were looking at a model that heavily weighed Bargain Rating, he likely did not appear among the top plays at the position. This goes back to my earlier point about knowing your model’s settings.
Despite appearing on 13.9% of teams overall, Hassan was rostered by six of the top-10 finishers in this GPP, making him one of the more valuable tournament plays.
2/25
I don’t know that I’ve seen a night where all of the Trend’s matches exceeded their implied point total by double digit points, but that exactly what happened last night. Durant and Curry both appear on over 20% of the teams in this GPP, but considering this was a six-game slate and their fantasy production, they were both strong tournament plays. In turn, Bogut came close to outscoring the most popular option at center (Vucevic, 32.8 fantasy points), while costing $3,700 less.
In addition to the above listed plays, Westbrook, Thaddeus Young, and James Harden had monster games, so this Trend wouldn’t have put you in the money by itself, but still, the results were pretty encouraging.
Review
We almost had a clean sweep, but LeBron had to go ruin it – James was the only player to miss his implied point total of this week’s matches, while the other eight exceeded value. Over half (five-of-nine) of the matches exceeded their implied point total by double-digit points. In terms of fantasy production, it was a successful week in support of the Trend’s overall +5.2 Plus/Minus, which is very high.
However, I entered the week thinking that because I was looking at players with below average Bargain Ratings, I would be able to roster a few players at reduced ownership. With only a couple exceptions, ownership levels were pretty high though. In a relatively low buy-in GPP, I don’t think most players are as value conscious as they would be in more expensive tournaments. It would have been interesting to compare the ownership levels to those from a tournament with a higher buy-in, but I think it’s safe to say that a player being overpriced on a site is not enough to discourage players from rostering them in cheaper games.
The last question for me is: why does this Trend have such a high Plus/Minus rating? Bargain Rating 0-50 is a negative filter and yet, the overall Plus/Minus is very strong. DraftKings and FanDuel obviously price players differently. On DraftKings, it seems like top centers have been underpriced all year. For proof, take a look at how many centers have had a Bargain Rating of 90+ on each site:
On the other hand, FanDuel seems slower to hike a player’s price after a couple of good games than DraftKings. Just because a player is (relatively) cheaper on the other site though, that doesn’t mean that they can’t still be a good deal on the site you play, and that’s exactly what the Trend is telling us. It’s not just a FanDuel thing either – as you can see, the results are nearly identical when creating the same Trend on DraftKings:
