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
The trend I created this week matched the players who qualified for the most Pro Trends on a given slate. If a trend that matches the most trends seemed a little Inception-y, let me explain. First of all, if you are new to Fantasy Labs and aren’t familiar with Pro Trends, there is more information here.
The “Pro Trends” filter that you can use when creating a custom trend matches the number of Pro Trends that a player qualifies for. With this particular custom trend, I am matching players who qualify for 10 or more Pro Trends on a given night. Here is the overall rating for the trend:
This is another simple trend that contains only a single filter:
• Pro Trends are Between 10 and 15
Results
The screenshots below are from teams I entered into FanDuel’s $5 Layup
1/11
There were only three games played on 1/11, which returned a single match: Brook Lopez (vs San Antonio). Now, you might be wondering what would cause a $8,600 Brook Lopez to qualify for 12 Pro Trends against the Spurs’ elite defense.
While some Pro Trends are matchup and pricing related, we have others that will award players for maintaining high averages within specific stats, having a low dud rating, and things like that. Players would qualify for these types of Pro Trends regardless of their opponent. Right now, Lopez’s role within the Nets allows him to qualify for a lot of Pro Trends on a nightly basis. Tonight, the Nets face the Blazers and Brook is currently sitting on 10 Pro Trends on FanDuel:
Anyway, despite the difficult matchup, 23.5% of the teams in this GPP still rostered Brook. Again, this was a three-game slate and there weren’t many alternatives. He had an okay game, but fell short of his 34.5 implied point total. Should have rostered Boban.
1/12
Wow, lots of qualifiers. To make things simpler, we had two Knicks (Melo/Porzingis) and two Bucks (Middleton, MCW). Yesterday, Brook qualified for some player-level Pro Trends, while these two teams benefitted from some team level boosts. Both got a significant bump in paceD and some of the Vegas categories from playing against faster opponents.
This was actually a very good night within the trend, as every listed player except for Melo surpassed their implied point total. In fact, Carmelo was well on his way to a big night before injuring himself against Boston and not playing in the second half. This could have easily been a clean sweep.
One thing I am noticing at this early point in the week is that the trend has not matched a single player who turned out to be less than 15% owned. The night of 1/12 was an eight-game slate, so there were plenty of available options for people to choose from. Some of the Pro Trends are less obvious than others, but people will be aware of bonuses that are awarded for playing lots of minutes, having high usage, and those types of things.
1/13
Somewhat unbelievably, on this 10-game night, there was only one player who qualified for 10 or more Pro Trends, and it was Emmanuel Mudiay. This is an instance of a player benefitting from some of our salary-based Pro Trends. FanDuel’s total cap is $60,000, while on DraftKings, it is $50,000. Since Mudiay cost $400 more on DraftKings, that meant he was going to be an excellent value on FanDuel, and that is reinforced by his 91% Bargain Rating. Unfortunately for Mudiay, he was outplayed by Jameer Nelson, who ended up with 32 minutes to Mudiay’s 17.
This was a CRAZY DFS night, with players being ruled out left and right prior to tip (several Mavs, Beverley, Dragic, Conley, etc., etc., etc.) It’s probably only fitting that this slate produced the weirdest results of the week within this trend as well.
1/14
We saw two players over-perform and three players underperform last night. Draymond Green’s dud was pretty easy to see coming, but it’s pretty incredible that the 76ers scored 111 points without getting great production from either Jahlil Okafor or Nerlens Noel.
Review
In my opinion, quality beats quantity when it comes to Pro Trends. Not all of them are created the same and that is evident by looking at the +/- column on the Pro Trends landing page:
I think this strategy would probably have been more successful had I used the “Pro Trends Rating” filter instead, since this isn’t based solely on raw count. All in all, 64% of the players identified by the trend this week surpassed their implied point total. That’s actually pretty good when you consider that two players left their games early (Melo and Tyreke), resulting in automatic duds.
