Best Player Available Draft – Update 1
This is the first update in the draft experiment series, for the Best Player Available (BPA) draft. If you’re unfamiliar with the premise, go back and read the original post: the great draft experiment.
This team was specifically drafted using a BPA strategy. That means, regardless of positions, I would try to take the “best” player out there. This strategy sounds like a good one, but it definitely has its setbacks in a league where positions matter. There are so many centers that are good out there, you’d theoretically end up taking multiple centers before you took other positions, and we all know this isn’t the best way to draft.
So, although I was going to give an update for each team monthly, I decided to go an extra month and let things fall into place a bit better for each team in the draft experiment. I will be posting the other three in the next few days, all in succession.
Now, you’re all probably wondering how well this team is doing in the standings. Well, the answer is: pretty poorly. It is currently in 11th place out of 12 total teams.
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The first row is the ranking in each category (this is a roto league) and the second row is the total year-to-date accumulation for each category.
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As you can see, I’ve only made made 6 transactions total. That means six players total have been added since this team was drafted. There have been five total drops. The sixth add was made without a reciprical drop because I put one of my many injured players on IR.
Take a look at the full current roster as it stands today:
You may be thinking to yourself that this team is doomed. Perhaps. I, however, am inclined to say that it is not. You’ll see why when you look at the games I’ve used for each position so far and then looking back at the standings you’ll see why this particular team is so low in goalie categories across the board. Injuries and poor performances have had a big effect on this team but over time, it is still very possible to get back up to speed as the long season rolls on.
The standings show that this team is simply brutal in goal right now, and that is obvious. Basically what happened was Turco and Biron had extremely poor starts to the season (Turco/Dallas continues to struggle) and thus I started benching my goalies whenever possible, depending on who they were facing. Also, while all this benching is occuring, I was also grabbing some goalies off free agency that I feel will be able to help me in the long run. In fact, of the few transactions I’ve made so far for this team, half have been goalie additions: Halak, Huet, and Bryzgalov.
In roto, you want to maximize the production you get out of each player for every game you use. In this Yahoo! public league, you get 82 games per starting slot. A common novice move in roto leagues with max games is to play it like head to head and simply rotate in all your players over and over, including your lower quality bench guys. Due to the massive struggles of Turco and Biron at the outset of the season, I was forced to bench them frequently and let them come out of their slumps. This is pretty much what you really want to do, relegate the majority of your usable games to your best players when they’re playing well, in order to maximize your production over the long run. No sense in continually starting them if they’re in a slump, though. This is a twist to the always start your studs rule.
Although this team is currently in 11th place out of 12 total, once I start using up more goalie games (which this team is behind in due to all the benchings), I will be able to claw my way back up the standings because I’ll be catching up by using games that my competitors have already used up. I am way behind in both G and at C. For the goalies, my biggest problem area, I have 5 goalies to choose from. I will be using a production by committee strategy for the next several weeks and starting each goalie vs. the weakest teams. Hopefully, if done right and with a bit of good luck, the production I’ll be able to squeeze out of each start will be higher than if I just had Turco and Biron starting every game like I would’ve at the beginning of the season. Take a look at the games used for each position in the graphic below.
If you look back at the previous roster (initial BPA roster) right after the draft, you can see that I haven’t made too many changes. One of the goals of this experiment was to make zero trades and have as few transactions as reasonably possible. I have received a LOT of trade offers for this team. Most of them have been pretty terrible offers, honestly. If this was a normal team, I would certainly be fielding and offering lots of trades but because of the rules I decided to formulate when coming up with the idea for the experiment, there will be no trading for the entire season. Obviously, this stunts quick improvement, but the real goal of this experiment is to see how well the draft strategy and players drafted can pan out over the course of the entire season.
The next draft experiment updates will come tomorrow. The other 3 teams are doing quite a bit better in the standings than this particular one. However, again, roto is a long term game and there will be ample opportunity to catch up in the standings for this BPA team.
Check out the original post: The Great Draft Experiment and also the main page with links to all the teams: http://saucerpass.com/draft-experiment.
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