Dinkmeyer: GPP Leverage January 12

Welcome to the fourth edition of GPP Leverage for the 2020-2021 NBA season. This article is going to be a catch-all space for my GPP thoughts. In most of the articles I’ll address some of the relevant GPP plays for that day’s slate, but some of the articles will be more focused on plays and others more focused on strategy. Today’s Leverage is going to focus on how to handle depleted rosters. With Covid protocols decimating rosters and leaving tight rotations of fringe NBA players available at cheap prices, it’s important to have a strategy in place on how to approach these situations. We will hone in on the specifics of these situations, but there are also some core concepts that you can extrapolate to NBA DFS and DFS as a whole. Let’s start there.

Dealing with Fragility

Over time, projections have had a stronger influence on DFS. In the early days of DFS, projections weren’t readily available, and a larger percentage of your competition was building a few lineups by hand and calling it a day. With the explosion of projections and optimizers, the dynamics have changed in the game we play. Ownership used to correlate more heavily with recent performance. Players that were amid hot streaks would keep garnering higher and higher ownership even as their price rose. Conversely, cold streaks would crater price tags AND ownership on players. It was a phenomenal environment for a projections-based player as you were consistently getting offered a better price (both in actual salary and in ownership percentage) on a player who fundamentally hadn’t changed but his recent results had. It was relatively easy to get naturally contrarian on good projected plays, because the field was swinging with the emotions of recent performance.

The proliferation of projection systems and optimizers has drastically changed the landscape.