GPP Leverage: Week 4

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Welcome to Week 4 GPP Leverage! Last week, we considered how secondary stacks can help us combine appealing players in ways our opponents might overlook. This week, I want to focus on another familiar tournament decision: How should we handle players who significantly outperformed their projections in the week prior?

A big game can tell us something useful about a player’s role, his health, or how an offense wants to operate. It can also make us more confident than we should be that we’ll see the same thing again. From a leverage perspective, we need to consider both what we learned and how much ownership that performance is likely to attract. A player can remain a good play while becoming less appealing as more of our opponents decide they want to roster him.

This brings us back to the quote I’ve regularly referenced from Drew on mastering the concepts rather than copying the answers. The goal here isn’t to produce a list of last week’s standouts to fade. It’s to consider when their performances give us a reason to change our expectations, when the field might go too far, and how we can use that distinction as the slate develops throughout the weekend.

To get a better sense of how the field responds to big performances, I compared players at the same position on the same slate whose salaries were within $500 and whose ETR projections were within one DraftKings point of each other. For this analysis, a recent smash means a player exceeded his projection by at least 10 DK points in the previous week. His counterpart came from the same salary and projection group and finished less than five points within projection.

As shown below, the recent smashes attracted considerably more ownership without delivering better next-game results. In the Milly, they averaged 9.3% ownership compared with 5.7% for their counterparts. However, they outscored the other player only 47% of the time. The Spy results told a very similar story: more ownership, slightly less production, and an outscoring rate around 47%.

That gives us a reason to question how much extra ownership a big game deserves when the players remain similarly priced and projected. These results didn’t show a scoring advantage that supported the premium. Of course, average points and head-to-head wins don’t capture everything that matters in tournaments, but they also don’t give us a reason to automatically prefer the player who just went nuts.