When Is the Optimal Time to Draft Best Ball Mania Teams?

When is the best time to draft your Best Ball Mania teams?

On one hand, drafting early exposes you to values, builds, and combinations that aren’t possible later in the summer. J.K. Dobbins‘ ADP is going to skyrocket three-plus rounds after he signed with the Broncos — anyone drafting in late summer will be paying a premium for Dobbins compared to those who secured him early.

On the other hand, there is plenty of information that’s simply unknowable in May or June. We don’t know who is going to win every training camp battle. We don’t know which players coming off an injury will be ready for Week 1. We don’t know who’s going to get hurt in training camp or the preseason. For the first two points, we can pay attention to buzz throughout the early summer to give ourselves a good chance at guessing right, but we aren’t going to bat 1.000 like someone drafting a week before the season begins.

It’s an interesting thought exercise to consider which side wins out. In theory, you can draft all the players whose ADP is going to skyrocket in May and win everything. In practice, cashing an 18-leg parlay on all massive ADP risers is essentially statistically impossible. However, if you can nail one or two big ADP risers in May and keep the rest of your team mostly clean, does that outweigh the benefits of increased information later in the summer?

That’s a hard question to answer. Thankfully, we have some data to inform our decision-making. When I wrote this article in 2022, my contention was that the information edge from drafting later in the summer outweighed the inefficient ADP edge from drafting earlier (there are also other factors, e.g., more casuals drafting later in the summer). Best ball has become far more popular and evolved tremendously since then. Today, we’ll review data from the past two seasons of BBM and hypothesize whether you should be drafting most of your BBM teams early or late in the summer.

POINTS SCORED AND PLAYOFF ADVANCE RATE BY DRAFT MONTH

We’ll start with a bird’s-eye view of average fantasy scoring by draft month. As demonstrated below, each subsequent month has a higher average score with August having a massive lead over all other months (BBM filled before September last year).

Keep in mind that this doesn’t impact advance rate at all since teams drafted in August will only be competing against other teams drafted in August for the first 14 weeks. However, once teams get separated into random pods for the playoff weeks in Weeks 15-16, the increased scoring firepower of an August team could give them an advantage over earlier-drafted counterparts. To test this theory, we can look at semifinal advance rate by month. To be clear, this looks exclusively at teams that advanced past the first round (Weeks 1-14) and identifies the rate at which they advanced past Week 15 into Week 16.