Punting Categories and Team Makeup

[CaptainAwesome]

As we are in the fantasy offseason for dynasty leagues, I was curious... what factors lead you to consciously punt a category and how does that impact your draft board and trade targets? I'll share my own thoughts on the matter over the weekend, but I was curious how others tackle this, especially in dynasty where there are long term impacts from choosing categories to punt.

[frytening]

Assuming we are talking about H2H here... I usually let my first 2 picks leading into availability of the 3rd determine punt strategy, as well as what the rest of the league is doing.

Punting is all about exploiting the difference between market value, and value to you. So if I see that 0 or 1 managers are punting a given category and I have the chance to pick up a significant value differential, I will pull the trigger. Given that I am always on the clock, I always make 3 or so lists before the draft for punting categories. This allows me to take advantage when the opportunity presents. It also means I know exactly what my future targets are.

I'm not currently in any dynasty leagues but my preference would be to maintain as much flexibility as possible until pulling the trigger is just too good to pass up. Having said that, value differentials are probably going to be higher for the same reasons so maybe you can go hard early. The problem is, if you draft the wrong Christmas tree line and that player bombs or gets injured, you might be in bad shape and with little room to get better.

I'm sure there are heaps of other considerations but those come to mind immediately. I also recommend doing research by unchecking some categories on my rankings page: https://fasketball.com/players/rankings

[CaptainAwesome]

This looks very similar to the spreadsheets I build out each season where I'd use Christmas tree style coloring for lines like you are - I love that this is online!

[CaptainAwesome]

As soon as I can get to my laptop, I'll write up how I've tackled dynasty and categories and some strategic punting. It netted me multiple titles, and I'll explain how I had to adjust the team over the course of multiple seasons as certain players strengths weren't as huge of a difference to offset punting those categories anymore.

[CaptainAwesome]

So, let's look at how my team evolved in Dynasty over a 5 year span, from 2010-2014.

In 2010, my team was anchored by:

Dwight Howard
Pau Gasol
Amare Stoudemire
Carlos Boozer

Those were my 4 keepers going to the next year, but I also had 1 year wonders from Chris Kaman, Beno Udrih, Raymond Felton, and George Hill.

Categories in the league at this time were: FG%, FTM, FT%, 3PM, 3P%, REB, AST, AST/TO, STL, BLK, DD, PTS

Team structure for the league at this time was G/G/F/F/C. Since I didn't have a dominant PG per se (I did have Parker, but the other three above were eh), I punted 3PM but was able to stay quasi-competitive in 3P%. Any team with Howard is a black hole for both FT% and AST/TO, so I punted those categories as well. I would wind up winning most weeks 8-4, with the occasional 7-5, 9-3, and 10-2 win as well. I got a lot of assists from non-traditional sources (e.g. Pau Gasol), so I was near the top of the league in assists every week.

I wound up finishing 3rd that season; I had a rough week in the semis and lost 6-5-1.

In 2011, I added to the 4 keepers listed above: Jrue Holiday, Udrih (again), Darren Collison, Millsap, and Lowry (this was the year that Dragic got hurt in HOU and Lowry hit it big in his place). I was actually able to not punt FT%, as Dwight was surrounded with an army of above-average FT shooters. I, of course, did punt 3PM and AST/TO.

I won the title this year on a tiebreaker (had both head to head and regular season tiebreaker advantage over the second-place team); needless to say, he was none too happy and forced several rule changes for 2012, as he thought it was "unfair" that I loaded up on second-tier PGs to run up AST and STL and that I didn't have a single SF on my roster for the F position (allowing me to load up on PF/C types).

Rule changes for 2012:

Categories became: FGM, FG%, FTM, FT%, 3PM, 3P%, REB, AST, STL, BLK, TO. That put us at an 11 category league, down from 12.

Positions became: PG/SG/SF/PF/C/UTIL.

I kept the same 4 players from the previous year and drafted: Klay Thompson, Thad Young, Paul Pierce, Dragic, Gortat, Felton, Monta Ellis. Not a terrible draft, but early on, I realized I needed another star at PG, so I pulled off this trade:

Young/Boozer for Josh Smith and Derrick Rose. Note that this was pre-ACL Rose coming off his MVP season (he hurt his knee less than two weeks after the championship week).

This team was a juggernaut post-trade and steamrolled its way to a second consecutive title. Needless to say, more people were not happy with how I plowed through the league and how my punting of categories (FT%, TO) gave me an "unfair" advantage. So... more rule changes for 2013 ensued.

I kept Gasol, D12, Smith, Rose (keeper prices were dirt cheap so it made sense to stash Rose indefinitely at that time).

Categories became for 2013: FG%, FT%, 3PM, 3P%, REB, AST, STL, BLK, TO, DD, PTS. 11-cat league still, but with a slight change in categories.

Note that of those 4 keepers, the only one who stayed healthy in the 2012-2013 season was Smith. Gasol? Hurt. D12? Hurt. Rose? Not coming back that year at all. Somehow, with a lot of waiver wire moving, I won my division and made the playoffs and finished 4th. The worst part was that I was offered Curry (coming off of the second ankle surgery) straight-up for Gasol the week before he got hurt. I strongly regret not pulling the trigger on that one.

The 2014 season had the addition of a second UTIL slot. I kept Smith/D12/Korver (his deadly nature from outside the arc was sorely under-appreciated even back then), and Rose. Sometimes, I wish I knew how to quit Derrick Rose.

I had a good draft this year, getting Lowry/Bledsoe/Favors/Hawes/Manimal/Conley/Millsap/Parsons. I traded Parsons early in the season for MCW, as I was punting TO and FT% and wanted another PG/SG eligible player that contributed in many categories. My long-term plan was to build around Lowry/Bledsoe/Favors/Conley (as Smith was becoming a fantasy time bomb), which would give me a solid core of guards plus Favors and his upside and youth.

I had the #1 overall seed coming into the playoffs, but during the semis, family wound up getting admitted to the hospital, so I had to drop everything and didn't even bother to set my lineup, so I finished 3rd.

It was at this point that the league decided to switch to a cash format and due to this change, everyone agreed that we should do a redraft for the 2014-2015 season.

This gave me a chance to completely reset my team and change how I wanted to build my team going forward; I've gone at length on those changes and how they panned out in the "Offseason" thread.

[CaptainAwesome]

I'll post in a bit on why I chose those keepers and why I chose to punt specific categories year over year...

[CaptainAwesome]

So, when I wound up with my initial team in 2010, I had a LOT of bigs that could do a lot of things... except make FTs and 3 pointers. The point guards that I had were - on the whole - pedestrian (Parker excluded), so I couldn't rely on them for more than assists, points, steals and not killing me in percentages. Every now and then, if I had an opponent that was even more dreadful in volume of 3 pointers made (and there were a couple in the league), I'd stream 3 point specialists as we didn't have a max transaction per week rule in place at that point and I'm all about exploiting rules to the max to win.

In 2011, the league instituted a max moves per week rule to mitigate the streaming of 3 point specialists (I was opposed to this rule change, but sometimes you just gotta roll with it). So, I realized that 3PM was going to be a total punt category for me virtually every week. To frytening's point, it makes sense to maintain as much flexibility with keepers as possible for categories... unless you've got a big time value difference maker that makes the punting worth it. Any team that carries D12 would for sure punt A/TO (given how much of a turnover machine he is for a big) and would have a severely negative impact to FT% due to his bricking of so many FTs. That said, consciously keeping him back then in dynasty meant major boosts to: FG%, FTM, REB, BLK, DD, and a plus on points. With that many categories getting big boosts from D12, it made sense to consciously build around those categories and choose keepers to make sure that those categories would be won week in and week out. That's where adding Josh Smith the season became such a big deal for me - Smoove is a terrible FT shooter, but contributes in so many other categories as a SF/PF that he actually made my team back then stronger because of the strategic decision to punt FT% and turnover-based categories.

As fryetening also pointed out, sometimes a conscious decision to load up on players that are of a certain type (such that you're stacked with players that make you punt certain categories) can backfire horribly, like it did during the 2012-2013 season. Watching Howard, Gasol, and Smoove all get hurt pretty much ruined any hopes of a three-peat. But, sometimes you have to take that chance because if the team stays somewhat healthy, you have a core of categories that you will win week in and week out and you've got enough of a supporting cast to pick up a few more categories to allow for a 7-4 or 8-3 win.

Looking at what I have right now in dynasty, I know my team is very heavy in the SG/SF/PF types; I'm pretty much chained to Rose and Jennings (assuming he's healthy and starting somewhere in the fall) for PG, so I know I have to get my AST and the like elsewhere to offset this. I'm not punting AST yet, but if I had to unload someone of value to be competitive in AST, there's no way that I'd do it. We'll see how this plays out going forward.

[wickedwrister]

In roto I never punt anything, too hard to win with a 1 or a 2 in anything

In H2H, I never consciously decide to punt at the begining for the draft but I tend to just draft for value and not position for the first half of a draft. If after the first half I've gotten mostly players who are deficient in the same category then I may make the call to just give up on it and stop factoring that category in my future draft choices because it won't make a difference.