I am trying to plan out my weekly lineup so that I don’t use players that I really don’t need to use (given 3-game constraint), but also don’t want to get to the end of the week and realize I have games left that I can’t use.
Would be great if there was a lineup sandbox that would let you input your lineup for the week and it shows you how many games at each slot you are using.
Any best practices outside of the site?
I’ve been trying to figure this out as well. With the unbalanced schedule I’m having to have a google tab open to look at every teams games that week.
I created a note on my lineup and keep a view of how many games I have at each position. If I have some remaining after each of my starters’ games are accounted for, I use my bench and note who I used and when. It looks like this:
G: 0
G: 0
G: 0
F: 0
F: 0
C: 1
G/F: 0
F/C: 0
Util: 1
Started Poole at G 10/19 to use up final G game.
Started Maxey at G/F 10/20 to use up final G/F game.
This link might help a little bit… It’s something I built yesterday as part of building a more useful lineup preparation tool (that is giving me fits so I can’t share the whole file). The team abbreviations in this will match what ottoneu uses, so you can hopefully easily find out when teams are playing on a given date.
I am a little confused by the notes at the end as it mentions using Poole for final G game and Maxey for the G/F spot but above that it shows zero remaining for G and G/F … if I am understanding what your doing correctly, dont you only have 1 game at C and Util available after accounting for the games your starters would take up for the week?
Yes, and that’s what it showed. Maxey and Poole used my final games for those positions, so they’re at 0. I guess I’m confused by your question. Can you clarify?
I played around with this sort of thing last night quite a bit last night while half-watching Monday Night Football. This is for a H2H Categories league (probably less effort would be needed for a points league).
First, I have a Rotowire subscription and manually entered in my roster onto their platform so that I could utilize the lineup optimizer. However, that’s just the starting point since it doesn’t take the constraints of daily lineup into account or categories.
What I wound up doing was creating a spreadsheet with two tabs. First, “Week 2 - Plan” includes a column per lineup slot (i.e., [3] G, [2] F, C, G/F, F/C, UTIL) and then a row for each game that I filled with the player’s name and day of the week in parentheses. Some of the assignments were obvious (e.g., start Giannis four times this week!), but some of them required some consideration.
Below that on the same sheet, I have my potential bench players as rows and day of the week when he’s playing as columns. That way if for example Rozier isn’t available Wed/Fri/Sun either (he didn’t play Monday due to injury), then I can figure out when I need to start playing Powell or Poole and still make sure that I can cover the three games that I had hoped to start Rozier in. This is duplicative of the “Schedule View” on the platform, but I wanted those data alongside my lineup plan.
Second, I created a “Week 2 - Projections” that included the daily projections from Rotowire for all of the players that I’ve got tentatively included in my lineups (this involved some CSV exports and vlookups). I then manually inputted the actual statistics and then created a difference (actual minus projected) to give me a sense of where I’m “ahead” or “behind.” For example, Valanciunas’ monster double-double last night has me ahead of where I was projected in rebounds but I’m a couple blocks short of where I was projected. I’m not sure whether I’m going to maintain this throughout the week, but it could be helpful since I might allocate starts differently based on how the matchup is going if I’m well ahead/behind in certain categories.
Last, after reviewing projections and whatnot, I used the Plan sheet to guide my entering in my lineups into the Ottoneu platform. It only took 5-10 minutes to get the lineups entered once I knew exactly who I wanted slotted where and when.
So that’s my (work-in-progress) process for figuring out basketball lineups. I suspect that MNF is going to be when I sort out most of my basketball lineup plans, at least for the duration of the football season.
I don’t know to what extent what I’m doing with my offline spreadsheets could be added to the platform for some sort of lineup sandbox since I’m leaning pretty heavily on Rotowire projections, which I assume can’t be integrated into Ottoneu. But maybe the matrix that I described in the first tab, where each column is a lineup slot and each row is a player/date? It could be handy to have that with the schedule view below and then drag-and-drop into the sandbox.
IDK. I feel like basketball is going to require some planning well beyond what you have to do for baseball or football. However, it’s possible/probable that the development of some basic heuristics could mitigate the need for precise planning, so what I’m doing for Week 2 might not be necessary for Week 22.