Sneak peek at Ottoneu Fantasy Basketball Rules and Settings at Launch

After 30 days, you are allowed to nominate any player you cut. You don’t have to bid anything, but you can. If you win the auction the player will be on your roster for the cap hit they were already occupying. You can do that process every 30 days to keep recouping 50% of the cap hold, down to $1.

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This is excellent advice. We are a first year FF league and this is going to come in very handy (we have some… beginner values.)

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Anyone have a source for expected player values in this format? I’m not seeing anything remotely close to a precedent for 25/400 format basketball values. Was there a beta test league in Ottoneu?

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I couldn’t find anything for free.

Rotowire has auction values that you can plug in positions, scoring, and auction budget. You can get six months for free by making a $10 deposit on a DFS site (otherwise it’s like $72 for a year for access to all sports). I finally made the jump to Rotowire earlier this week for the auction values and really regret not doing it sooner. It’s very well integrated with Ottoneu (i.e., you import your league with just a couple of clicks).

There’s also a software package Hooplab from rotolab.com that comes with a set of projections and is very customizable with league settings. I haven’t used the basketball one (yet), but the baseball and football versions of the software are quite good. If you enter the picks as you go, it adjusts the values of remaining players for inflation, which I think will be quite useful in a first year of the draft. It’s $39.

Finally, you can download projections from Fantasy Basketball Projections and Rest of Season Rankings 2021-22 | Hashtag Basketball and compute auction values yourself (it’s not that complicated if you’ve got intermediate or better Excel skills).

But as far as I know, there isn’t something like Beersheets or Justin’s Surplus Calculator for fantasy basketball.

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A few changes have come up as we get closer to the season and I wanted to highlight them.

The playoffs are going to be over the final 3 weeks of the season, unless your league only has 4 playoff teams, in which case they will be over the final 2 weeks of the season. They will be single week matchups.

This will no longer be the case. For most leagues (i.e. leagues with more than 4 playoff teams) this will result in a 22-week regular season, which will allow every team to play every other team 2 times. A couple of the weeks will be a little shorter as a result, but the balanced schedule is well worth it. Leagues with 4 playoff teams will have a 23-week regular season and will get a bonus 3rd game against one opponent.

This has been moved to the end of February, so no trades will be allowed starting March 1 at 12:00am ET. Having the baseball keeper deadline and the basketball trade deadline on the same date was a bit much, so I made this adjustment when someone pointed this out to me.

The site and the rules page reflect these changes. Let me know if anyone has any questions.

There is still plenty of time to sign up for a league and plenty of leagues looking for managers.

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Really excited for this. Is there anywhere I can find any OTTONEU NBA auction data? Player profiles don’t seem to be populated with this yet. I assume there haven’t been enough auctions yet?

Lol we are doing the first ever auction literally right now.

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in the categories format is anyone else confused by 3pt% and FTM as opposed to FT% and 3ptM.

seems like the latter makes way more sense, they are easier stats to strategize and draft for.

I think the logic is something along the lines of there being a greater opportunity cost to missing a 3PT than missing a FT.

To give this a little more thought, I think it’s helpful to look at the correlations between the categories. So this correlation matrix is based on the projections that I’m using for all players with a value greater than $0:

Let’s first compare FTM vs FT%. As you can see, the correlations between FT% and the other stats is very high or moderately high, with the exception of STL (r=0.03). On the other hand, FTM is very weakly correlated with BLK (0.05), FG% (0.03), and 3PT% (0.06).

In categories, you want some statistics that don’t correlate very well; otherwise, you’re essentially just measuring the same thing over and over again. For example, 5x5 features HR/RBI/R (which are highly correlated with each other) but also BA (moderately correlated to HR/RBI/R) and SB (weakly correlated with everything). So simply put, FTM is a more interesting category than FT%, IMHO.

In terms of 3PT% versus 3PTM, it’s a similar story: 3PT% is weakly correlated with STL (0.08) and FTM (0.06) again. Meanwhile, 3PTM is correlated with pretty much everything.

So basically, if you had FT% and 3PTM instead of FTM and 3PT%, you’d have fewer tradeoffs to consider when constructing your team. And that’s really the whole point of playing categories rather than points, IMHO.

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Is it possible for leagues to have custom scoring?

No, the scoring options are what is listed here.

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What’s the rationale for choosing FTM in 9cat instead of FT%?

I had a longish conversation with a few folks at Rotowire and the recommendation was similar to the one made here (thought not with as many numbers)

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Will players with F/C (or C/F) eligibility be able to play in the G/F slot, and vice versa?

Yes, those slots in the lineup are flexible slots for players with Guard or Forward (or Forward or Center) eligibility.

I dont see Rotowire having ottoneu for basketball… just custom league?

Eno Sarris and I both did a custom sheet from Rotowire and it wreaked havoc on our draft :joy:

Any thoughts to making a 4 playoff team league have a 22-week regular season but to end one week earlier than the NBA regular season? This would keep the balance of an even 2 matchups against each opponent while also avoiding the final NBA week where some players with nothing to play for get benched or have limited minutes.

I suppose another option would be to have a 2 week final (22-week regular season with 3 weeks of playoffs).

I would prefer either of these to playing one opponent 3 times and everyone else twice in my 4 playoff team league.

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What do you mean by that? In a good way?