The Numbers Game: Ryan's Ranks: 8-cat & 9-cat
You can never have enough pre-draft rankings. Even when you disagree, sometimes vehemently, it gives you a better idea where other people might be targeting a given player. The rankings below are not my suggestions about where you should draft every player in every draft — they are my personal rankings, based upon my own projections, and should be viewed as nothing more than a potential guideline for cumulative values.
Even I won’t draft this exact top-200 like an automaton. Early round picks necessarily determine how to build your team in the middle and late rounds. League depth, personal strategy, the preferences of opposing GMs, league settings (e.g. injury-reserve spots, caps on waiver wire moves) — it all has a huge impact on how to value players.
NOTE: These are explicitly roto rankings, weighted by projected games played. Owners in head-to-head leagues can use this as a road map to value, but (as mentioned above) your own draft-day strategy is a massive and unquantifiable X-factor. For instance, plenty of readers will be outraged to see DeAndre Jordan, Andre Drummond and other awful FT shooters ranked so low. And yet DeAndre is the No. 3 player in my projections (9-cat) when you exclude FT%, behind only Anthony Davis and Stephen Curry. With FT% tossed out, Rudy Gobert jumps to No. 6, Andre Drummond is No. 15, and Dwight Howard…well, he’s still only No. 38. I won’t apologize for that.
For simplicity’s sake I am also including ‘punt FT%’ ranks for both 8-cat and 9-cat. Context is king.
Long-time readers know that I take a skeptical view toward rookies, for fantasy purposes. They often have spurts of excellent value, but the frequent peaks and valleys are detrimental for roto purposes. Karl-Anthony Towns is the first rookie to appear in 8-cat or 9-cat, ranking No. 43 in both formats. Jahlil Okafor crept onto the list at No. 153 in 8-cat leagues, though he plummets to No. 200 in 9-cat. I won’t be touching him in any formats this year — in deeper leagues where I might consider Okafor, I’m positive that another GM will take him multiple rounds earlier than I’d target him.
The games-played weighting also takes a heavy toll on many players’ values. Derrick Rose is a poster-boy for this, having played 100 games over the past four seasons. His preseason injury (fractured orbital bone) isn’t a huge deal but it’s another check in the ‘against’ column.
My top-200 rankings for 8-cat and 9-cat are included below, but my full stat projections for the top-200 players are only available in the Rotoworld Draft Guide. Click here for access! (Projections available once Google Sheets is back online)
Finally, before launching straight to the rankings, here is a quick summary of how I compiled them.
Methodology
1) Aggregate every player’s 2014-15 stats on a per-36-minute basis (via NBA.com and the ever-impressive BasketballMonster.com)
2) Eliminate most, but not all, of those players who averaged fewer than 15 minutes and/or appeared in fewer than 10 games (aka ‘scrubs’)
3) Project the remaining players’ games played and minutes per game for the 2015-16 season, while adding in this year’s rookie class
4) Weight last season’s per-36-minute stats by the projected minutes-played for 2015-16
5) Individually tweak projections for every player especially those with shifting roles, more experience, etc. (e.g. Damian Lillard, already projected to average huge minutes, saw his points and 3s go up with a dip in FG%; I tacked on a marginal amount of 3-pointers for Anthony Davis, etc. etc.)
6) Determine the top-200 players’ means and standard deviations for every category (I ran both 8-cat and 9-cat), then use the means and standard deviations to assign z-scores to individual players in every category
7) Tally the z-scores and eliminate all players below the top-200 in 8-cat leagues
8) Weight the ‘raw’ z-scores by projected games-played for 2015-16
9) Tweak some projections to correct for preseason injuries and role changes
10) Rank the remaining 200 players by weighted/adjusted z-scores
You can follow me on Twitter @Knaus_RW.
*8-cat (weighted by games-played) = adjusted z-scores
*8-cat Ranks = exactly that
*8-cat (punt-FT%) = 8-cat ranks without FT% include…so essentially 7-cat
The same formulas hold true for 9-cat on the following page.
Continue for 9-cat rankings.
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