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| coming soon! | Dealing
With Turnovers Most categories in traditional nine category roto leagues sort independently. That is to say that a given players contribution in one category generally has very little correlation to his production or lack thereof in a separate category. However, there is a strong negative correlation between the turnover and assist categories. If a player is stellar in assists, they are also likely to be poor in turnovers. While this doesn’t hold true for each and every player, some players will be terrible at both assists and turnovers, it holds true as a general rule. In fact, I prefer to view the assist and turnover categories as one combined category. In most roto leagues it is rare for any team to have a combined score of assists and turnovers greater than 75% of the combined maximum. It is also rare for any team to have a combined score of assists and turnovers less than 25% of the combined maximum. This leaves a narrow spread between most teams when you combine the two categories. It is quite easy to achieve a score of 50% of the maximum combined score of the two categories. The challenge for championship roto teams becomes how to get a combined score in the 75% of maximum range. I recommend one of two strategies for dealing with the turnover/assist problem. The first strategy I recommend is to try to build a team of players that is good in the turnover category and average in the assist category. You can accomplish this quite easily by drafting or trading for players who are not terrible at turnovers, and throw in a couple great (low) turnover guys and a couple point guards with great (over 3:1) assist to turnover ratios. This should give you a good shot at having a combined score in assists and turnovers at the top of your league. The nice thing about this strategy is that it doesn’t require a top flight PG. You can safely wait 5-6 rounds in most drafts and select a 2nd or 3rd tier PG with a strong assist/turnover ratio who gives you some 3s and/or steals. This lets you draft big men in the first 4-5 rounds giving you an advantage over other teams who will not have as good of quality of big men. Let someone else spend the big (draft) bucks on the Arenas and Iverson types and allow yourself to let your PG position languish until the 3rd tier point guards start to look like a good value. The second strategy I recommend is to tank assists. While I don’t recommend tanking categories in general, I make an exception for assists. Tanking most categories drops you around half a category. That is if there was a possible score of 20 in that category, you will lose about 10 points on average by tanking it. However, when you view assists and turnovers as a single category, and considering the special nature of the negative correlation between the two categories you find that you will only give up around a quarter of a category. So in a category worth 20, tanking assists will only drop you an average of around 5. The question then becomes, can I make up the loss of that quarter category of points in the other categories by tanking assists? I believe you can. For instance, you may fill your guard spots with players that are poor at assists but, are good at rebounding and blocks for their position. By tanking assists you can load up your roster with non-point guard players. Considering that most teams in the league will be running 2-3 point guards in an attempt to remain competitive in assists, this will give you a nice advantage if you are using those spots to shore up other categories instead. This is an interesting strategy because it lets you focus on a different type of player, whereas simply tanking turnovers only lets you focus on players who are bad at turnovers. And players who are bad at turnovers tend to be players that see the ball a lot, and players that see the ball a lot tend to be in demand. So, I would not recommend trying to tank turnovers as I don’t believe you will find much competitive advantage in doing so. If after 3-4 weeks into the season you find you are near the bottom of the category in assists, and you find that even if you were to make a trade or two to shore up that deficiency you are still going to be near the bottom, I strongly recommend just tanking assists. Make up those lost points in other categories. You may need to target bigs that shoot 3s, but, they are generally good turnover and poor assist guys anyway, and a large part of the reason you are struggling in assists to begin with. - - - - - -
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