Oh The Power of Analytics...

So for the first time ever (and looking back, I'm actually very surprised it took me this long), I joined in a Fantasy Basketball league with some friends. I must say, this has totally sucked away my life. I spend so much time now following the NBA, looking at players' stats, and contemplating adds/drops/trades. Its kind of crazy. Seriously though, if I spend half as much time analyzing the stock market as I do the "NBA Market"...I'd be quite rich by now. But then that's not as fun, right?

Unfortunately for all of my time invested, my team has been doing quite horribly. Granted, its only been a week so far, and my 2nd best player (Antawn Jamison) is injured. I do, however, hate losing, and so am quite perturbed by this. In a bout of frustration last night, I sat down and (in un-abashed Banker-style) built out an excel model for my team's performance.

Judging by the amount of red seen in my team's performance vs. the league averages...you can see just how poorly my beloved "Team Awesome" is doing. Most notably, I'm getting absolutely rocked in the 3PT, PTS and REB categories. No need to panic yet though, this was just Week 1 out of 22 weeks and hopefully we can attribute most of this to early-season jitters.

But oh the power of analytics. This model is great so far, and it flows perfectly so that each week all I have to do is dump in the raw data from last week's performance and it will calculate all of the necessary stats. Not to mention with vlookups, all I have to do is enter the name of the team I'll be matched up against next week to estimate my performance. I think it'll be very, very helpful. By looking at my team's performance relative to the league average...analyzing trends such the standard deviations and skewness, I can determine what areas I can improve on and what areas I should just botch. For example, looking at my results so far, I think that in looking at trades or adding new players, I should work to improve my BLK and FT% categories, as those are the areas I'm not too far from the average in. And I should do so at the expense of my weaker categories--as those I'm way too far behind to catch up in. But hey, its only the first week (<4 games into the season) and certainly not enough data points to come up with statistically significant conclusions. I may just wait this out a few weeks and see how I fare.

Next steps: an overall dashboard to see total performance and improvements? something to estimate my team's performance based on my players' previous performance and extrapolate that to a per-week estimate?

LOL I think I've reached a new state of dorkiness. 8-)