While we’ve got a little lull here in the schedule, I thought I’d chime in on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for awhile - head to head leagues. More specifically, I want to talk a little bit about why I don’t think they really work for fantasy basketball.
One of the most challenging things about fantasy sports is dealing with the uncertainty factor, be it an injury, a mid-season trade, whatever. In fact, most of the writing that we do here is based on trying to mitigate and take advantage of uncertainties as a fantasy factor. The thing is, it’s also one of the things that makes fantasy sports so exciting. It’s why taking huge leaps of faith on guys like Baron Davis, Tim Duncan or Amare Stoudamire generate so much talk around draft time and through the year.
However, there’s two kinds of uncertainty - luck and risk. Risk is good. Risk is the debatable stuff: How well a rookie will perform, how many games will an injury risk play, how players will mesh with new teams. It’s the life blood of fantasy sports, gambling, etc, and I love it. Luck, however, is bad. It’s stuff that you can’t possibly forsee or plan for or that really should have no bearing on your ability as a fantasy player. It’s the most frustrating part of fantasy basketball, and unfortunately, H2H leagues bring them into the forefront. Here are my three biggest beefs with H2H fantasy basketball:
1. The weekly games played issue.
Now, come on. you can’t tell me that in the heat of the draft, you’re looking at a guy and saying, “well, he’s not as good as this other guy, but his schedule complements my team a little better.” The extreme example was last week where most teams played either one or two games. The difference between one game and two, obviously, is huge, and teams with few one-gamers has a nice advantage over teams that have a lot of one-gamers. But that’s ridiculous! Just because your team has a more favorable schedule this week doesn’t mean that your team should have any real advantage in the standings. That might be an extreme example but this happens every week to some degree. This is closely related to…
2. The weekly lineups issue.
Listen, I know how impossible it is to predict when one player is going to play versus when he isn’t. I have problems with this all the time, and we have daily lineups. So I can’t imagine how impossible it is to predict the future six days ahead of time. A perfect example was Elton Brand last week, who sat out two games with absolutely no warning. Daily lineup leaguers were at least able to plug in a bench player to get some help. Weekly lineup leaguers were totally SOL. Even worse, this set-up means that the injury affects TWO teams - it gives a big disadvanage to the injured player’s team while giving a huge advantage to their opponent!
3. The innattentive owners issue.
It’s just the truth. Over the course of a nearly 6-month season, the owners of struggling teams are going to stop paying attention. It happens in rotisserie leagues just like it happens in H2H leagues. The only thing is, in rotisserie it affects all of the competitive owners the same. No one gets any real benefit over anyone else if the last place guy stops paying attention. Not so in H2H. Here, only the teams scheduled to play against the lame owner benefit, and that’s a big advantage over guys who don’t get to play against the walkover.
Now, granted, a lot of these arguments can also be made for fantasy football, but with so much less attention attrition, so much more of a trash-talking culture, the lack of good rotisserie stats, I can see the point of doing H2H for football. But basketball? Not so much. Rotisserie works and works well. The best team will win the championship, not the one who got to play the most teams who were decimated by injury at the time. H2H is a neat idea for football, but please, let’s not get carried away with it.
