COURT GUIDE

Injuries are the daily currency of fantasy basketball, and the minutes have to go somewhere

A football injury is a Tuesday-to-Sunday story with one answer. A basketball injury is a nightly one: a star sits for a week, a rotation player sits for a night of load management, a sixth man starts three games and goes back to the bench, and every one of those changes moves minutes around a ten-man rotation. The manager who knows where the minutes land first gets the pickup before the rest of the league does, and in a category week the pickup is often worth more than the star it replaces, because the star was already on somebody’s roster and the pickup was free.

The question is who, and the honest answer is in the box scores. When a player misses a game his club still plays 240 minutes, and the record shows exactly who played them. This page reads that record for every player on the injury report.

Read the rest

How a card is built

Take an injured player and his club. Over the season being read, the club’s games split into two piles: the games he played and the games he missed. For every teammate on the club’s roster today, the page averages his line in each pile, minutes, points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks and a usage figure, and the difference between the two averages is the lift. The teammate with the biggest lift in minutes is the first name on the card, and the next two follow, so a card is the three men who most reliably took the floor when the injured player did not. The season in progress is read first; when it holds too few games on either side of the split, which is the case for most of October and for any player who has not yet missed a night, last season is read instead, and the card says which. Only the games inside the injured player’s time with the club count: a game before a trade brought him in is neither a game with him nor a game without him.

Usage, and why it sits beside the minutes

Minutes tell you who was on the floor; usage tells you who had the ball. The figure here is a common proxy, field-goal attempts plus 0.44 of free-throw attempts plus turnovers, the number of possessions a player ended himself. Two teammates can each gain eight minutes when the star sits, but if one gains six shots a night and the other gains one, they are not the same pickup. In a points league the usage lift is the whole story, because points, threes and turnovers all ride on it. In a category league it is half of it: a wing who gains usage gains points and threes, a big who gains minutes but not usage gains rebounds and blocks, and which of those you want depends on the categories you are chasing that week. The full line is on every row for that reason, with the with-him figure in small type under the without-him one, so the lift is never a number on its own.

The roster percentage, and the green ones

A next man up is only useful if you can get him, and most of the time the starter who moves into the injured player’s slot is already rostered. The share of fantasy leagues each teammate is rostered in sits at the end of his row, and a share under half is drawn in green because in a typical league that player is on the wire. That is the row to look at first. The teammate at ninety-five percent will be started by whoever owns him; the one at twelve percent is a free game or three, and in a category week with four adds those free games are what the add cap is for. A player the roster data does not list is shown as unlisted rather than as zero, because the most common reason nobody tracks a player is that nobody rosters him, but it is not the only reason.

When there is no split to read

Some cards cannot be built the honest way. A rookie has no games on record. A player who changed clubs over the summer has a full season of games, but with different teammates, and a split against men he no longer plays with tells you nothing about the roster he is on now. A player who missed no games last season and none yet this one has no without-him pile at all, and the same is true early in the season for anyone whose absence is only a game or two old, because three games on each side of the split is the least this page will average over. For those players the card says why and falls back to the same-position depth on the roster today, ordered by our projected minutes: not a with-and-without record, and never dressed as one, but the best available answer to who plays the position while he is out. A card built the honest way carries the season it was read from and the number of games on each side, so a six-game split and a forty-game split are never confused.

What the page does not know

It does not know tonight’s starting five, a coach’s stated plan, or a trade that happened this week; the roster it reads is our directory as of the last refresh, and the game logs are the box scores as they stood at the last nightly rebuild. It does not know your league’s free-agent list, so the roster share is a proxy for availability and not a promise. It cannot tell a player rested for load management from one out with a sprain, because the box score records only that he did not play, and a split built on a handful of rest nights is a thinner read than one built on a month-long absence. And a lift is an average over the games he missed, not a forecast of the next one: a coach who gave the sixth man the start in November may go to the rookie in March. Read the number of games on the card before you read the lift.

How to use it in a week

Open the page when the injury report changes, which in basketball is every day. Filter to Out for the players certain to miss games, and to Day-to-day for the ones who might, since in basketball day-to-day usually means he plays and the beneficiaries on those cards are one-night streamers rather than week-long adds. Pick the club if a trade or a team-wide illness is the story. Then take the green rows to the waiver planner, which counts the games each one has left this week under your add cap, and to the streamers page for the night in question. The status filter and the club are written into the address, so the link you copy opens the same cards for the group chat.

The injury report, the rosters and the roster percentages are refreshed on our own feeds through the day; the game logs are rebuilt nightly. If the feed is unavailable the page says so rather than showing stale cards.

Next Man Up