Commissioner Speak: Games Played

The Problem
In rotisserie style, you have a 82-game limit on each position, which works to balance people's games played (GP) numbers out. However, in H2H leagues, it's always a problem matching up schedules. How do you make sure one team doesn't play more games than their opponent each week?

The two solutions are to either (a) average out a player's stats over how many games they played that week or (b) impose a games cap for the week.

Option (a) is clearly superior but no league provider does this -- we've emailed a few of them to ask why not, no answer yet. Option (b), allowing you to set up a games cap per week is an okay compromise but it has some serious disadvantages. Once you reach that cap number, you don't accrue any more points for the week. Kobe went off for 81-points during the last game of your week? Whoops, already reached the cap, sorry. ESPN.com works around this by allowing any games played on the same day of the cap lock to still count. Of course, this can still result in lots of GP gaps, if with a slightly better variation.

Another partial solution used in conjunction with Option (b) is to take the best, say, 35 games of that week. But this rewards inconsistent players and is not a good option either.

Analysis
Our choice, given that we can't do averages, was to just let it ride. So, what happens then? In WK1 of our season, Evan will be facing off against Alvin with a -7 games disparity. That's essentially two whole players worth of games. Ouch. Maybe Evan could fix this disparity by inserting some of his bench players but the fact of the matter is that his top ten guys are just playing less games this week (31 games), while Alvin's guys are playing an exorbitant amount (38). Some quick numbers:

This shows a sampling of teams and how many games they have set up for the next two weeks.
WK1, WK2 - Owner
34/50, 35/51 - Jon
34/51, 34/50 - Eric L
34/49, 36/53 - Roger
31/53, 32/53 - Evan
38/56, 36/54 - Alvin
36/49, 35/52 - Brian

This quick analysis shows that the average GP per week should be around 33-36 games, with a high of 38 and a low of 31. It just so happens that Evan is facing Alvin this week, making for a slight aberration of games played. For the most part, the difference in GP between any two opponents should be 2 games -- which isn't too bad.

Notice that the second number after the slash represents how many games are available for the entire fifteen man roster. So assuming we went to daily lineup changes, you could hypothetically get 50+ games in a week (barring schedule overlaps), perhaps making a difference in that disparity, but it's not worth having to shuttle people in and out all week long.

This was one of the reasons we chose to go with weekly versus daily lineup changes [See: Weekly vs Daily]

Conclusion
So while it sucks that we can't do averages, we have to make do with what we can. For the most part, you just play your best players and go with it. If it comes down to 2 games from Caron Butler versus 4 games from Danny Granger, maybe you go with Granger, but there's a chance those two games won't make a huge difference -- especially if you're talking about a superstar versus an average player.

It becomes part of the strategy then, to balance your GP number each week. This isn't ideal but to be quite frank, a few negative games played disparity weeks shouldn't kill your team. We go 21 weeks in the regular season; if your team sucks, you're losing regardless of a few low GP numbers -- except in out of the ordinary weeks. Right?

And to be honest, since we'll have pretty consistent rosters throughout the season, the GP for each player and each individual week should balance out. Evan's looking at the short end of the stick for two straight weeks, but that should fix itself over time. Hypothetically...

NBA.com User Tip - Go to MY TEAMS tab >> TEAM RESULTS link >> Change the Stats drop-down box from Fantasy to Standard to see Games Played value.

Alternately, just count up how many games you have each week from your lineup page. Use a calculator, I do.