Who's Playing Games?

It’s time to revisit our 2014 post "Weekly Averages: How Can They Help?” So I ran the same methodology and put up total, weekly, and individual averages for each team through sixteen weeks. Unfortunately, ESPN only gives us season long stats in total, and without a break down of each month or so, which kind of sucks. (Would be nice to have a drop down for individual matchup totals weekly/monthly, like we have under Active Stats on individual team pages.) So instead I have to distill it all down. But no worries, I did it!

And as you can see by the following spreadsheet, we’ve got the total stats for the year, then divided by sixteen games, and then divided even more by each team’s individual Games Played number. That way you can see how you really rank accordingly, if all things were equal.

• 2017 Updated Games Played Sheet (make your own copy on GDocs to fiddle around)

Mostly what I was interested in was the impact of Games Played — and to see if there was any correlation between “moves” and free agent adds. As we'll see below, there’s not a huge correlation there, but there definitely is a correlation between how many Games Played and winning matchups, as the bottom five teams in GP are also the bottom five teams in wins. I mean if you’re playing two less games per week than your opponent — or in Jedi Knight’s case, almost five games less! — you’re going to lose more irregardless of talent. To beat a top team, you gotta play your guys, Coach Auerbach says.

If we take out the outlier owners (Thien and Chris) we get an average GP of about 26.5 games per week — out of a max of 28/29 GP depending on how many games you can fit in on Sundays. For our purposes, maxing out your lineup with 28 GP is probably more accurate. Toward that end, our best coaches are Swamp Dragons, Against All Odds, So Buckets, Sour Snails, and Chunky Monkeys. And we already mentioned the low end guys. The difference between a top tier GP team and a bottom GP team is about 12.5%, meaning you’re already handicapping yourself in each matchup by not putting up equal games.

I'm one of the culprits, so no shots fired at anyone... I've been trying to win, I really have!

Moving on from GP, the average and median for free agent pickups has been 15 moves (since Nov 1st), which takes into account roster movement including free agents and waiver wire pickups — but doesn’t subtract multiple instances of players moving on/off the same team.

Again, Thien is the huge outlier here, with 63 adds, while the lowest active owners average about 6 adds so far this season — with Sager’s Suits and Ties being a bottom outlier themselves, having made only one add all season long (Hi Big Al!). For comparison’s sake, our top three teams in adds minus Thien are Sour Snails, Squirtle Squad, and Fat Jubas and they average about 29 adds, or roughly 1.8 adds per week. However, make a move about once a week and you’re proving your worth as an active owner.

Some more numbers: Our nine teams at 15+ adds per week average roughly 9.8 wins this season while the seven teams under that activity median average only 5.4 wins. The numbers speak for themselves!

Although there is the curious case of Squirtle Squad, who ranks third in adds but has only seven wins — perhaps due to being just about exactly average in GP. In fact, there’s something strange going on in Transformers division in general as Squirtles, Another Bad Creation, and Buffy all are below 0.500, and a combined 19-28-1, while putting up higher than median GP numbers. We suspect it’s just a weird season overall for the entire division as a sub-0.500 team is likely to take the Transformers crown this year.

Overall, the most accurate to see where your team truly ranks is to see the individual breakdowns per sixteen games, which is the third and bottom set of numbers on the spreadsheet. This would even everything out assuming everyone had the same Games Played. Of course, if you’re anything like Funk Coalition, no matter how you massage the numbers, suck is still suck! But let’s hope moving forward some of our poorer performing coaches and GMs step it up in time for the post-season, otherwise Magic is coming to clean house!

Also, with some further updated analysis, my numbers now for a competitive team in each category is: 46.5 FG%, 80.0 FG%, 435 PTS, 35 3PT, 155 REB, 85 AST, 26 STL, 18 BLK, 48 TO. Mostly the same as three years ago, except with PTS and 3PT getting significantly juiced higher to account for the NBA’s three-pointers and scoring boom.