To Punt a Cat or Not to Punt to a Cat?

To punt or not to punt, that is the question! I get this question a lot, is it better to have a well rounded team or is it better to just punt some areas and try to dominate other areas? The short answer is yes. Yes it’s better to have a well rounded team; yes it’s sometimes better to just punt certain categories. One thing you’ve gotta realize is that no matter which strategy you follow, you’re always going to be punting at least one category. Chances are pretty high that if you win your league you’ve also got a pretty low score in turnovers. That’s why turnovers is such an important category, it’s nearly impossible to do well there if you’re doing well elsewhere. But is there an advantage to one of these strategies over the other?

Yes, no matter how you cut it, in basketball, whether you play ROTO or H2H, it’s always better to play for a well rounded team than to play for 5 or 6 categories. I’m going to talk a little statistics here so if I bore you I’m sorry, but it’s integral to learning why one is better than the other. Let’s say you have a three category league: points, rebounds, assists. You’ve decided to embark on a strategy of going after just point and boards and ‘punt’ assists (to those who don’t know the lingo, to ‘punt’ means you just effectively give up the category. So you have this team and they average say 20 points per game, 10 rebounds and 2 assists. Now suppose the teams you play against all have well rounded squads, and they each average 17 points per game, 8 rebounds and 5 assists. You win every game, right? 

Wrong. See there’s something called a standard deviation. Standard deviation is a way to determine the range around the average you can expect a certain amount of time. For points, the standard deviation is about 5. This means that roughly 70% of the time (to any math geeks, I’m using rounded numbers here) your team will score between 15 and 25 points per game. The standard deviation on rebounds is about 2.5, so again 70% of the time they’re pulling down between 7.5 and 12.5 rebounds, you get where I’m going here? For assists it’s about 2.8, which means you’re going to score between 0 and 4.8. Now of course the same numbers affect your opponent too, but nonetheless you can see that by only going after a limited number of categories, we are reducing our chances either for the season (in ROTO) or per week (in H2H).

The only way we can give ourselves the best opportunity to win is to try and be competitive in every category (even turnovers, though this is futile). You can see that after factoring in the standard deviations to both teams, the guy who is well rounded is much more likely to pick up either points or rebounds to beat you, then you are to pick them both up to beat him (cause you have no real shot at assists. If you’ve taken the strategy to punt, don’t panic, there’s more.

In my example, I said everyone went for a well rounded team. This is generally not the case, and it’s more likely that at least a few other teams have gone the punt route. In this situation, you stand a very good chance of beating them, and a halfway chance of beating the rounded teams, and thus have a shot at the playoffs or the title. Also, the less categories you decide to punt, the better chance you have at winning too. This is why the Team Analyzer is so important; you need to know where you really stand. If you are going to punt some cats are dominate in others, you had best REALLY dominate in them to give yourself a good shot. This means entering a season with that particular strategy in mind, and executing it from day one to the end. Be consistent, stay focused, execute.

During the 2009 baseball season one of my league members decided he was going to ‘punt’ starting pitching and just go for hitting. He drafted all top hitters and then went after a couple closers and left starting pitching for the very end. His team dominated for the first half of the year. Then for some unknown reason he deviated from this scheme and went for a big trade sending a solid hitter away (Matt Holliday) for a stellar starting pitcher (Chris Carpenter). This was devastating as he quickly started dropping in the rankings almost immediately. After about 4 weeks he reversed course and dealt the pitcher for a solid hitter and resumed his climb. He ended up winning the league last year.

Did he win because he punted categories? No. Will I win my basketball league this year because I have a well rounded team? No. In the end, we both entered the season with a solid winning strategy, then worked to execute it from day one to the end. If you choose to punt, the road is tougher, but it can be done. If you choose to be well rounded, the road is easier, but not infallible. In either case, you need to know what you’re going to do before you draft, then work that angle and keep working it throughout the season. The guy who tries to make a mid season shift out of panic because of his position (really guys, we haven’t even hit all-Star break or the Trade Deadlines, WAY to early to panic) is the guy destined to lose.

We don’t panic here (most of the time lol). We don’t let a bad month or a bad stretch or a bad start shift our strategy. We stay focused, we continue to execute, and we dominate.