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Thursday, January 22, 2009

My Fantasy BBall Team Can't Shoot a Free Throw

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Okay, seriously, this is getting ridiculous. My fantasy basketball team (Beasliality) couldn't hit a free throw if it was a grade school student from the early 20th century.

Sorry, I should be a little more introductory and a little less stream of consciousnessy. I love sports, but the only sport I know well enough to be really confident about my fantasy ability is baseball. So when I say I don't know why my free throw percentage is so low, WEEK AFTER BLOODY WEEK, I actually might just not know enough about my players, and they might be performing exactly according to expectations.

But it just seems like I should have a better FT%, and I'll tell you why. My team is built around little guys (not by design... as I said, I don't know basketball well enough to design anything). I have lots of guys who are really good at shooting 3 pointers, like Roger Mason, Rudy Fernandez, Manu Ginobili. I have a ton of point guards: Allen Iverson, Baron Davis, Keyon Dooling, Russell Westbrook. Big men have been my weak point all year.

Now, maybe I'm totally wrong about this, but little guys are usually better free throw shooters than big guys, right? I know the opposite is true for field goal percentage - big guys take most of their shots much closer to the rim, so it makes sense that they make a higher percentage of them. But since they don't take a lot of outside shots, they're not good shooters. Therefore, little guys should be better at shooting free throws. 

That's my hypothesis. Clearly it isn't working for my team, so let's look at some data and see if I'm justified in my frustration.



(click to embiggen)

Okay, we've got a number. I should be shooting at 75%.

Method: I found each of my players' career and 2008 free throws attempted per game and averaged them, and then did the same thing with free throw percentage. Then I added everything up.

Checking league standings: in actuality, I'm shooting 76.1%, and that ranks me 12th out of 14 on the season. Huh, mystery solved I guess. Tomorrow I'll dive into the stats and find out why my team is worse at free throw shooting than I thought based on general impressions.

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