Roto Strategies Revealed!!

Here's a quickie for my roto players out there. A little bit of strategy straight from the Thief.

Roto basketball, well roto of any sport for that matter, comes down to one important factor - games played. If you look over the history of your leagues, as I generally do (way to often I might add) you'll notice at the end of the season, the guy who generally fit in the most games played within the limit, tends to do better.

I mean this is obvious stuff right? If there are 82 games in a season, and you have ten players, you're looking at a max of 820 games played in a year. When you check the end of season stats, you notice more often than not that the guys who finish 2nd, 3rd, 4th even tend to have lower games played than the guy who finished first. Indeed it's almost always the case that the guy who finishes last also has the least amount of games played. Cause it's all about accumulating stats, right?

The reason people end up down on games by years end is because injuries, and swapping tends to have you lose games in certain slots, and you make up those games often in other slots. Oh my PG went down, I'll swap in another guy, but maybe I swapped him into my guard slot or just a utility slot. This creates an imbalance of games played.

Then comes the end of the season and you're scrambling to find a PG to fill up those games. You're either left with no one in that slot, or you're grabbing some chump player off the WW to just grab any plug in stats.

Plan now! What I like to do, at about this point in the season, is readjust my lineup nightly so that I go over in games played at all positions except for the UTILITY slots. I'll run about a 5-8 game surplus in each spot, and a 5-8 game deficit in utility. This way, when the end of the season comes around and you're looking to make up games, you can plug ANYBODY from your whole roster into that slot.

There's nothing worse than losing a league in the final days of the season due to poor planning and execution. By making sure that you've satisfied the games played requirement for your positional slots a good 3-5 days early, and leaving only deficits in your utility slots, you'll find yourself in a solid position to plug in your top producers and finish strong.