Transcript

Andy Baldacci:
Hey, what’s up guys. Thank you so much for joining us as we walked through everything that you need to know to beat daily fantasy basketball in 2020. My name is Andy Baldacci. I’m the CEO of SaberSim and I’m joined by DFS pros, SaberSim partners, and twin brothers, Max and Danny Steinberg. How’s it going guys?

Max Steinberg:
It’s going very well, thank you.

Danny Steinberg:
It’s going great.

Andy Baldacci:
Sound very excited. No, this is going to be a good one and what we’re going to go over today is we’re going to cover the fundamentals of daily fantasy basketball. And then Danny is going to break down the secrets of winning lineups, what it takes to have your lineup stand apart from the rest of the field so you can win some of these big tournaments. And then Max is going to show you how to put it all together by walking through his build process step by step.

Andy Baldacci:
The first thing we’re going to go over are just these fundamentals. And honestly, we’ll keep it pretty simple. You guys know how basketball works, I hope. If not, there’s always Wikipedia you can check out. But again, hopefully, you know the basics there. And when it comes down to it, between the main sites, DraftKings and FanDuel, there aren’t too many major differences.

Andy Baldacci:
The first thing just knows that on FanDuel, blocks and steels are worth more and turnovers have more of a penalty to them. Whereas DraftKings has obviously a smaller penalty for turnovers and slightly more points for rebalancing three pointers. But the big thing on DraftKings is that they have triple double and double double bonuses.

Andy Baldacci:
The other thing to point out is that DraftKings theoretically allows for up to seven players from the same team in your lineups. The only lineup requirement is that you need to have players from two games. Whereas FanDuel has a maximum limit of four players per team.

Andy Baldacci:
In baseball and hockey and practically every other sport, these differences around what makes a valid lineup are pretty important because stacking is just such a huge variable in what goes into winning lineups. In NBA, stacking is something to think about. There are correlations and Danny is going to dig into that in a little bit, but it’s nowhere near as important. So honestly you don’t need to worry too much about the limitations on the lineups and when it comes to the difference in scoring, if you’re making your own projections, obviously you want to be aware of that. But with basketball, there are a lot of good sources out there for projections.

Andy Baldacci:
We’re very proud of our own NBA projections. And if you’re using a projection source, this all should be baked in there. So, really for these fundamental parts of the game, there’s not too much, you need to pay attention to, which does make it different than a lot of the other sports out there. The other thing to add is just usually Wednesdays and Fridays have tended to be the biggest days, but in this weird season, we’re honestly not too sure what that will look like. So, we’ll just be keeping an eye on things as the schedule progresses, as DraftKings and FanDuel and the other sites get into their own rhythm.

Andy Baldacci:
But with that out of the way, what we should do now is just jump into really the meat of this. And that is how to build winning lineups. What is the secret to doing this? And Danny, do you want to take over here?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. So, there are three key elements to building winning lineups and having upside. Those are correlations, ownerships, and variance. So correlations are the measurement of how each player’s performance impacts other players in the same game. And this is where the value of stacking come from. So in many sports like League of Legends and MLB, there’s a positive correlation between players on the same team. So, you can take advantage of that by putting as many players on the same team as possible in your lineup.

Danny Steinberg:
This isn’t really much of a factor in NBA and I’ll talk about that a little more in a minute. Ownership is just how frequently the players are rostered in a contest. If one of your players has a huge game and they’re very high owned, that doesn’t do you a whole lot of good in a top heavy GVP tournament. But if they’re very low owned and they have a really good game, then that’s going to give you a lot of upside and a really good chance to gather really top lineup.

Danny Steinberg:
Variance is how it players’ performance varies game to game. So two players may have the exact same projection, but their floor and ceiling may be a whole lot different. And I’ll get into that more a little later. So, correlations for NBA. What do correlations look like in general? NBA there’s not a whole lot of strong correlations between players or strong negative correlations between players on opposite teams.

Danny Steinberg:
It’s really nuanced. In general starters on the same team are positively correlated, or players who tend to play in the same line up are positively correlated. Point guards are more correlated to other players than other positions because point guards get high assists and assists are one of the main ways in which players floor together, because an assist is basically a one player pass the ball to someone and they scored points and that player gets an assist. So, that’s the positively correlated of that, that you have one player and another on the same team getting stats at the same time.

Danny Steinberg:
There’s also some negative correlations, like benched players tend to have a negative correlation to a starter they may play over. But it’s really nuanced and hard to understand. And this is why simulating is so useful for NBA correlations because they’re not always completely intuitive.

Danny Steinberg:
So, what does that mean for stacking? So stacking, as far as putting as many people on the same team in your lineup, is not really a great strategy. The small positive correlations between starters can often mean playing two to four starters together can be optimal, but often projections and variants are just as important and there can be such strong value in terms of projection per salary, where you’re going to want to put a player in the lineup, even if he’s the lone person on the team and your lineups are going to be much more based on who has the best value on the slate rather than who are on the same team. Or you’re not going to just stack two teams together, three teams in a given lineup. It’s mostly just going to be who are the best players on the slate and who is the best value and how can we fit all those people into the line up regardless of what team they’re on.

Andy Baldacci:
So, trying to wrap my head around this, and I think … It seems nuanced, but I do think this is an important point, which is why I’m trying to highlight it. And it’s that rather than saying, “I am going to find two to four starters to stack.” You’re more saying, “Okay, there could be a case where, because the matchup is so strong, because all these other factors are in the right case, that there are two to four starters from the same team that are the right play to have in your lineup. And correlations boosts that, but that’s not exclusively why you’re playing. You’re playing the stack because of all these other variables that are really boosting their projections, almost independently.” Is that fair to say? How do you think about that?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah, I think you probably said that better than I did. Yeah. So, the correlations are really small. So, really the projections and the variances of the individual players are really dominant there. It’s really like … It’s such a small factor that’s often a tie breaker. The small correlation will often be, like, “Okay, I’m playing Chris Paul, and then one of the forwards on the Thunder.” Or, “I could play this other forward on another team who is the same projection as a forward.”

Danny Steinberg:
In that case, the small positive correlation between Chris Paul and a fellow starter would make you want to pick the other starter. If everything’s the same, the correlation can be a tie breaker. But in general, it’s not a huge factor in what the optimal lineups are.

Max Steinberg:
I also wanted to add, I think a lot of people will see, they’ll look at some of the top tournaments and some of the top players, and they’ll see three or four people from the same team in a lineup and think, “Oh, this has to do with stacking.” Well, it probably actually doesn’t. A lot of NBA has to do with injury impact, if one or two players that are out from a team, especially a key player. That can raise the value a lot, of some of the players on that team. And what ends up happening is there are three players on the team that are now great values. And that’s why you’ll see a lot of good players used two, three, or four players from the same team and lineup. It actually doesn’t have to do with correlation at all. So I just want to hammer that point in because I think a lot of people get a little confused looking at lineups and think, “Oh, why is this going on?” And it’s for different reasons than you might think.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, at the same time, you’re also not really avoiding stacking either. In some situations, as Max was saying, you’ll have teams where there’s so many injuries where there’s only seven or eight active players, and you’re going to have a whole lot of value on that team and probably are going to have lineups where you’re going to play three or four players from that team just because the value’s so good, not because of the correlation at all.

Andy Baldacci:
How does this apply when it comes to thinking about game stacking? Because this is something that a lot more people in the space are talking about now. If you’re watching other videos, if you listen to podcasts, whatever, game sacking in all sports seems like it’s the trend. So, is that a thing that we should be thinking about in NBA? Or what is your take on that?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. So it’s not entirely clear. Possibly. So, the idea behind game stacking in NBA is basically you hope to have a game that goes to multiple overtimes. And if the game goes to multiple overtimes, then starters on both teams are going to have a shit load of fantasy points. So, there is a positive correlation between players on opposite teams when the game goes to multiple overtimes. But that can happen. That’s a rare occurrence, I think. I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but probably less than 5% of NBA games go to overtime.

Danny Steinberg:
So, it’s really unclear. Game stacking can be okay if you have a very high over under endgame. But it’s very probable that you can make better lineups with more upside by not game stacking if there is like a larger amount of value across the slate.

Max Steinberg:
I’ll just add as well, you see a lot of people talking about games stacking and I feel like, though I think we all agree there’s a little value, that value is almost negated by the fact that people create lineups like that. You end up being like everyone else, which is not great for tournaments. And so any value that’s there might just straight up be negated by the fact that a lot of people like to do it.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. That’s a good point.

Andy Baldacci:
On that point, we’re transitioning into ownership a bit. How are you applying it to MBA? Because this is where I feel like it’s not as intuitive as it may be in a sport that super high variance like baseball, where if there’s just a super highly projected batting stack or whatever, it may be, fading is almost never going to be a bad choice. But in basketball I know that’s not always the case.

Andy Baldacci:
So, how are you thinking about when to eat the chalk or when to fade it?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah, so that’s well said. In baseball, if there’s like a hit or that’s going to be 50% owned, I may almost always fade them just because there’s such a high probability that they can still have a very bad game. That’s not really the case in NBA. Sometimes there’s such incredible value because of team injuries that even though the person is going to be high owned, that you still want to play them just because the value is too overwhelming.

Danny Steinberg:
And sometimes it does make sense to fade, but I think that’s why it’s important to have a lineup builder that does all those calculations for you based on the player projections and the ownership, like SaberSim does, because it’s hard to weigh the factors of, okay, should I fade this guy? How good is too good value? SaberSim really does that math for you.

Danny Steinberg:
But in general, as a rule of thumb, there’s oftentimes where people have two strong projections per their salary to make them worth fading. So, in general, there’s some rules of thumb where it does make sense to fade. If someone could get into foul trouble, like if there’s a very high on center, often centers can get into foul trouble and if they get to foul trouble, they won’t play much, they won’t get many fantasy points.

Danny Steinberg:
Are they coming off the bench or is it not certain they’re going to start? Sometimes we don’t know the starters ahead of time and a player we think is going to start comes off the bench and that could be a really good opportunity to fit the chalk because often if someone’s not starting, they may not get enough fantasy points to be worth playing.

Andy Baldacci:
So it’s kind of like the more uncertainty there is around a players’ minutes, the more likely you should be to fade them if it seems that they’re going to be highly owned.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andy Baldacci:
And on that note as well, when we’re talking about variance, how does that impact how you’re diversifying across all of your lineups?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah, so there’s really not high variance in NBA. It’s really one of the most predictable-

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. So there’s really not high variance in NBA. It’s really one of the most predictable sports. So sometimes that means that playing 100% of one player is the correct strategy, even though it seems like, “God, if this player does badly, I’m going to do horribly.” That just isn’t something that… That’s something that sometimes will not happen that often, if you have a player who’s truly, truly extremely good value. So it’s not necessarily high variance to go 100% one player if they’re really good value, and oftentimes that can be the correct strategy if they’re really, really good.

Andy Baldacci:
And I guess just actually taking a step back a little bit, we’ve talked a lot about value, but for some people watching this, they may not know exactly what you mean. They might have an intuitive sense of it, but how do you define value? And then, what are you really looking for when it comes to a player whose value is almost unavoidable?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. So when I’m talking about value, I’m talking about projection relative to salary. So someone with a minimum salary who’s very high projected has really good value. If someone has a high salary, you’re often going for less value relative their salary as a good value. If someone’s projected for six to seven times their salary and they’re very high salary player, that’s extremely good. But often for min salary guys, you’ll have situations where they’re projected to score 10 to 12 times their salary, and that can be a person who you just want to put 100% of your lineups or you’re just going to lose, basically.

Andy Baldacci:
And talking about some of the other unique considerations for basketball, I know that a lot of what you’ve gone back to is the importance of certainty around minutes and just how that’s what a lot of this comes down to. Can you just expand a little bit about what it is that you’re looking for when paying attention to the minutes, if there’s any ways that people can get trapped by just looking at minutes? How are you approaching this idea of minutes?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. So often, the lowest upside people relative to their projection are going to be the guys with the highest minutes. Now that doesn’t mean you’re not going to play someone who is high minute. It’s often the absolute best players, like James harden, Giannis Antetokounmpo, LeBron, they’re all going to have very high minutes projections. But there’s often guys where you get trapped… There’s a easy trap where you have this low fantasy point per minute player who’s supposed to get like 34 minutes, and that guy’s really not going to be high upside. More minutes means more certainty, and there’s also kind of a natural cap on how many minutes a player can get. 48 is the absolute most, but you almost never see that. Really the cap is around 40 minutes. Almost no one is going to get more than 40 minutes in the game.

Danny Steinberg:
So if you’re projected for really high minutes, there’s not a lot of upside there necessarily. So in general, you want to look for guys who are high projected but don’t necessarily have a lot of minutes for that projection. They’re a guy who gets a lot of fantasy points per minute, and if they happen to have a game where they get a lot of minutes, then they’re going to get a lot of fantasy points. Where someone who doesn’t have a lot of fantasy points per minute, if they get a lot of minutes, they’re not necessarily going to have a good fantasy game.

Andy Baldacci:
Do you mind walking through… And the example doesn’t have to be from an exact date and time and this and that, but can you walk through like any examples that come to mind of a player who might have higher upside without being projected for a ton of minutes? They might have that high fantasy points per minute.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah, so… [crosstalk 00:18:58]

Max Steinberg:
Danny, I can take this one because I’ve been looking at the slate right now. Because it’s someone like Royce O’Neill. He’s going to start for Utah, I’m pretty sure. And he’s a perfect example of a high minute, low fantasy point per minute guy. We have him projected about 22.5 DK points. And he’s a starter, he’s projected for a lot of minutes. Over 30 minutes. He’s a guy who is going to be someone where he’s probably not going to play more minutes than we project him. He’s a starter. He gets a lot of minutes, but he does have downside of getting to foul trouble, getting badge, something like that. And there’s just not much upside there.

Max Steinberg:
Take on the flip side, maybe someone coming off the Lakers bench like Kyle Kuzma. We have him projected as 24 minutes. He is projected about the same as for Royce O’Neill, but the Lakers could have the bench play really well. They could insert him in into the fourth quarter. He’s a high production player. He has that min as his upside. He’s someone who I would be a lot more excited to target than Royce O’Neill because Kuzma could get 30 minutes, the same amount as Royce O’Neill. And if he gets 30 minutes, he’s going to do a hell of a lot better than Royce O’Neill.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. And often with players with lower minute projections, often if they play well, they’ll often get more minutes too, so that kind of adds to the upside there. So it’s really like… Yeah, Max, that was a great example. I think in general, shooting guards and small forwards tend to be low fantasy points per minute players. So you can get a shooting guard or small forward who gets moved into the starting lineup because of injury, and he was in the lineup with maybe James Harden, or Russell Westbrook, or LeBron, where he’s just not going to get that many fantasy points, but he’s going to get a lot of minutes. And that can be really like, “Oh, this guy is certainly good because he’s going to get a lot of minutes, and it feels safe,” but you really don’t want safety. You want upside, you want potential.

Andy Baldacci:
Let’s talk a bit more about injuries. This is something that drives a ton of what happens in daily fantasy basketball. Can you just talk a little bit about the role that injuries play in all this, in your process for building lineups?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. Injuries are really, really, really important in NBA. I would say more so than any other sport. With MLB, if you have a bad hitter move into the starting lineup, they’re not necessarily going to have a good game. With NBA, if you have someone playing minutes, minutes and fantasy points are very correlated. So someone goes from getting 10 minutes a game to 30 minutes a game, their fantasy points are going to go way up. So in general injuries cause people to get more minutes, players’ roles to change, and for their minutes increase or decrease. And that can be a tremendous place to find value. And oftentimes you’ll have injuries at the last second where you’ll have to… In general, when teams are more injured, the other players on the team, their projected points go up because they have to play the other players who are healthy more minutes than they would normally do if the team was fully healthy.

Danny Steinberg:
So injuries are very, very important because minutes really leads to fantasy points more than any other sport. If you’re on the court in basketball, you’re going to get stats and you’re going to get fantasy points. It’s easy for a rebound fall to you. It’s easy for one of your passes to lead to a three-pointer that gets made for an assist. Sometimes you get left under the basket for an easy layup. Sometimes you get an offensive rebound. There’s just… Basically you will get stats if you’re on the floor in an NBA, and that’s not really the case with any other sport. And that’s why injuries really matter for NBA.

Andy Baldacci:
One of the other things I know you’ve you’ve mentioned before is just see the risk of overestimating the probability that a player may start because of an injury. Can you just expand on that a little bit?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. So, injuries, I think it takes a lot of experience to interpret them correctly. Often it can seem like, oh, the starting center’s injured so the backup center is going to play. That’s not necessarily true. A lot of times coaches will try weird rotations. They’ll play a power forward at center. That’ll play a small forward at center. They’ll try a weird line of combination. So definitely don’t… It’s definitely not always as straightforward as, oh, the starter’s injured, I’m just going to play the backup. Often minutes are distributed in more nuanced ways than that.

Andy Baldacci:
So obviously this is a very different season now that things have resumed. They’re playing in a bubble in Orlando, and there’s just a lot of unique considerations to keep in mind to this. And everything that Max and Danny have talked about applies across the board in basketball, but in this unique season of 2020, there are some other considerations to keep in mind. So I’m going to go through these, but Danny, Max, jump in if there’s anything that you guys want to add or if there’s anything else you think that people should really keep in mind to it.

Andy Baldacci:
And for me, a lot of this comes down to the fact that, with the schedule that the NBA has put out so far, there are almost no overlapping start times. And that means that the games, just by the nature, are spread throughout the day. And so far, I mean, this is still early, but what we’ve seen is that the contests have been all-day slates for that main slate. And this is going to mean that the contest will lock at the afternoon on Eastern time, but the contest will go all the way until the middle of the night. And so that adds a unique kink to things where you might not have as much information as you otherwise would on a traditional NBA season.

Andy Baldacci:
And so with that in mind, if it is one of those all-day slates, what we would always recommend doing, and this applies honestly to any slate, you want to put the latest starting player in your lineup in the flex because that will give you the most flexibility if they get ruled out, or if someone gets ruled out you can move things around a lot easier, because you know that player can always be swapped out for someone else if you need to make multiple changes to your lineup. This is something that we automatically do for you in SaberSim as we build your lineups, but again, if you’re building by hand using another tool, just make sure that you’re setting things up so that the player with the latest starting game in your lineup is in the flex.

Andy Baldacci:
The other obvious one is you need pay attention to the news. You have to see who is going to be in those confirmed lineups, who’s ruled out, so you get an idea of, okay, do I need to swap anyone out? This gets tough because the NBA is already known for being really bad with starting lineups. They were supposed to have them out officially, I think it was 30 minutes before tip-off, and while they might be a little bit better than they had been in previous seasons, it’s still not good. And there’s still plenty of late scratches. And with all the different possibilities for why someone could be ruled out in the current season, there’s a lot of risks that you have there. And so all of this honestly depends on how much time you have available.

Andy Baldacci:
If you can’t stay on top of the news and you still want to play, I would just say, okay, consider fading that first game, look at the block of games that are all starting roughly close to each other in the afternoon, and put a lineup in that uses only confirmed lineups. This will definitely sacrifice some edge because you’re not looking at as large a player pool as there is, but that is much better than getting zero by putting someone in that ends up getting scratched or whatever it else happens.

Andy Baldacci:
For the all-day slate in general, if you do have time to watch everything, it still can be worth fading that first game because it’s usually eight hours before the last game, and so there is almost no chance of all the lineups will be out by that time. So by fading that first game, you can see, all right, I can get some of these afternoon lineups in, and then maybe some of the later ones have come in, and you get a much better idea of what’s going on.

Andy Baldacci:
And the last thing I want to touch on is, know how the sites work when it comes to late swap. FanDuel this season offers it. They hadn’t in the past, and that’s a good thing with these weird schedules, but they have their own quirks for how they handle swapping out players. On DraftKings you have very little control over it. You can only swap out a player for someone who has a lower salary than that player, or I guess lower or equal. Whereas on FanDuel, you have the option of trying to force in a player with a higher salary. And the reason that matters is because if all of your lineups have $50,000 or the exact salary amount spent, then this isn’t a big deal. But oftentimes, and if you don’t do this you probably should, have some buffer in those lineups just to promote uniqueness, and just because that’s how things are going to work out.

Andy Baldacci:
And if you are forced to rely just on what DraftKings has, you’re going to be oftentimes leaving a lot of money on the table. So you just want to go into these slates knowing what to expect. We think that this is going to be a profitable season if you follow this advice and if you are aware of what’s going on and quick to adapt, but you just want to be sure, regardless, that you’re aware of these other factors. Do you guys have any other points you want to add?

Max Steinberg:
Oh, absolutely. So I would say what’s unique about this NBA season is there’s actually some strategy in how you manage this all-day slate. As Andy mentioned, fading the earliest game. If you fade the earliest game, you have more leverage in terms of, if news comes out, you can make perfect lineups with that late news. And basically the later games sort of have more of an advantage because you have more information. And so you can get creative with boosting projections of players in the later games. There’s basically a strategy around it and that’s going to give you some edge. So we’re always looking for places where we can add value and get more of an edge. And one of those things in this basketball season is going to be, how do you deal with the fact that these games are spread out over the entire day. This is just not a factor in baseball or football or hockey, really at all. There is a spread but it just doesn’t really matter. In NBA it really matters, so it’s something…

Max Steinberg:
There is a spread, but it just doesn’t really matter. In NBA, it really matters. So it’s something to really think about.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. I just wanted to add that I think this season is kind of high opportunity because there’s going to be a lot of weird things that happen. So following the news is important. I think one thing to pay attention to too is minute limits. That often happens in NBA where a player has a minute limit and that can really limit their upside and make them not worth playing. So really paying attention to what the coaches are saying or just news in general, if people have minute limits because they had coronavirus or an injury. I mean, it’s been a while since these people played games. There’s also a regular season that’s not really that important. So it’s possible that you’re going to see coaches really manage their players’ minutes a lot. So there’s going to be a lot of nuance there to really have to pay attention to.

Andy Baldacci:
Let’s talk a bit about what goes into putting all of this together. We covered a lot there and it can be hard to kind of draw the lines between, “Okay, I get the principles, I get the fundamentals that you guys have covered, but when it comes time to build my lineups, there’s just so many questions, so many things I’m trying to figure out.” And so Max, if you wanted to jump in and just kind of walk through at least the first part of building lineups, which really comes down to research. Can you just share what you do on this? And I know for you, stats are one of the fundamental kind of foundational things that you focus on. So maybe that would be a good place to start.

Max Steinberg:
Yeah. So just to start, I’ll say, in these videos, I talk a lot about adding value to the SaberSim. I think the best way for you to add value in NBA is working on this projections, because there’s a lot of free resources out there and project getting good projections is going to be the most important thing for you to win at DFS NBA. And so a couple places that are a big part of my process is actually from the NBA itself. It’s stats out of NBA. The NBA has cameras that are actually on the court and they give us a lot of really, really great stats that show sort of how players are actually used on the court.

Max Steinberg:
And this is really, really important, especially if there’s injuries. And so let’s say for example, and there’s going to be a lot of injuries, but let’s say someone like LeBron James or someone like that is out for a game. So we can look at stats at NBA and look at some of the advanced stats to see how players are used. If you look at LeBron, you can see … This is a stat we really like is unassisted field goals. So LeBron has high on an assistant field goals. This means that he handles the ball a lot. He’s essentially the point guard. So if LeBron James is out and we know Rashaun Rondo has a broken hand, we have to look at okay, who is going to be sort of taking control of this offense, what is going to happen? So we can see that Quinn Cook is someone … I don’t actually know if he’s on the team right now, but we’re looking at [crosstalk 00:33:00]-

Danny Steinberg:
I think he is.

Max Steinberg:
He is? [inaudible 00:33:02] So let’s say Quinn Cook starts. He’s a high emphasis field goal guy. That makes sense. He’s the point guard. So he’s probably going to be handling the ball a lot and that’s going to mean a boost in stats. Playing without LeBron is going to help people who actually create a shot on their own. You can see guys like Kyle Kuzma, 30%, that’s actually pretty good for power forward, small forward. And you look at these different stats to see, okay, who do I think is going to handle the ball more? You can also look at some advanced stats. I think they have secondary assists. You can look at players on a game to game basis. You can look at their total shop percentage. You can look at their usage percentage. You could look at their defensive rating. There’s a lot of really good stuff on here. And so I think that’s a pretty big part of my process.

Max Steinberg:
As well as there’s a free website called Popcorn Machine, which really shows you sort of how the rotations are playing out for a particular team. So you can look at okay, who’s going in for who. This can help you predict starters. For example, let’s say Jamal Murray is out. If you look at who has been going in for Jamal Murray, and this is back in March, so this might’ve changed, but you can see Maci Morris is the first sub for Jamal Murray, who’s the point guard. So Jamal Murray is out and we don’t have enough starters. I will look at Popcorn Machine and say, “Okay, who seems to consistently be going in with Jamal Murray? Who seems to play with the starter sometimes as well?” And then I’ll use that to help confirm who might start. So I might be pretty confident that Maci Morris is going to start for Jamal Murray, even if it’s not announced.

Max Steinberg:
You also want to look at foul trouble recently to see, okay, this person has not been playing a lot of minutes. Is that because they’ve been getting fouls or is it because of something else? And it looks like just by looking at this, this is not something that’s in this game, but I think reading how these lineups are going in and out and Popcorn Machine is a really, really huge part of my process.

Andy Baldacci:
And one of the things that I want to just touch on here is that this is not necessarily a requirement. Digging into the advanced stats like this is not what everyone needs to do, has to do, or does. Even the high stakes guys. Everyone has to find their way of adding value to the process. And Max likes to dig into those advanced stats, really likes to look at all those situations. And honestly, it’s not super complicated. And I think what he just gave is a pretty good primer to get you up to speed on how you can do that relatively easily. But even at a more basic level, there are some ways you can use the data we already have for you inside of SaberSim.

Andy Baldacci:
And Max, if you just want to talk a little bit about kind of looking at the detailed player projections and what to look for when it comes to minutes, when it comes to how to react to the news, because that ultimately to me is kind of the baseline that if you are serious about playing daily fantasy basketball, you have to be able to react to the news. Otherwise, you’re going to have a hard time. And so Max, if you can just kind of talk about how people can do that part of things from within SaberSim, that would be great.

Max Steinberg:
Yeah. So I think the best way actually to just save you time and get a good sense of who to focus on is actually just to do a build before we even look at anything. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to use the default build settings and build some lineups. And this is going to tell us, okay, who are the people that we’re getting a lot and who are the people we want to focus on? Because if you’re just looking at every player’s stats and then you’re like, Oh, [inaudible 00:00:36:47], I’m going to adjust him one point. And I did all this research. And then you notice, even if you adjust him one point, you don’t get them at all. That’s going to be a real pointless amount of … I mean, you’re doing good work and theoretically, good job. But if it’s going to be a real pointless amount of work. Right?

Max Steinberg:
So we’re going to do a sample build and just look at some people that are standing out. I would say that one person that immediately stands out to me is Joakim Noah. I didn’t even know he was on the Clippers, so I think he was a recent sign. And I don’t know if he starts, I don’t know if he’s coming off the bench. This is a real thing. This is why it’s good to do this build because I honestly just don’t know what’s going on with them. And so if I see something like this, I think what I’m first going to do is just start looking for news about Joakim Noah. Is he starting? Is there a minutes limit? How old is he? What is the depth of the team? You’re going to have to look at a lot of stuff.

Max Steinberg:
And so one thing we can do is just actually look at the Clippers team and who’s being projected and sort of just look at the thing. So we see Ivica Zubac is out. He’s usually a starter for the Clippers. Patrick Beverley is out. I think that’s due to coronavirus. I think Montrez Harrell also might be out to due to coronavirus. So they’re actually pretty thin at center. If I’m looking at this right now, I’m only seeing eight people. This might be wrong. There might end up being more than that. So we can say, “Okay, this team is really thin.” But now we’re saying, “Okay, so Joakim Noah is 20 minutes.” Make sense. For an eight man rotation, if he is starting, that actually does probably make sense. Right?

Max Steinberg:
So this is something where I’m going to do more research. Look, see if there’s a minutes gap, see who might play center. Danny was talking earlier about what players might weirdly play center due to injury. We could see maybe Marcus Morris, maybe JaMychal Green. Almost certainly JaMychal Green actually. So if you look at how those minutes play out, you can see, okay, maybe JaMychal Green, 22 minutes. Maybe that’s too low. Maybe Marcus Morris, 29 minutes. Maybe he’s going to have to play a lot more because of the short rotation. Who have they signed? There’s a lot of things to just look at and I think that’s really important. I think that’s why doing a build at the start is really, really good.

Max Steinberg:
If I was actually doing this, actually just looking at a first glance, I’m not sure what I’d do. I might lower him, but he actually is a really good value. And again, this feeds on the other point we were making before, some players in basketball are just a really good value and you can’t fade them. And at min salary on an eight man rotation, usually you’re not going to be able to fade someone like Joakim Noah who does probably have a high fantasy point [inaudible 00:39:39]. So that’s one bit of research I might do.

Max Steinberg:
I’m going to probably not look at LeBron, given that I’m going to be pretty confident his projection. I really want to look at these low salary guys. Maybe Josh Hart, right? Here’s another guy who stands out. He’s another low salary guy. We can look at New Orleans as well, see what their rotation looks like. Zion Williamson might be out of the start of the restarts. So we want to look at their rotation. They seem to have more healthy players in general. I don’t know if Josh Hart is going to start. I don’t know if he’s going to come off the bench. We only have him at 24 minutes, so he might be coming off the bench.

Max Steinberg:
And maybe I’ll look at popcorn machine. Look at how New Orleans’ rotation has, before the NBA stopped, how their rotation was sort of working out and just take a look or maybe look at the last time Zion Williamson was out. And just do some research there and maybe even look at game logs and see what is his minutes upside and things like that.

Andy Baldacci:
Yeah. And I mean, this is something where it’s important to keep in mind the different abilities that we all have to spend time on this. Max and Danny are both professionals. So when they start researching, it’s truly like they are going to look at practically every player, not necessarily in the same amount of depth, but they’re going to analyze every single game. They’re going to try to look at every single player. They’re going to look for every single angle that they can find, but I don’t have time to do that. I’m guessing you probably don’t have the time to do that either.

Andy Baldacci:
And so that’s where what we call, within SaberSim, called a test build. That’s where this really comes into play because it helps you narrow down, “Okay. I don’t have time to look at absolutely every single player. So what if I can just do this test build, and then see who we are naturally high or low on?” Then I can say, “Do any of these jump out at me? Do any of these seem like based on what I’ve known, what I’ve been doing just from following the news casually, does it seem weird to me?” And then with your amount of time that you have available to do your research, you can focus in on those things that jump out at you.

Andy Baldacci:
And Max, if you want to go back to the home screen quickly. We had talked a lot about just how staying on top of the news is crucial as well. And we do our absolute best to adjust projections as fast as we can whenever there’s late breaking news, but there is simply some news that comes out so close to lock that we can’t react as quickly as we would like. Or it’s just honestly not always clear how things are going to shake out. And so what we recommend doing is as you’re staying on top of the news is looking at the minutes column over here to see how many minutes we’re projecting for each player. And that can show you, okay, have they adjusted for this news? Have they then adjusted for it in a way that I think they should? And that will also guide you in the right direction of making some adjustments and figuring out what are these areas where I can add value to the process with my research, even if I don’t have a ton of time.

Andy Baldacci:
And this is, in my opinion, the absolute fastest way to get up and running and add some value to your builds. Because again, we all only have a certain amount of time that we can spend on this. And by doing this test build first, by staying on top of the news, and by just seeing who is jumping out as the handful of players I need to focus on, you’re able to get a ton of research and, relatively speaking, get leverage on that research and make an impact on this.

Andy Baldacci:
And so what Max will do from here is just kind of walk through the process of, okay, we’ve already talked about the research, but now what does the actual build process look like? What do I do to really put that into my lineups and get some high upside lineups out of this?

Max Steinberg:
Right. So essentially what the build process is the three step process. So step one is going to be adjusting the projections. So we’ve identified some situations of players that we want to focus on. And a couple of things that stand out to me is one, just from the Clippers situation, I think I’m probably going to boost JaMychal Green a little bit, because I think he probably could play some crunch time center. They’re really thin. I like just in general targeting players from really thin teams, because they’re just going to have to get minutes and there is some minutes upside there. There, I think maybe … Again, I haven’t done that much research yet, but someone like Alex Caruso is going to play some point guard. He’s a player that gets a lot of stats. He could get some good minutes. He’s someone I might boost to.

Max Steinberg:
And also we have these ownership projections. I think this is something that goes pretty overlooked. People just say, “Ownership projections, whatever. Great. I’m going to use them, fade, blah, blah, blah. They have some whatever.” But we actually allow you to adjust them. And I think that’s another way you can really add value because you see some of these guys on New Orleans, Zion Williamson is out. Someone like Brandon Ingram. I might just look at the front page of some of these tout sites, see Brandon Ingram’s picture and be like, “You know what? It really seems like people are going to use him.” You can increase his ownership percent-

Max Steinberg:
… you use him, you can increase his ownership percentage and that can help with when you’re using the Ownership Fade, when you’re actually choosing your bill settings, actually help add value to your lineups. You’re going to adjust some of these projections. Maybe Anthony Davis looks a little low to me, whatever, let’s raise him too.

Max Steinberg:
Then we go into the step two of the build process, which is choose your build settings. We have given this a lot of thought and have chosen some great default settings to use that are actually tailored to the slate. This is a two game slate. That’s going to have certain default settings. Six game slates are going to have certain default settings. We have cash settings. We have GPPs that are small, that are big, and this is going to change what is going on under the hood with the build settings.

Max Steinberg:
But I’m going to just show you what goes into it. The default settings for a 20 max GPP with a lot of entrants, which is going to probably happen during this NBA season quite a bit, has three key components, what we’ve talked about before. Correlation, ownership, and Smart Diversity, which actually is upside in a sense.

Max Steinberg:
These settings had a lot of thought put into them. They’re not just something random. You might look at this and go, “Huh, this is interesting. Why is correlation zero? There must be an error.” It’s actually not an error. I would say the first thing correlation, we’ve talked about how correlation is not that important part of NBA. As you can see, correlations between players are very small. Considering them is not going to be a huge factor in the process. They also are already considered when talking about Smart Diversity, which I’ll get into a bit.

Max Steinberg:
Ownership Fade. This is something where we’re just going to consider, what is the ownership of the player? It’s going to build your lineups considering that factor and giving a score to the lineups based on the ownership of the player that are in the lineup. Smart Diversity, which I think is our coolest and most interesting feature, and it has to do with how SaberSim actually works.

Max Steinberg:
We are a simulator. We simulate every NBA game thousands of times and that gives us great data. It give us a range of outcomes for players, it gives correlations for players, and what that ends up doing is it allows us to diversify your lineups with taking into consideration upside because instead of just randomly selecting different lineups with different average projections and using [inaudible 00:47:37] players, or doing some sort of Jerry-rigged thing to diversify your lineups, how we actually diversify your lineups is we just take some amount of simulations, and if you set Smart Diversity very high, it’s just going to be a few simulations, and we actually take the average projection from just those two or three simulations that we are choosing for you, and what ends up happening is you are going to get lineups that have high upside, because it’s going to maximize for the simulations while diversifying your lineups in a way that you’re actually going to get a diversity of players, but with maximizing for the upside of those lineups.

Max Steinberg:
With correlation, correlation is going to be built into this because how correlation works in practice, it means players are scoring together or they’re negatively correlated to each other. If we’re just taking simulation data, we’re actually going to be considering that correlation already because we’re just taking what actually might happen, given our simulations. If there’s anything you guys want to add as well [crosstalk 00:48:46].

Andy Baldacci:
The only thing I would add is just that I think this is something where you can really fine tune it if you want to have more control over it. But even in that case, this… Max, how much time do you spend on the second step?

Max Steinberg:
Five seconds. I might fine tune it. These are the settings I would absolutely use for a two game slate.

Andy Baldacci:
That’s the big thing here where we want to show you what’s happening under the hood, but one of the main reasons that we built SaberSim is because we felt there was just so much busy work in DFS that a computer could do better than we could on our own.

Andy Baldacci:
While it’s important to understand how the machine works, we have built this in a way where you tell us the contest you’re playing, the entry limit, the number of entrants, all that, and we’ll choose what we feel are the best slider settings for you, so that if you don’t feel as though you need to have extra control above that, you can leave this alone, build the lineup pool and move on and not be leaving anything on the table.

Andy Baldacci:
But again, if you do feel like you really understand these concepts and do want to make some slight adjustments, you can do that under the advanced settings. If you want to add a [inaudible 00:50:01] for MBA, I would strongly advise against, that is an option as well. We’ve got things set. We understand what’s going on behind the scenes with this. What happens next?

Max Steinberg:
We’re going to just build the lineup [inaudible 00:05:16]. Again, one, I think, really cool factor about SaberSim is when you request 20 lineups, we’re actually going to build you a lot more than that. I think eventually it’s going to build a thousand. That’s going to give you a lot of control in the post fill process in terms of just what we call the quality control process. This has to do with fine tuning your lineups. This is not, let’s change a bunch of things. If you see something that you don’t like, where you’re saying I have… we we’re talking about Joakim Noah before. You’re like, “Man, I actually now think he’s too high projected. I see that he has a minutes limit.”

Max Steinberg:
Suddenly, this news comes out, that’s something where you’re going to want to go back to the home screen and adjust his projection and rebuild. Once you’ve tuned all of that, or maybe it’s ownership percentage, something that I missed, is that he actually was going to be on more than 1%, we don’t have some secret here. This is something that [inaudible 00:06:14]. You might want to raise his ownership percentage or something.

Max Steinberg:
But once we’ve really gotten our projections and ownership projections to where we want them, now, we’re just talking about quality control. This is talking about getting a little more diversity if you want, maybe capping someone’s exposure a little bit, just doing some things that are just going to fine tune your lineups.

Max Steinberg:
We have stuff with team stacking and stack types, which I think is a lot more helpful for NFL and MLB than it is for NBA. Mostly you’re just going to focus on players, so you might say, okay, Marcus Morris, he’s someone that maybe I want to give a little more. Well, then I’m going to just raise his [inaudible 00:52:00] exposure to 20% or maybe 25%.

Max Steinberg:
Maybe you’re like, I like Joakim Noah, but maybe not 100%. We can cap his exposure at 80% and SaberSim is going to automatically trade in the most high value lineups and trade out the most low value lineups that have Joakim Noah to balance this out.

Max Steinberg:
Really, there’s not that much more to this process. This is it. If you have any drastic things that you want to do, I would go back to the projections. You can screw with team stacks and stack types. But I think specifically with NBA, this is not that important. I think with MLB, which is a high correlated sport, then looking at stacks and stack types is going to be a huge thing that you can do. But with NBA, we’re just talking really about players and this is something that I’m going to do. I’m going to just fine tune my exposures a little bit, make sure that I have balanced lineups, and then I’m just going to download and put them into DraftKings or FanDuel, and that’s about it.

Andy Baldacci:
To just emphasize the reasoning behind the setup we have, we found that people who might be more familiar with traditional optimizers have this obsession with very specific exposure percents and trying to get everything perfect. They come into it with, I want extra some of this player, or Y percent of so on, and Z percent of someone else. We just frankly feel like that’s backwards. We think it all comes down to the data. It all comes down to projections. That’s why we say, rather than trying to force a specific exposure in, see if it’s someone like Rudy Gobert, if that’s too much of him, lower his projection and see if that gets you a little bit less of him, see how far you have to lower his projection to get the percentage that you’re looking for.

Andy Baldacci:
Because if you have to cut someone’s projection in half to get them as little as you want them, maybe your intuitions might be leading you a little bit of astray.

Max Steinberg:
Right. Great point.

Andy Baldacci:
That’s the value of this process is that, we’re not perfect. There are going to be times where you do have to tweak what we do. Honestly, in most slates, you should make some adjustments, but we can act as almost a little bit of a conscience on your shoulder, just saying, hey, do you really need that much of this player? Or do you really want that little of him? Maybe you should rethink that, because by just focusing on the exposures, you lose that sanity check that bringing things back to the projections have.

Andy Baldacci:
By starting out with that test build like we talked about, by seeing who we’re naturally high or low on, you’re able to very easily see who are those players that you need to pay attention to, go back over, start from step one, adjust projections, choose your build settings, and then get those exposures fine tuned.

Andy Baldacci:
But it’s a bit of a different process, but I hope that once you’ve seen us go through that, after we’ve explained this as well, I hope this makes it a bit more understandable and you can see just how powerful this is and how honestly much easier it is to get those high upside lineups without spending hours and hours trying to program a tool to do exactly what you want it to do.

Andy Baldacci:
In summary, we covered a lot here, but there are really ultimately six keys that I want you to take away from this. The first, and most important, is just pay attention to the news. Basketball is a game of late breaking news and the news has very significant impact. You just have to pay attention to that. If you’re not able to, focus on confirmed alignments, but know that you’re going to be sacrificing some edge. When it comes to stacking, sometimes it happens, but almost never for stacking sake alone. Don’t force that.

Andy Baldacci:
The third point is find the value. This is really what’s going to tell you if you should eat the chalk or fade it, is the value, is seeing, is this someone who was mid salary, low salary, but now is starting, is going to get a lot of usage, is this someone that I just have to play, or are is there another player with better value [inaudible 00:56:16] projection that I can swap in here for them? How do I find the right person to put in there?

Andy Baldacci:
The fourth one is, sometimes you have to be okay with 100% exposure. I say that a little bit tongue in cheek. I think Max and Danny probably are okay with 100% exposure in certain cases, but if that’s too high for you, then maybe 90%, maybe 80%, but you just really don’t want to force too much diversity into your lineups because there are times where the value is so high, you just have to play someone a lot.

Andy Baldacci:
The fifth key is focusing on projections. This comes down to that. Obviously ownership, obviously correlations, obviously these other factors matter, but NBA is going to be the sport, honestly, where projections really matter above all else. You want to make your adjustments. You want to really get those dialed in because that is what’s going to be driving most of the value that you can add to the process here.

Andy Baldacci:
The last one, is just use the right tools. There are a ton of tools out there for you. There’s a ton of sites to look at. There’s a ton of places to get good research, whatever it may be. Danny and Max have shared a few of those with you. The other obvious tool that we want to talk about is SaberSim, but it’s finding the tools that fit what you are trying to do and how much time you have available. Honestly, without the right tools, this is going to make DFS just frankly just too complicated to really consistently find the time to actually play.

Andy Baldacci:
NBA is going to take a bit more time to stay on top of things than other sports may, but because of that, I think it’s even more important to find the tools that let you leverage your time on the highest valued thing, so you’re not wasting hours a day just getting dozens of settings exactly right, so that everything works the way you want it to. You want to leverage the tools that are out there.

Andy Baldacci:
With SaberSim, luckily you can try us completely for free for three days and see if we’re right for you. Not only will you get access to our MBA tools, but you’ll get access to all of the sports that we have up, which we’ve got baseball, football, practically, everything that the major sites offer, we’ve got there. If you want to see how this works for you, how you’re able to use this to quickly build high upside lineups, just head to sabersim.com. We’ve got a free trial that you can get started in just seconds.

Andy Baldacci:
But honestly, I will end this and let you get started and start playing around with things yourself. I really appreciate the time. Thank you guys so much. Danny and Max, thank you for joining me. This was a lot of fun.