Introducing Standings Impact

Standings Impact is like an expert drafter sitting beside you during a draft, considering all of your needs for categories and positions and giving you helpful recommendations. Here's how it works.

Standings Gain Points

You may have heard of SGP (Standings Gain Points) before. It's a way to build player values or rankings before a draft. You look at how much each player would help a typical team in the standings and sort them by the biggest impact. I think it was first suggested by Art McGee in his book, How to Value Players for Rotisserie Baseball.

The problem is that SGP are all based on a typical team. SGP are built before you draft a single player, so they don't understand team context. Maybe SV are closely bunched for several teams, so targeting a closer could springboard you over the entire mass. Maybe you've already drafted enough HR, and drafting a power hitter, even if he's the best available on your draft board, doesn't actually help your team.

For every draft pick, you will be asking questions like these:

• Which available player(s) available will help me in the categories I need most?
• Can my team handle a player who will help in one category but hurt in another?
• What position should I take here to avoid the bottom of the barrel?

Good players will develop an intuition about questions like these. But I wanted a way to quantify it.

Standings Impact: Live SGP

So my idea is like SGP, but tailored to your team's specific situation. I call it Standings Impact.

At every point in the draft, DraftKick calculates the projected, end-of-draft standings. It even looks at who's still available to draft and fills teams with the average remaining player at each empty roster spot.

Standings Impact uses those projected standings to test placing each remaining player on your roster. If that player were added to your team, how would those end-of-draft standings change? The Standings Impact formula simply shows your possible points in the standings minus your current points. One player might boost you +3 in the standings, while a similarly ranked player could actually hurt you in the standings.

Here it is step-by-step:

1. Add up the projected stats on the current rosters.
2. Fill in empty spots with the average remaining player at each position.
3. Calculate the standings.

Then, for each player available to draft:

4. Put the undrafted player on your roster in place of the average remaining player.
5. Recalculate standings.
6. Subtract your original point/win total from your potential point/win total. This is the Impact for that player.

Effects

The biggest effect is addressing category need. Drafting a speedy player at just the right time can be the perfect pick on a team that is weak in steals. You can opt for a higher volume SP with worse ratios if your team needs W and SO. Or vice-versa in the opposite situation. It's a great way to see who from a group of similarly-ranked players can help your specific team.

But Standings Impact also help you make a plan for each position. Let's say there's a big expected dropoff after the top 6 players at 3B. As each one is taken, the average of the remaining 3B keeps getting worse. This causes Standings Impact to gently push up its recommendations for drafting one of the remaining good 3B, because it sees the gap between that scenario and picking from the dregs.

Problems

Standings on draft day will be way off; FA pickups have a huge impact on standings.

That's true. I'd still rather come out of the draft with a strong, balanced roster.

Projections aren't reliable enough to generate standings.

See the first response. Using projections is better than nothing. You still want a balanced team.

Impact says Player A will help me 27.5 points in the standings, but Player B only 16.5. There's no way Player A is better!

Relax. Don't pay too much attention to Impact at the beginning. Until each team drafts a player, there's lots of noise from all of the ties in the standings. You can just follow ADP for the first couple picks and still draft good players. After that, you should keep an eye on what your team needs.