How DraftKick Generates Projected Standings

Contents

You're reading the Guide to DraftKick, which explains everything about how to use DraftKick to win your leagues.

1. Ranking and valuation methodology
2. DraftKick Views
   • Players
   • Rosters
   • Board
   • Standings (this page)
3. Settings

How not to do standings

DraftKick tries to correct two big issues that I have with the projected standings that show up in draft rooms:

1. First of all, league draft rooms will typically give your team full credit for bench players. Especially for baseball, that is unrealistic, and it harshly penalizes anyone who drafts a minor leaguer as a stash.

2. Secondly, draft room standings overrate teams that have filled high-volume positions. The first team that drafts a QB will show up ahead of everyone else, even though the other teams will catch up once they also draft a QB.

Starters only in the standings (baseball and basketball)

DraftKick's solution to the first problem is simple: For baseball and basketball, it doesn't count any bench contributions in the standings.

If someone drafts a low-impact player as a starter and a better player on their bench, you can drag and drop the players on their roster to swap them. That will give more accurate results.

What if teams rotate SP on days they pitch?

In baseball leagues with daily transactions, it's a common strategy for fantasy teams to rotate starting pitchers between SP and bench slots to maximize your IP. In that case, I recommend removing a couple of "Bench" slots in DraftKick and adding them as starting "SP" slots. This will make the standings and the replacement levels more in line with reality.

Optimal lineups for football

Football works differently. For football, DraftKick will build your ideal starting roster for each week in the standings. It knows about teams' bye weeks, and it knows if a player will miss games early in the season for injury or suspension.

DraftKick does not try to make an adjustment for opponent strength (although I've considered adding that). It simply divides a player's total projection evenly amongst the weeks they will play.

DraftKick also does not try to account for any of the head-to-head matchups in your league. I know the standings won't perfectly correlate with most points scored, but scoring lots of points is still the best strategy for winning.

Projecting final rosters

The other problem I mentioned above was from draft room standings not caring which positions each team has filled at a given point in the draft.

DraftKick handles this by (optionally) filling each team with the average remaining player at each position.

Let's say you are the first team to draft a catcher. The naive standings will put you lower, because your catcher's raw stats aren't as good as the players other people are taking. But that's misleading, because eventually those other teams will also draft catchers, and you'll catch back up with them.

The DraftKick methodology would construct an average of the undrafted, starting-caliber catchers. It then fills each empty catcher slot on the other teams with that average catcher. Your catcher (assuming you drafted the best overall) will help your team more than those teams with an average catcher. And that will be balanced by some other position on your team being filled with an average player compared to the players other teams actually drafted.