Daily Fantasy Basketball Strategy

Player Lab has one simple goal: To help you find the players who are poised to have huge games.

As DFS players, the way we do this today, is by looking for indicators or 'criteria' that tell us a player has a statistical advantage over the rest. Essential daily fantasy basketball strategy 101. This could be the simple fact that a player is well rested, or is facing a bad defense, or is facing a team who is tired from being on the road multiple days. There are a multitude of indicators that one could look for, and that is precisely the problem.

The information is out there in the form of websites with endless pages of data. But pulling this data together and making sense of it, attempting to figure out which players meet these criteria, is so time consuming that it is prohibitive. If you don't have hours a day to spend on DFS, it is going to be very hard to be competitive.

This is what inspired us to create Player Lab.

Lets take a look at the layout:

Here is an example of Player Lab in use. There are several indicators (or 'filters') in the top section. You can see that several are toggled on, and the in the chart below, several players are highlighted green. One glance and hopefully the system starts to make sense.

We are using these filters to find players that meet our criteria, the exact indicators described above. Things like:

• How well rested is a player?
• Is he facing a poor opposing defense? (Defense vs Position)
• What does Vegas project about the game?
• How many minutes does this player average per night?
• ... and many more

The idea is simple but insanely powerful: The more filters a player meets, the better statistical odds that player has at being great today. You can experiment with different filters and with just a little work, you can find VERY interesting players. You can use the system to speed up your typical research, or you can try to employ new strategies that you have wanted to try, but maybe didn't know where to find the data. (or didn't have enough time to round it up every day!)

If you want to understand each filter, hover your mouse over the filter name and you will see a tooltip.

Each filter is fully configurable. Click on the little 'gear' icon to open it up.

Here you can set up your filter, in this case, I am going to set my Vegas Total to 200. Now players will only be highlighted if they meet this criteria. If you want to learn more about the filter, click on the 'more info' link and you can read the theory behind it.

So you can select multiple filters, and find very very interesting players. Great. But before we go on, lets take a look at the actual table of data itself:

Most of these columns are self explanatory, and if something doesn't make sense, you can hover over it to see what the tooltip says.

We will be adding new columns over time, but to see what data is currently available, click on the 'Show/Hide Columns' button.

You can see we offer 5 day and 10 day averages for several filters.

Finally, after we have selected some filters and we have a group of interesting players, we can then either send that data to the optimizer, or download it in an excel file:

So there you have it. Let us know what you think, and please send in your filter & data suggestions here. We have several more on the way, but we will definitely re-prioritize based on feedback.

Go check out Player Lab here. And don't forget to register with us to hear about new Player Lab filters when they are released.

Player Lab - Tutorial Video