What I look for in Fantasy Sports (Basketball obviously)

So, I've been getting pretty into fantasy basketball for the past two years now and I've spent a lot of time going through various systems, utilizing the ever popular Yahoo! Fantasy Sports, to the Ultimate Fantasy Commissioner, Pick One Challenge, and NBA Stock Exchange on NBA.com, as well as CBS Sports fantasy leagues, and the NBA Challenge application on Facebook (I have not done ESPN because it costs money). There are several features that you can make to optimize the fantasy experience, and each platform brings a unique touch to it. I've been asked to give some input for a "suggestion" to create Google Fantasy Sports, and to basically incorporate what I know and love about fantasy sports and take all the good aspects and make a perfect fantasy league platform. So here's a few of my ideas on what'll optimize the experience:



1.) The Draft

One of the biggest parts about fantasy sports is preparing for it, making sure that you have all the info on who's going to be hot and who's not going to be hot. A lot of times this will come down to the last game of the preseason, and getting a scope out on what rookies are going to beat expectations, who has injuries and if he's good enough, is he worth holding onto until he's back in the game, etc... Thus, the draft settings in any fantasy league is always important. Now, most hard core fantasy players will refuse to do anything but a live draft, and that's good, but it's still important to set draft rankings in order to get the ideal team in the event you can't make the draft. The draft list system I've seen for each of the platforms I've used are decent, but not optimal. UFC (Ultimate Fantasy Commissioner) on NBA.com provides a list of all players (active I believe) in the league, and has you order them that way, by moving players up and down the list. Now what is universal in all platforms is that each will have a set of specialists who provide player rankings which is your default draft list. Now given this list in the UFC format, last minute injuries and such play a major role and often cannot be accounted for in said rankings, so it's pretty tedious to move them up and down. Now as for Yahoo!, you are provided with the draft rankings list I believe 50-100 at a time (we'll say 50 for now) and you rank as many as you want in your must draft or do not draft lists, and then refresh the page and the next however many (until the list reaches 50) players will show up. Now personally, I felt that a really good draft format would be to create draft lists by position (I want to say that NBA.com did this a year ago) and then create a draft sequence of positions. Since fantasy basketball is generally pretty position sensitive (you can't draft all guards or all centers otherwise you can't play everyone), it's pretty effective to say, "These are the guards I want and these are the forwards I want, I want forwards more than guards so I'll draft my forward positions first." The bonus, is that if there are a lot of high ranked forwards, and you need a guard, you can just say, "After I get my premier forwards, the autodraft can pick the best PG/SG available to draft". This way your top 5 picks don't all end up being PF/C and SF/PF players while you get lower end guards. It helps players who can't always make a live draft create an optimal team. Ideally, after creating the league, draft options should be the only thing available when going into the team editting section, making the draft room easy to find is important as well (I could not and still have not found the live draft room for UFC). I big button that says like "DRAFT NOW" is ideal.



2.) The Team Edit/Management
The most important aspect of fantasy sports would be editting your lineup. What most places I've seen do, is the traditional drop down menu where you bench players and then fill those spots with other players of the eligible positon. Personally, I think that the Yahoo! drag and drop system actually works really well.

3.) The Waiver Wire
There are two places fantasy sports buffs will spend more time in than in their own team management page, one is the rumore mill, the second is the waiver wires. Fantasy owners are always looking for players that they somehow missed in the draft to replace draft duds or injuries. One of the most important aspects of this is stat comparison, if there were someway to do a side by side game log comparison of players that would be amazing. Yahoo! and NBA provides a list of the Free Agent players sortable by stats and rankings (for Yahoo!) and breakdowns by period (1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, year-to-date). When you decide to add a player you have a side by side comparison of the YTD average stats for both the player you are about to add and the player you are about to drop, which is nice. However, what would be even cooler is if you could do multiplayer comparisons across beyond stats but also somehow incorporate game logs (at least say the last 3 games) and do comparisons between free agents as well.

That's pretty much all I have for now, but I'll figure more out later.