Can a streaming strategy work in fantasy basketball?
Pitcher streaming is a common strategy in fantasy baseball. In formats with daily lineups, a starting pitcher takes up a valuable roster spot while actively contributing to your team only once or twice a week. By constantly rotating pitchers into your lineup from the free agent pool, you can build a commanding lead in counting stat categories.
That's what streaming is all about: maximizing the space on your roster to squeeze as much statistical production out of your team as possible. How can we apply this strategy to fantasy basketball? There are three situations where the general streaming philosophy merits consideration.
Daily Lineup Leagues: Small Slates
While the amount of NBA programming on Thursday nights has expanded in recent years, there are still typically only three games at most that night. With only six of the NBA's 30 teams will be in action, you're going to find that most of your fantasy roster is not playing.
The quality of player you'll find in the 12th round of a 10-team league is not a must-own asset. Per FantasyPros' average draft postion, these are players like Alex Len, Robin Lopez and Tony Parker - solid but hardly indispensable. If you drop a player like this, there's a good chance he'll still be available when he clears waivers.
Remember: a day without a game is a high opportunity cost to pay for the 12th man on your fantasy bench. On a short Thursday slate, streaming the best player available out of the free agent pool is better than nothing. If you have available players adds in your daily lineup league, getting even replacement-level production out of an otherwise unused roster spot is an advantage heading into the final three days of your weekly matchup.
Daily Lineup Leagues: Chasing Categories
On that note, say you've reached Friday in your head-to-head matchup and you have a good grasp of which categories are trending in your favor and which will likely to fall to your opponent. Say you've built what should be an insurmountable lead in assists and no longer need to actively set your roster to optimize your performance in that category. Yet you're trailing in rebounds.
Most teams will play two games from Friday to Sunday each week; though you might have an ace passer on your team, he's not going to add much value when what you really need are rebounds. While finding specialists in the free-agent pool is uncommon, if there's might be someone available that can better suit your present needs. The worst-case scenario is that you lose a category you were likely going to lose anyway.
A specialist might not be a great for with your team's overall construction but the beauty of streaming players is that much of their value is in their impermanence; once your matchup ends Sunday night, drop your specialist and add someone with more balanced production for the next matchup.
Weekly Lineup Leagues: 5-Game Weeks
Though streaming in fantasy basketball lends itself better to daily lineup formats, weekly lineup leagues aren't entirely left on the sideline. While a weekly NBA schedule is more heavily populated than the one-game-per-week football schedule, not all weeks are made equally. Sometimes, a team will play only three or even two games in a seven day span but sometimes they'll play as many as five games.
Those extra games are a major boost that may impact who you add to your team prior to the start of the week. For example, Andrew Wiggins and Lou Williams are both SG-eligible, and all things being equal, you'd start Wiggins over Williams any day of the week. When you take the number of games they play in week into account, things are much closer than they seem.
Wiggins averaged nearly 21 points per game last season; if the Minnesota Timberwolves play three games in a week, Wiggins' fantasy owners can reasonably expect him to score around 60 points. Williams averaged just over 15 points per game off the Lakers' bench; if his team plays five games in that same week, he'll likely outscore Wiggins 75-60.
The number of games a team plays in a week is crucial information in weekly lineup formats. Keep track of the schedule and do the math. Five games from an average player are often going to beat out three games from a good player.