Fantasy Basketball: It's not too early to look towards the playoffs

The fantasy basketball regular season is past the halfway point now, with week 12 of 20 nearly complete.

While 60 percent of the schedule does not a season make, there's a good chance one or two players in your league are sitting pretty, with a playoff spot relatively probable.

In fantasy football, you'll see these owners try and add players with attractive match-ups during the fantasy playoffs. In basketball, this is much less a consideration - while poor defenses do surrender more statistics against in total, there's little evidence that this has an appreciable impact on individual performances.

But what you can do in basketball, at least if you're in a head-to-head league, is look ahead to schedule volume in the fantasy playoff weeks. For most leagues, those weeks begin on March 17 and seasons end on April 6.

Three weeks isn't long enough for team schedules to balance out; some teams are going to play more games than others over that span, and it can have a very real impact on your performance. 

If you are in a position of strength and can afford to do as much, it's worth targeting players with heavy late-season schedules and shopping players with heavier schedules now, whose stats may mean more in the short-term to a team trying to make the playoffs.

Does this really matter, though? Consider the following disparity in a fantasy finals week, assuming each player posts their exact averages:

Griffin is ranked 29th in standard formats right now and Marion is 57th, but Marion would be expected to post slightly better counting stats because he plays four games to Griffin's two.

You're not going to trade Griffin for Marion, of course. But consider the larger impact of the three-week playoff window, where the difference between games can be as many as three games. We'll look at a more realistic swap, too.

In the fantasy playoff weeks, DeRozan plays 12 games to Hayward's 10. Even though Hayward is ranked 59th and DeRozan 73rd, and even though Hayward averages more rebounds, assists, steals and blocks, DeRozan gets an edge because two extra games is enough to close those gaps and he scores so much more.

Consider a more extreme example (and sorry to use another Raptor, but they have a heavy fantasy playoffs schedule):

Again, a Curry-for-Lowry swap, even though Lowry ranks 13th to Curry's seventh, probably isn't going down. But it highlights how the late-season schedule can come into effect, since Lowry plays 12 games to Curry's nine and suddenly doesn't look like much of a downgrade.

Maybe if you're in a position of power, you don't want to tinker right now. That's certainly fine, especially since taking a slight hit now for a playoff gain inherently introduces risk to your team. But it's worth considering - don't do anything rash, but keep this list in mind as you make moves ahead of your trade deadline: