Week 6: Draft Review, one month in

 

There's lots of reasons for these two gentleman to be smiling, one calendar month into the fantasy season. Arthur and Dave have been off to a great start.

• Arthur's year to date lead on the pack grew this week as he kept pace while Robert and Kevin took a step back
• Michael, Keith, and Paul all took a step towards climbing off the bottom
• Dave had a monster week that jumped him nearly a full YTD Power Ranks point....that didn't even have a better Week EWW value than Arthur 
• Robert's -8.9 Wins Over Expected value is starting to get personal. That guy has faced some tough competition so far and its cost him about 9 games in the Yahoo standings compared to how good his team has been.

So we're 6 weeks into the regular season. The dust has settled. Temperatures are warming up everywhere other than Atlanta, it seems. Let's look back on the draft.

The simplest way to analyze the draft at this point is change in value. We had projected values for each player, which are heavily reliant upon projected production AND projected playing time. Fernando Tatis? He's been a production problem. Mookie Betts? A playing time problem (at this stage, playing time misses are going to be injury related). Yordan Alvarez? He's been a beast. Kevin McGonigle? He's getting way more playing time than projected. These are just four examples of where projection analysis can err, but it's the simplest analysis I can think of, so let's dig in.

Comparing to draft values is almost always going to show net negative profit. Its more likely that a pick will lose its value than gain it, that's why we add players off the free agent wire. So the goal is to minimize loss and try to 'hit' on late picks. So how have we done so far?

• Based on how the season has gone, it's unsurprising to see Arthur running away with this one. Take a look at all the players Arthur has profit on so far

• Some of these players aren't even on his team anymore that team has been so good
• Don't sleep on Paul's team. He basically only had picks after round 10, but he hit on a lot of them.
• As if we needed another graphic for it, but Michael's season has been a disaster. Worst profit from the draft, fewest picks with profit, fewest draft pick hits after round 20 (granted, he only had like 5 picks after round 20)
• Kevin, Dave, and Robert also show very well here. They had balanced picks in the draft but still have hit on more than their fair share and did it throughout the draft

• Commish is out of time to dive in any more on this. There's a million ways to parse this data and it all says that my team is screwed. Yay

Have yourselves a week, everyone.