Author: Brant Tedeschi

The Fantasy Assistant offers many different ways to analyze your team and how you fit into your fantasy league.  Today we are releasing a drastically improved roster analysis tool.  You will find much more information about each player: roster trends, your fantasy outlook, and more trending stats.

Brand new in this update are the own and start bar graphs to the left side of each player.  Along with the start and own graphs will be trending information and arrows indicating fluctuations in these numbers.  Some players will have green or red arrows to indicate significant movement in start or sit trends.  These trends are extremely important when setting lineups and making roster moves.

A relatively new addition that were redesigned are the red and green backgrounds surrounding certain player ratings.  These colors indicate if a player is overachieving or underachieving and are also an important factor of expected performance.  These can play an important role in formulating trades and putting player importance into better perspective. You’ll notice that each player has their complete player information shown with position, team, and injury status.

Perhaps the biggest change to roster analysis is the addition of Fantasy Outlook indicators at the top right.  The fantasy outlook indicates how well the team is set up for success.  The ideal number is 80%+.  In the screenshot above, it shows a green outlook bar but other colors include yellow and red.  Your team’s outlook is updated once per day, or any time you make roster moves.

The team Outlook should be looked at in conjunction with other factors to gauge how well your team is performing.  These include: Season Projections, Weekly Projections, Daily Team Ratings & Rankings, and Daily Position Based Rankings & Ratings.

A lot of factors contribute to your team’s outlook, such as the health of your team, performance, and trends.  If you have a bad record, but a good outlook, then you are doing your job as a team manager by trying your best to improve them.  Alternatively, if you have a good record but a bad outlook then expect things to take a turn for the worse.

Sign up and take full advantage of this roster analysis.

Deciding who to pick up or drop in your fantasy league can be a daunting task.  The Fantasy Assistant offers a brand new way to help decide who to pick up.  Our Waiver Research tool  combines player trends with fantasy performance.

The Waiver Research tool is offered for all major fantasy sports, including fantasy football, baseball, basketball, and hockey.

Our tool offers various ways to analyze the waiver pool in your league.  You can break things down by a specific timeframe of days or weeks.  You can also break things down by specific positions.

A key aspect of the Waiver Research tool is the F+ rating, shown in green.  The F+ rating combines fantasy performance with player trends to help you decide who to pick up.  The higher the rating, the better the pickup.

You’ll notice that player’s you own are also shown in the mix and are highlighted in yellow.  It is critically important to show where your player’s performance stacks up against the waiver pool.   We make it easy to compare your player’s performances across shorter and longer timeframes to see if a free agent may be worth the pickup.

The icons next to each player name provide links to the fantasy league player page and an availability breakdown of which league he is owned in.

Finally, we also provide each player’s OWN and START ratings which are shown as two orange graphs.  When deciding who to pick up, it is very important to take note of these percentages. We guarantee  by using our Waiver Research tool that your research time will be cut down drastically.

Go ahead and take the plunge with the Fantasy Assistant.  If you aren’t a member yet, then SIGN UP now.

Today we are introducing a new feature that projects weekly fantasy points and weekly records for your fantasy teams.  This update applies to all of your favorite fantasy sports, including fantasy football, but for this post we will be discussing how this works for fantasy baseball.  Our projections support Head-to-Head Points, Rotisserie, and Head-to-Head Category leagues.

In our previous update, we announced Season Projections inside the Fantasy Assistant, which shows category comparisons and rankings against the rest of your league.   This update builds upon that.

Right below Season Projections, you’ll see our new Weekly Projections area…

These are REAL projections from my fantasy baseball league.  The categories have been customized to my specific league.  In this specific example, I’ve selected a category h2h league, so projected records and category breakdowns are also shown.

For each category, you’ll notice  your projected number in bold and your projected rank, along with a color of red, green, or orange.   As you can see, I am projected to be very competitive in just about all categories.  At first glance, it would seem my RUNS category may be lacking due to a ranking of 5th place.  However, I am near the top of the league based on the estimated league range of 32-47 RUNS.

Speaking of ranges.  The smaller gray number towards the bottom of each category shows your league range, or how a specific team matches up against you.  You’ll notice in the image above that when “rocky mtn oysters” is selected, the gray numbers change from ranges to his team’s projections.  This will be critical for setting lineups and gauging week-to-week performance.

Not shown are Head-to-Head Points projections, but we also support them.

Fully Customizable

Weekly Projections are shown every Monday and Sunday for fantasy baseball, hockey, and basketball users.   However, fantasy football users will see weekly projections starting on Thursday through Sunday morning.

You can easily customize your league and select the categories in your league, Player Pool, and league type.  For those of you in fantasy football leagues, you can easily specify a PPR league as well.

For those of you still not using our site, sign up now.

Today we are introducing a new feature to see which fantasy players are overachieving and underachieving.  Below you’ll see why this matters, how it works, and how you can use this data to manage your team moving forward.  (At the time of this writing, fantasy baseball examples are shown but the same features are available for fantasy football, fantasy basketball, and fantasy hockey.)

Why it Matters

Understanding which players are overachieving and underachieving is extremely important when it comes to managing your team for future success.  If your team consists of too many overachieving players, then you’ll quickly realize that the fast start your team had is bound to come to an abrupt end.

On the flip-side, if your team consists of too many underachieving players, then you may have to dig yourself out of a hole as you wait for these player’s to return to form.  Consistently starting a player who has not performed well, but has high expectations may ensure your team continues its slow start.

A fantasy team will inevitably have both types of players and it is important to start players during their hot streaks and bench players who are failing to live up to expectations.   Managing your team requires daily effort to stay on top of such trends.

How to Detect Overachievers and Underachievers

When analyzing your team’s roster, it’s absolutely critical to put personal feelings aside.  Sure you had high hopes for Billy Hamilton during the baseball draft, but your team needs players who are performing well right now.

The Fantasy Assistant makes this easy by using colors to determine who is performing better, worse, or on par with their expectations.

The picture above shows a small portion of my starting lineup.  Player ratings in red are currently underachieving and player’s in green are currently overachieving.  Players who have no color next to their rating indicates that they are performing close to their expectations.  If you mouse over each rating, a more detailed explanation is revealed.

In addition to a revised lineup, we are also introducing a brand new section which is called “Over Under” so you can research the best and worst players by position.  The EXPR number indicates how much worse or better the player is performing based on expectations.

How to use this Knowledge

As mentioned earlier, the most obvious way to use this knowledge is to bench underachievers and start overachievers when its in your favor.  However, you should also use this data to pick-up players on the waiver wire who can give your team an immediate boost.

A perfect example of this has been Yangervis Solarte for the early start of the 2014 baseball season.  Lately, he’s already come back down to earth so it’s probably best if you go ahead and drop him since he has already cooled off.

Another possible way to utilize this data is to help develop trades based on this information.  An irrational or impatient fantasy player often makes mistakes when a player on their team is performing poorly.  There may be an opportunity to snag Adrian Beltre or Manny Machado for a discount if their owner wants to get rid of them before they start to perform closer to expectations and fully come back from their injuries.