Category: fantasy points

Nearly a year ago, the Trade Research Center was released to the public.  At the time I didn’t realize how popular the feature would be!.  To this day, we are still the ONLY fantasy site the offers trade suggestions. Over the past year I’ve had lots of feedback from users and lots of opinions on how it could be improved.

The Feedback

Before we get to what has changed, let’s start by talking about the feedback from users.   The trade research tool started all because users kept requesting the feature.  I knew it would be a big undertaking and would take some time to perfect, but it had to start somewhere.  In May of 2013, the tool was released in BETA because I knew it need more work.

Once people had the tool in their hands they let me know their thoughts on how to improve upon it.  Their initial thoughts were helpful and cool to use, but it was a step away from being great.  Their concerns can be summed up by this REAL comment from “User X”:

An enhanced Trade Research tool would make the difference for me.
Instead of just having a few suggested possible trades and listing how in your favor it would be- maybe have the option to select the players on your team you’d be open to trading then have possible suggestions based on that.

This user echoed a lot of what others said, except his thoughts were very concise and to the point.  The people wanted more trades, more customization, and better accuracy.  My job was to make sure it gets done right and works for the NBA, NHL, MLB, and NFL.

Customizing Trade Suggestions

The first step to more accurate trades would be directly asking the user who should be traded and what they are looking to improve upon.  Previously, our research suggestions would automatically try to figure this out and the user had no way of changing it.  Things are much different now.

The trade suggestions area still makes mention of weak/strong areas of your team, but it’s now completely up to you to select which players you are willing to give up and which positions you want in return.

You can add as many players and select as many positions as you’d like and the Fantasy Assistant will automatically generate possible trades (shown below).  Customizing your trades are now extremely easy and only take a few clicks.

Viewing Trade Suggestions

Viewing the trade suggestions are just as easy once you’ve selected the positions.  Trade Suggestions are now presented for ALL the teams in your league and we offer up to 3 possible trades per team.  This is a huge difference from before, where we would pinpoint one team and then offer up to 3 trades.  For this particular trade we are offering up Will Myers and Jimmy Rollins and want outfielders and infielders in return.

Trade suggestions will work for 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3 trades.  If you select more than 2 players, then we will determine what players to select and whether or not it should be a four player trade or six player trade.

At the top are all available teams in your league with a number next to each team.  This particular example shows that all teams in the league have 3 trade suggestions each.  However, this varies greatly depending on how you set up the trade.

With “deadzone 1” selected, we can see three possible trades for you to consider.  The green boxes next to each player indicate their FSP rating, which we use to gauge the overall rating for each player.  Since today is March 1st, expect these ratings to change quite a bit before opening day and throughout the season.

Underneath each trade is the “Analyze Trade” button.  This button will take you directly to the trade analyzer and show you exactly how this trade would break down for both teams.  Because this is a baseball trade, the trade will break down categories such as batting average, home runs, runs, etc.  Have a look at our blog post that describes how the trade analyzer works.

If you’d like to see a different set of trades, then click on the “Refresh Suggestions” button underneath shown in the previous picture.  The Fantasy Assistant will revise its suggestions and present a new set of trades for you to view.

Wrap Up

This update is already live and available for all four major sports.  A lot of planning went into this update and great strides have been made in improving the quality of trades.  The combination of the Fantasy Assistant and Trade Analyzer are great assets to have for all fantasy sports players.  Go ahead and give it a spin and expect more tweaks and changes as the weeks and months go by.

Still not a member of FantasySP?  Sign up!

 

 

Fantasy baseball season is quickly approaching and many of you are close to league drafts.  Once your team is drafted, the fear might start to creep in as you wonder if you made the right picks.  Luckily FantasySP has you covered as I present you with the top 5 fantasy baseball tools we have to offer for the new season.

Trade Analyzer

A lot of hard work has gone into improving FantasySP for this baseball season.  The trade analyzer is the best example of that.  On the surface it may seem like not a whole lot has changed.  You add players to a potential trade and try to find out who gets the better deal.  Simple right?

For this baseball season the trade analyzer is much smarter.  It can now show you the impact of a fantasy trade based on the league(s) you have synced.  You can easily see how a trade improves your batting categories for outfielders or pitching categories for starting pitchers.  And so much more!

In addition to that, you can also share these trades with leaguemates and have a mobile version of the tool for fast load times.

Player Alerts

Player Alerts is the perfect feature for a sport such as fantasy baseball because the season is so long.  FantasySP will keep track of your players and automatically update the rosters behind the scenes.  If we detect a major news trend, such as a suspension or an injury, then we will email you immediately to let you know.  You can set Player Alerts to a setting of Low, Medium, or High depending on how often or how soon you would like to be alerted.

So go ahead and stay out late on those Friday or Saturday nights and let us worry about your fantasy baseball players.  Have a look at an example Player Alert email.

Waiver Alerts

If you thought Player Alerts were cool, just wait until you check out Waiver Alerts.  As you might have guessed, Waiver Alerts will work similar to Player Alerts, except Waiver Alerts are specifically tailored to your synced leagues.  Do you really want to miss out on another minor league call-up?

Waiver Alerts will automatically analyze the waiver wire for significant trends relevant to your teams and send you an email when we find something interesting.  Plus, the email will have relevant OWN/Start Trends, Player Stats, latest player news, and your fantasy team ratings/rankings.

I don’t have a fantasy baseball example to show you since the season hasn’t started, but I do have a fantasy football example to show you.

As an added bonus, we also offer a list of waiver wire trends based on the week or day.

Fantasy Assistant

You’ve never heard of the Fantasy Assistant before?  This is the swiss-army knife of fantasy baseball tools.  It has been designed to make your life a lot easier and works in conjunction with the trade analyzer, player alerts, and waiver alerts.

The Fantasy Assistant does tons of number crunching and analysis to see where your team ranks in comparison to other teams in your league.  We rank and compare Full Rosters vs Starting Lineups to determine depth as the season progresses.  We compare position based ratings so you can see how your Outfielders or Starting Pitchers rate throughout the season.  You can even use this data to research potential trades.

New this year also includes category based analysis and team projections.  You can compare any player on your roster to team averages to determine if a player is outperforming or underperforming in over 10 categories.

The best feature for the Fantasy Assistant is how it saves you time with the waiver wire.  You can easily compare your player vs the free agent pool to determine the best available player based on “High Risk” factors or a more refined search such as stolen bases or a lower ERA.

Check out the full overview of the Fantasy Assistant with plenty of pictures and videos as I explain its features.

Start or Sit Tool

Last but not least, we have the start sit tool for baseball.  Throughout the season we will often find ourselves struggling to figure out who deserves a spot start and who should be benched.  The start sit tool will give you all kinds of data to help make the decision a little bit easier.

Some key metrics might include the latest performance trend comparisons, own/start trends, expert ranking comparisons, split stats to see how well a player performs on the road vs at home, and much more.

As an added bonus, we also offer a mobile version of the start/sit tool to help you out while you are on the road.

The year of 2013 is quickly coming to an end which means its time for another year-end post about the most popular website to host fantasy leagues.  As you may recall from last year, I wrote a blog post that compared 2011 to 2012. Feel free to give it a read if you haven’t already.

For those of you not familiar with FantasySP, we allow our users to sync their fantasy leagues in order to provide them with unique analysis and insight to help manage their teams and stay on top of player news.  Our fantasy tools will alert you of important player news, waiver trends, suggest waiver pickups, analyze trades, chart your teams performance over time, and offer start/sit suggestions.

This year I will be providing much of the same analysis in terms of the most popular fantasy hosts. This year we have over 10,000 fantasy leagues ranging from August 1st up until now and added support for two additional websites: Fleaflicker and MyFantasyLeague.  Also included in this blog post will be charts from the previous seasons of 2011 and 2012 so you can see how the market has changed over time.

 

Making Sense of the Numbers

CBS’ market share of fantasy football games has continued to erode over the past 3 years and now sits at 4.6%. For the first time since NFL.com fantasy launched, it has actually decreased to 1%.  ESPN continues to dominate the fantasy market and now sits at nearly 50% of the market share.

ESPN is the only fantasy host to gain market share 3 years in a row.  It also seems as though Yahoo may be making a rebound and for the first time has actually gained market share.

• NFL.com has gone from: 9.7% to 13% to 12.1%
• Yahoo has gone from: 37.7% to 32% to 32.5%
• ESPN has gone from: 43.7% to 45% to 49.7%
• CBS has gone from: 7.9% to 8% to 4.6%

 

Three Major Fantasy Sports Analyzed

For this final section, I think it would be interesting to see what it looks like when three major fantasy sports leagues are analyzed to see current market share.  This includes hockey, basketball, and football.  Unfortunately baseball cannot be accurately calculated since it is the off-season.

Not too surprisingly, things remained very much the same for most of the fantasy websites.  The only noticeable difference is that Yahoo is a popular choice for hockey and basketball players.

Full Disclosure & Wrap Up

FantasySP is not affiliated with any of these websites.  We do offer CBSSports apps to fantasy football leagues, which may skew the data slightly.  However, after adding basketball and hockey leagues into the mix, the numbers suggest the impact is minimal.

The continued popularity of daily fantasy games is something that we cannot factor into market share.  Therefore, this analysis should be considered to cover “traditional fantasy sports” games only.

Feel free to comment or email with any thoughts or concerns.

The next generation of waiver wire trends have arrived at FantasySP.  We have just released Waiver Wire Trends for the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB.  Many of you guys have seen waiver trends listed on several fantasy sites but we have our own unique spin that will give you an edge.

Before we get to ways our waiver wire trends differ, let’s first give a broad overview on what to expect.  As you can see to the right, we list the top 25 Waiver Trends for your favorite sport.  These just so happen to be the NFL.

By default, we list the weekly trends and compare the own percentage from this week to last week.  The player’s with the biggest own increase are listed first.  Nothing super interesting with that so far, and these player’s will mostly likely already be owned in your league.

Where things get interesting is when you sort by “Percent Change”.  This category will show you all players who have a significant weekly or daily jump in ownership.  Often times you will see players with a 2000% percent change.  These player’s will likely be available in the waiver wire and are guys that you should be researching.

A couple examples so far would be Peyton Hillis, Harry Douglas, Marvin Jones, and Kenny Stills.  Notice anything?  All of these players are either fantasy sleepers that came out of nowhere or are injury replacements that are instantly worth picking up.

Many of you probably read waiver wire suggestion columns on various fantasy sites, but our waiver trends page makes things much easier.  We list all player’s worth a possible pickup, and even grab relevant player news from around the web about each guy to let you know what the experts think.  FantasySP just cut waiver wire research time in half.

Our waiver trends are the first that I know of to allow you to sort by daily trends to easily pluck out fantasy sleepers.  This is extremely useful for fantasy football, but even more for hockey, basketball, and baseball.  There is also a graph of ownage history right next to each player so you can see what has been happening the past 30 days.

Finally, notice the Gray icons next to each player name?  Those indicate that those players are available in at least one of my synced fantasy leagues. Any of those links will take me directly to his player page on my hosted fantasy league.

As an added bonus, Yearly Plus members will have the waiver trends shown in place of banner ads on every page.

If you still aren’t impressed by these waiver wire trends, then wait another few weeks when we announce yet another feature.  All I can say is that it involves the Fantasy Assistant and waiver wire trends.

Our suite of fantasy sports tools have been extremely popular over the last several years.  Many of you have been asking us if a mobile version of the trade analyzer or start sit tool would ever be available.  Well, we have great news for you!  As of today our optimized mobile versions are live on the mobile site.    They offer the same great content and functionality, but in a smaller package.  What better way to celebrate the fantasy football start or sit tool‘s first birthday!

Want to skip the details and go straight to our mobile NFL start or sit tool and mobile NFL trade analyzer? We are fine with that too.

For the rest of you, let’s quickly go over a few details so you guys can learn about what they look like, how to access them, and tips.

Just by looking at the picture to the right, you’ll notice that the tools have been completely redesigned from the ground up for your mobile phones.  I wanted to make sure that the experience would be as fluid as possible and a lot of time and effort went into making sure they fit and look good on a variety of mobile phones and load fast.  Things will work as expected and look great whether you have an Android, iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows phone.

The start or sit tools work exactly like the desktop version and showcases 7 categories to help decide who to sit or start in a given week or day.  A decision on who to start or sit is shown at the very bottom of each decision with a percentage of certainty. We also provide trending trades or trending start decisions right underneath the main tool so you can see what everyone else is searching.

The trade analyzers look a lot different than the desktop version, but still offer the same in depth analysis and news.  When a trade is processed you will notice that each player is listed under Team 1 or Team 2 vertically.  A trade will have a stronger side or a weaker side.  The goal is to be on the stronger side of a trade.    Each player has their own interactive row that can be expanded to reveal their fantasy graph, stats, analysis, and latest player news.

So the real question is, how do you access them?

You will notice that our mobile site has a new footer at the bottom of every page for quick access.  However, the majority of users won’t even have to do anything different and will automatically be shown the proper version of the start or sit tool or trade analyzer depending what device you use.

We will continue to push the envelope on our fantasy tools in 2013 and beyond.  Keep an eye out for another major update coming soon to the trade analyzer.