Bradley Beal, DNPs & Punting

Bradley Beal is expected to miss six weeks after having surgery on Sunday to repair a non-displaced fracture in his scaphoid bone, a small carpal bone just above his left (non-shooting) wrist.

His six-week timetable is encouraging, as it's toward the low end of expected recovery times for the procedure, but it still leaves fantasy owners with a major gap to begin the season. If he does return without any setbacks in six weeks, he'll have missed Washington's first 12 games, or 14.6 percent of the regular season.

John Wall said in a recent interview that both Otto Porter and Glen Rice Jr. will need to "play big" with Beal sidelined, especially with Martell Webster recovering from back surgery. Webster has been participating in drills at practice since early October but his return date is still uncertain, so in all likelihood either Rice Jr. or Porter will step into the starting SG role on opening night.

Glen Rice Jr. had a tremendous Summer League, during which he averaged 25.0 points, 2.2 threes (36.1 percent from deep), 7.8 rebounds, 2.3 assists and 2.5 steals in just 32 minutes per game. He opened the preseason with a strong 18-point game but has since struggled, and is averaging just 8.8 points on 37.5 percent shooting, including a 3-of-13 mark from downtown. Even if he does slot into the SG spot, he's unlikely to provide more than low-end value as a points/3s/steals specialist, and his FG% is a looming concern (29.7% in limited action last season).

Otto Porter could earn the starting job despite being a natural SF, but he's equally unimpressive as a fill-in fantasy option. He too had a strong Summer League with averages of 19.0 points, 1.2 triples, 5.8 rebounds, 1.8 assists and 0.5 steals per game. His preseason has been the reverse of Rice Jr.'s, beginning with a dud (four points on 1-of-10 shooting) followed by three consecutive strong performances.

Porter looks much more confident and his 2013-14 stats (including 36.3% shooting) are misleading since his rookie season was decimated by injuries. Even if he does emerge as a dependable facet of Washington's offense he's unlikely to have many scoring outbursts, and his lack of peripheral stats is alarming -- consider the following averages for assists/steals/blocks in his limited NBA action:

2013-14: 1.1 assists, 0.9 steals and 0.1 blocks on a per-36-minute basis

Summer League: 1.8 assists, 0.5 steals and 0.3 blocks in 32 minutes per game

2014-15 Preseason: 0.8 assists, 0.3 steals, 0.3 blocks in 24 minutes per game

Amazingly, despite standing 6'9" with a 7'2" wingspan, Otto Porter had exactly one blocked shot during 319 minutes of action as a rookie. I'm looking elsewhere for sleeper value in the late rounds.

It's worth quickly discussing the effect that Beal's absence might have on John Wall. Last year, with Beal off the court, Wall's FG% dropped from 43.7% to just 40.8%, even as his usage rate spiked from 24.4% to 32.6%. Fantasy owners may be willing to accept more scoring with a lower FG%, and they'll be pleased to note that Wall's assist-rate jumped from 29.3% to 35.9% without Beal. Neither Rice Jr. nor Porter will handle the ball like Beal did last season, ensuring that Wall (with some help from Paul Pierce) will control the offense on virtually every possession. Wall even had slightly higher steals per 100 possessions without Beal.

Let's now use Bradley Beal's six-week timetable as an entry point to discussing the impact of DNPs. I mentioned that he's slated to miss almost 15% of the Wizards' regular season games, and that's assuming that he stays healthy the rest of the way.

I should interject that while I’m a big fan of Beal in reality, I'm not very impressed by his fantasy upside. Over the Wizards' final 30 games last year, in 37 minutes per contest, he averaged 17.1 points, 1.6 threes, 3.7 rebounds, 3.3 assists, 1.0 steals and 0.3 blocks. The scoring and 3s are nice but he was otherwise mediocre, and he shot just 42.6% from the field and 77.0% at the FT line. My end-of-season rankings place him at No. 82 on a per-game basis in 8-cat leagues, with a cumulative z-score of 0.36 (just ahead of Reggie Jackson, Zach Randolph, Greg Monroe and Markieff Morris).

Even if we assume that Beal plays in 70 games once he returns from his wrist surgery, and takes a substantial leap forward from last season's production, the 15% hit to his season-long value makes it hard to project him as a top-75 value. By my quick calculations, a 15% hit to his value would have dropped him down about 15-20 players in the list of overall fantasy values last year, to just inside the top-100.

That loss of value isn't altogether a deal-breaker, and many owners will be willing to draft Beal after the middle rounds and stash him on their bench in the expectation that they'll still be competitive once he's healthy. That's a perfectly valid approach, assuming you get an appropriate 'injury discount' on draft day.

The equation is much trickier with Kevin Durant. In Mike Gallagher's analysis, he recommends KD as a top-5 pick in H2H leagues, but puts him in the 10-12 range for rotisserie leagues. Durant's early timetable is 6-8 weeks. If we assume that he'll miss exactly six weeks before picking up at his typical level of production, he's already down 15 games. If that stretches to an eight-week absence he'll miss OKC's first 19 games, or 23.2 percent of the regular season.

I've mentioned in multiple columns that Durant wasn't just the best fantasy player last season -- he blew away the competition. His league-leading scoring and ridiculous weighted-FT% gave him an elite foundation, he didn't hurt owners in a single category (excluding turnovers), and he missed just one game all season. In 8-cat leagues, he could have played in 63 games last year and still ranked in the top five for cumulative value. In 9-cat leagues his 63 games would also have provided top-six cumulative value.

We should also remember Durant's remarkable durability prior to this wear-and-tear foot injury -- he's missed 16 total games in seven regular seasons, which works out to 2.9% of his games since entering the NBA. When you consider that the average top-200 player last year had right around 12 DNPs, the idea of waiting for Durant becomes a lot more palatable.

Whether you can survive a month without Durant in H2H formats depends upon your strategy, the depth of your league, the quality of opposing owners, and more. In a general sense, it seems quite possible to start with a 2-2 or 1-3 record and storm back once Durant is healthy. The same can be said for rotisserie leagues, where a slow start could be overcome by Durant's return -- and the typical 82-game limit per position means you should get solid 'replacement value' until he's ready to go.

I wouldn't let Durant slide past No. 10 in either format, in other words, and I might take him higher if there weren’t unknown variables. Yes, he could return after six weeks rather than eight, but he could also have a setback and be out even longer. Or the Thunder could ease his workload upon his return, to ensure that he's 100 percent healthy for the playoffs. Those 'what-if' scenarios are scary enough that I'd lean toward a healthy and elite player like Carmelo Anthony or Kevin Love before reaching for KD in the hopes of a dominant return in late-November or early December.

One final note on Durant's injury...As Mike pointed yesterday, Russell Westbrook had a ludicrous usage rate of 44.9 percent without KD on the court last season. The major caveat is that he only played 39 minutes without KD (a total of 87 offensive possessions), and shot just 39.4 percent from the field during that span. Nevertheless, it's a given that WB will dominate the Thunder offense until Durant returns to action, which should result in more scoring, 3-pointers, free throws and assists. I'm bumping him up from the late first-round to the top six, and am thrilled to already have him on two teams. Fantasy leagues are a competitive way to extend the NBA's entertainment, among other things, and WB is going to be incredibly fun to watch.

Here is a quick breakdown of how many games were played by the top-200 players last season:

*Ramon Sessions pulled off a rare 83-game season after being traded from Milwaukee to Charlotte

I mentioned that the top-200 fantasy options last season (8-cat, per-game) averaged around 12 DNPs, but the exact number is 12.7. That number shrank to 10.2 DNPs if you toss out the bottom-10 players for games played (guys like Kobe Bryant, Derrick Rose, Rajon Rondo, Al Horford and Brook Lopez), which yields an average of 71.8 games played. As a group, the 10 players who missed the most games were an average of 27.7 years old. For every venerable veteran like Kobe and Drew Gooden, there were two younger guys like Rose, Lopez, Ryan Anderson, Larry Sanders and Jrue Holiday.

Youth doesn't guarantee health, to be sure, but on the surface it seems to correlate with more games played (and vice versa).

I also briefly attempted to quantify the damage of DNPs by weighting each player's auction value with Rotoworld's projections for games-played this season. Logically, the impact of DNPs for valuable first-round picks will be magnified, while DNPs for late-round picks will only have a minor effect. Chris Paul, for instance, had an initial 9-cat value of $73.85. We have him projected to play in 69 games this season, however, which is six games below the population mean (75 games, which seems optimistic since last year's top-200 average was between 69.3 and 71.8, as explained above). That's a -7.6% hit to CP3's value, which drops his expected auction value down to $68.20.

Here is a sampling of the biggest losers when projected games-played are factored into the equation:

The effect is magnified the more valuable the player is, of course, so Chris Paul's -7.6% becomes the biggest absolute loss, taking $5.65 off his original $73.85 price-tag (I ran these numbers prior to Durant's injury). Derrick Rose, meanwhile, only lost $2.79 because he was initially valued at just $19.47 (this might seem low but that's because he's not as good in fantasy leagues as most owners think...his Y! projected value is $27 and his actual auction ADP stands at $31). We've projected Rose to play in 64 games, which takes a 14.3% chunk out of his value, though his recent season-ending knee surgeries may require an even bigger risk-based discount. Personally, I'm letting another owner worry about D-Rose this season. If nothing else, owners should be keenly aware of the escalating risk of drafting an injured player -- I'd much rather gamble on Andrew Bogut with the 106th pick than take a chance on Brook Lopez in the second round.

Keep reading for my breakdown of a recent punt-FT% strategy I employed in an industry H2H 8-cat draft.

Punt FT% Draft

In a column earlier this year, Mike Gallagher discussed a particularly intriguing punt-FT% strategy: draft LeBron James with the No. 2 or 3 pick, then use your next two picks to scoop up Andre Drummond and DeAndre Jordan (or Dwight Howard, if you prefer). This stakes you to a dominant lead in FG%, rebounds and blocks, though to become a successful 8-cat or 9-cat team you'll need to quickly make yourself competitive in some combination of points, 3-pointers, assists and steals.

I've talked to Mike about the strategy a few times and when I landed the No. 2 pick in this H2H league I decided to go for it. It'll be easier to discuss specific benefits and risks of this strategy with my actual team (in a mock draft) in mind, so here it is by round. This was a head-to-head 8-cat league with 12 teams and standard Y! rosters (PG, SG, G, SF, PF, F, C, C, UTIL, UTIL, and four BENCH spots):

I was thrilled to expand my punt-FT% strategy with the additions of Thaddeus Young (No. 47), Michael Carter-Williams (No. 50) and Terrence Jones (No. 71). Using numbers from my z-score based 'Rankings in Review' column, after drafting six players I had three first-round values (assuming 7-cat values, since I'm punting FT%) in LeBron/Drummond/DeAndre. I also had two guys with top-40 value in Thaddeus/MCW, with Jones ranking as a top-60 option.

This is where my strategy began to shift, and it's where I begin to lose appreciation for a 'punting' strategy. Only one other team adopted a blatant punt-FT% strategy, and they ended up with Dwight Howard, Derrick Favors, Josh Smith, Nikola Pekovic and Andrew Bogut, while adding Tony Wroten as a late-round gamble. The fact is that you eventually run out of quality players who benefit from punting FT%, so if you limit yourself to that small pool of players you're inevitably missing out on guys with higher upside.

To drive home the point, here are the 25 players who gained the most when punting FT% last season (on a per-game basis):

Thaddeus Young's cumulative z-score increased by 0.50, J.R. Smith gained 0.69, Jordan Hill gained 0.65, Dwyane Wade gained 0.49, Lance Stephenson gained 0.44 and a few other worthy players can be added to the list.

My argument against doing it is two-fold. First, there aren't a ton of players who even gain value with this punting strategy, with only 87 out of last year's top-216 players improving in 8-cat or 9-cat leagues when FT% is punted. Second, the substantial gains are limited to a handful of unbelievably bad FT shooters, almost exclusively big men, so the strategy yields very few guards and forwards who gain enough to offset the loss of an entire category (which is, after all, 1/8 of your available wins in an 8-cat H2H league).

So getting back to my draft, after six picks I felt I'd successfully picked up guys who fit the punt-FT% mold. LeBron and Michael Carter-Williams gave me a nice head start in steals and assists, and it is nice that I could basically ignore MCW's dreadful FG% -- without TOs or percentages weighed against him, MCW was a borderline second-round value last year.

However, I wasn't thrilled with my ability to compete beyond FG%/REB/BLK. That's reflected in picks like Kyle Korver (No. 74), Jeremy Lin (No. 98), J.R. Smith (No. 119) and Terrence Ross (No. 143). I was desperately hoping to land Reggie Jackson in the 10th round but he was scooped up one pick before me by Zack Rewis, who hosted the mock for The Fantasy Fix. He also wrote a nice piece about the draft, which you can read here.

I definitely fell into a trap in the late rounds, being overly influenced by my punt-FT% and drafting guys like Gorgui Dieng, Brandan Wright and (in the 14th round) JaVale McGee. I love Dieng this season and highly recommend him as a late-round pick, and I'm enamored with B-Wright's per-minute upside (especially with injury-prone Tyson Chandler at center), but I didn't need either of them for this lineup. If this were a real league I'd try to flip a center or two to re-balance my team, hopefully picking up another PG for help with 3PT/AST/STL (it helps that Y! requires two starting Cs). In case you can't tell, I don't like to punt and rarely go into drafts with a punt-or-die strategy, so I'll blame those late-round missteps on rust.

I would never consider punting FT% in roto leagues, and I mentioned a few of my biggest misgivings above, but it remains a very intriguing strategy for H2H owners. If you want to share your own punting experience and strategies, send me a message on Twitter @Knaus_RW.