Fantasy Basketball Teams to Target with Streamers: Lakers, Bucks, Hawks and More
Six NBA teams who are playing at a top-10 pace with a bottom-10 defense early in the season.
My favorite part of preparing for fantasy sports is looking for streamers on a given day/week. Streamers are all about matchups, where we can compare the opponents and opportunities of players with essentially the same skill level.
Football is the easiest sport to stream because teams only play once per week. That means setting a lineup only once per week, giving you seven days (give or take) to find the right matchups.
Some fantasy basketball leagues (or hockey, or baseball) have weekly lineups, but many are daily leagues which require setting your lineup each day. That makes it much harder to find streamers because you have one day to research, not seven. And that day probably includes you getting home late from work and needing to go to your kid’s school performance.
I like to go through the matchups each day to find the players who have the best chance at a good fantasy performance. It helps me, but it also helps you if I can share what I find, making it so you don’t have to spend the hours that you don’t have available. It’s a tough life setting the perfect fantasy lineup.
With no NBA games today (they took off for election day), I thought it was a good time to look at what we’ve seen through the first few weeks of the season and highlight some teams that are worth targeting in fantasy leagues.
I’ll go through my process in identifying the teams to target and those who have been most vulnerable this season. Most stats are from NBA.com, and I used our FantasySP defensive fantasy rankings.
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The Process
I like to use two advanced stats from NBA: pace and defensive rating. Pace estimates how many possessions a team averages per 48 minutes (the length of a game). Defensive rating measures how many points a team allows per 100 possessions.
The purpose of using pace is finding the teams who play the fastest, creating the most possessions and giving the most opportunities to accumulate stats. Defensive rating is a per-possession stat (multiplied by 100), so it’s not affected by pace. No matter how fast a team plays, 100 possessions is 100 possessions over any time span.
By targeting teams in the top 10 in pace and the bottom 10 in defensive rating, I’m looking for the teams that play the fastest and have the worst defenses, giving extra chances against poor teams. Most teams who fall into that group are also bad teams, so if you use +/- stats, it will usually be positive.
The “Teams to Target” listed below are those who fall into the top-10 pace/bottom-10 defense group. Those rankings will change throughout the season, and the list is fluid. I usually look at the numbers each day, but it’s good to get a lay of the land after a few weeks of games.
Teams to Target
- Atlanta Hawks
- Los Angeles Lakers
- Milwaukee Bucks
- Toronto Raptors
- Utah Jazz
- Washington Wizards
Six teams meet the criteria after Monday’s games. Six teams finished in that group last season as well; it’s usually a good estimate at any given time. Stats can fluctuate wildly early in the season, but as we get deeper, the teams that show up in both categories are usually easy to pick out.
While the Lakers and Bucks might seem like surprise teams here, the other four are likely to be fighting for the play-in at best (and otherwise fighting for the worst record). Injuries and trades later in the season will affect things as much as team performance and development.
Conclusion
These are teams to target right now, but things will change quickly. Every team has played between six and eight games: less than 10% of the season. Use the information we have but understand that the league will look much different come the All-Star break, let alone the playoffs.
Pay attention to the changing landscape and keep coming back to FantasySP for daily streamers and our fantasy tools. It’s a long season that can’t be lost or won right now; you can set yourself up for success, though, especially early in the season before your focus starts to wane.
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