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Novel Approach to Fantasy Basketball Management

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In head-to-head fantasy sports leagues, it is common belief that managers try to do their best in all statistics categories. In this paper, we work to turn this notion on its head and investigate the strategy of effectively forfeiting certain categories while focusing on a certain subset of all categories. Through millions of draft and match-up simulations based on 2008-2009 NBA statistics, we found that approximately one-quarter of all possible subsets yielded strategies that defeated the "all statistics" strategy in a head-to-head match-up, and that the "all statistics" strategy is not the overall best one.