25/26 Salary Cap League Sleepers and Bust + Draft Strategy Tips
Instead of coming up with a traditional sleepers and busts list for salary cap/auction leagues, I have put together an analysis that identifies players who are overpriced and underpriced in the various league settings and punting strategies. This analysis compares a player’s projected value in dollars based on Elite Fantasy Basketball’s projections to their average price on Yahoo and ESPN. The analysis will make it easier for you to identify sleepers and busts and figure out what is an appropriate price to pay for each player given your team build.
Salary Cap/Auction League Strategy Tips
- Prepare, prepare, prepare. A salary cap/auction draft is significantly more complicated and unpredictable than a regular snake draft. In a snake draft, you can usually guess the group of players that are going to be available around each of your picks, especially early in the draft. In salary cap leagues, the entire league is available to you. You can’t just prepare to build around one or two first-round picks. In a salary cap league, you could easily end up with your fifth or sixth choice of early-round building block. In a snake league, I usually have a few pages of notes. In a salary cap league, sometimes I have a dozen pages in front of me.
- When I do a salary cap draft, I have multiple lists of players printed beside me. I do this because it is much harder to keep track of who is available. Usually, I group players by targets for each build and by position. When I am grouping by build, I try to tier the players by type of player. You are not always going to be able to get your first choice and you’ll want to be able to quickly check who else can give you the type of line that the player you just missed out on does. I group by position because this tends to be the best way to monitor category scarcity. In snake leagues, you can go into your draft knowing you have to focus on certain categories by Round X. You can’t do that in salary cap leagues. It is very possible there will be plenty of assists or points left late in a salary cap league, but you won’t know that unless you have a firm understanding of who and what is still available.
- When making your plan, make sure you know what each player is going for on the host site. It doesn’t matter how experienced your league is, the host site prices will have an enormous impact on how much each player costs.
- You also want to track what strategies your opponents are employing. Make a note if someone grabs a punt FT% big early or doesn’t seem too interested in rostering point guards. This will make it easier to anticipate whether or not you will have to get into a bidding war for a player later in the draft. You also want to do this because it is usually not a good idea to punt a category that other teams are punting. This leads to bidding wars, especially with builds like punt FG%, where the top big man options are very obvious and very limited. Knowing your opponents’ strategies will also make it easier to drain your opponents’ budgets by nominating players who are likely to end up as the focus of a bidding war.
Click here for the sleeper and bust lists and the rest of the salary cap/auction league strategy tips:
25/26 Underpriced & Overpriced Players in Salary Cap Leagues (Yahoo)
25/26 Underpriced & Overpriced Players in Salary Cap Leagues (ESPN)
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