Fantasy Playoffs Strategy Guide

I’ve put together some tips that will help you out during the fantasy playoffs. I usually do pretty well in the regular season in my leagues, but it’s the playoffs where I feel like I have the largest advantage and that’s due to implementing some of the strategies below. Not every strategy will be worth deploying in your matchups, but they are all worth thinking about. The fantasy playoffs are almost always full of surprises and things rarely go as planned. Being ready for almost every potential scenario is essential if you want to win in the playoffs consistently.

• The most important thing you can do is prepare as much as possible. If your plan is to wing it during the fantasy playoffs, you are probably not going to last long. Manager skill matters much more during the fantasy playoffs than it does during the regular season. No one is going all out for a Week 10 win. If you are not preparing as much as possible, then you are not going to be able to maximize the impact of the skill and knowledge that you have built up over the course of your fantasy career.
• EFB’s Matchup Tool will be a major help when planning out your matchup. It uses the site’s projections to project your matchup and the projections are replaced by the players’ actual numbers as the week goes along. You can load your matchup directly from Yahoo and can manually add your players and your opponents’ players to the tool if you play on a different provider.
• If you play in an IL+ league, make sure that you know how to abuse the IL+ spots. If you have even two players with some kind of injury tag, you can play 14 on 13. If you have a few players with tags, you may be able to play 15 on 13.
• If you play in an IL+ league, keep an eye out for players with P or Q tags who are likely to play. Those players have more value than most streamers since they can go in the IL+ spot and potentially allow you to roster more players than your opponent. To figure out whether or not players with Q tags are likely to play, check out the Twitter feeds of the beat writers for the team that your potential streamer plays for. Often, the beat writers will have a pretty good idea of whether or not a player with a Q tag is likely to play in the next game.
• If you play in an IL+ league, always update your lineup, not just for the current round, but for the next round as well, after a player on your roster picks up a tag. You’ll probably make a pickup that resets your lineup at some point, but constantly moving players in and out of IL+ spots at future dates will make it more likely that you are able to get every game from the 14 or 15 players on your roster.
• Be aware of when the NBA injury reports that are relevant to your team come out so that you can anticipate and react to injury tags. They are released by the NBA every hour of the day at the :30 minute mark. When the teams are required to update their injury report comes down to the timing of their game and whether or not they played the night before. Use this link to access the injury reports – > NBA Injury Reports
• In leagues that allow you to make pickups for the current day, make sure you bench any injured players after they are ruled out. If you leave them in an active roster spot, you will not be able to drop them until the next day, even though they did not play and did not accumulate any stats.
• If you play in a league with same-day pickups and have a bye, make sure your droppable players are benched for the week. You don’t want to get into a situation where a must-add pops up and you can’t pick them up because your back-end options are in the middle of a game.
• In a league with the regular IL spots, don’t be in a rush to drop mediocre options currently in your IL spots. Let them sit there. The odds are not high, but it’s possible they come back at a time that allows you to pick up an extra game by activating them.
• Obviously, streamer choice should be based mostly on schedule and what the toss-up categories are. However, those are not the only factors that should go into a pickup decision. Safety and upside also matter. If you are the favorite in your matchup, go for the safer streamer. For example, if two players average 1.2 SPG, pick the one that is more likely to get at least one steal. If you are the underdog, do the opposite. In order to win, you need your players to outplay their averages. If you are looking for steals and are deciding between two 1.2 SPG options, look at each player’s game log and pick the player who blows up in the category more often. Playing it safe when you are the underdog usually doesn’t work.
• Don’t just target back-to-back sets. Those are usually useful, but stretches of three games in four nights are even more useful. Make sure you are reading the weekly schedule analysis and streaming guide. Those articles include a list of players who play three games in four nights.
• By the end of Wednesday, you’ll usually have an idea of where the matchup is going. By that point, both teams will have played about 40 percent of their games. That is usually when I start to make drastic changes to my strategy if things are not going well. Don’t panic over a bad Monday, but if you are in a bad spot by the end of Wednesday, you should start thinking about whether more extreme moves are necessary.
• However, don’t completely rule out making all your moves early in the week. That’s not a good strategy in most matchups since the deciding categories can change as the matchup progresses, but in some matchups, it can work. If you can get a significant amount of extra games by going all in early in the week, then that may be the way to go. I have pulled off upsets before by using all of my moves by Wednesday. My opponents took the opposite strategy and lost because they valued seeing how the matchup played out over extra games.
• VERY IMPORTANT: It is imperative to factor in the timing of the Sunday games when planning out and monitoring your matchups. The timing of Sunday games can swing matchups and championships. For example, you may think you are in a good spot in turnovers and FT%. However, due to the timing of the Sunday games, that may not be the case. If your opponents’ poor free throw shooters or high-turnover players play late in the day on Sunday, you may not actually be on pace to win the categories even if the Matchup Tool shows that you are. That is because your opponent can just sit those players and preserve their lead if they are leading going into the late games. If most of your players play early on Sunday, you may have to consider sitting players to stay ahead in categories like the percentages or turnovers. Turnovers is usually the category that is impacted the most by the timing of Sunday games. Also, don’t be afraid to start sitting players early if you think your Sunday schedule is going to be an issue. A few years back, I started sitting some of my point guards on Thursday because I knew if I was losing turnovers after the early games on Sunday, my opponent could just sit his players and end the matchup. I ended up missing out on not one, but two Elfrid Payton triple-doubles, but it ended up being the right move and won me the matchup.
• On a related note, when deciding on what players to stream on Sunday, place extra value on players who play late in the day. That will allow you to sit players if necessary and could force your opponent to make some tricky decisions earlier in the day.
• If your playoffs haven’t started yet, try to get your turnovers under control if they aren’t already. I’m not against punting turnovers during the regular season, but I absolutely loathe punting the category during the playoffs. Punting turnovers makes injuries during the fantasy playoffs hurt a lot more. Injuries obviously make winning more difficult, but if they shift turnovers into your column, at least you have a chance. If you run into injury problems and are still losing turnovers, your path to victory bcomes very narrow.
• Be aware of what is happening in the other matchups. I say that not only because you are going to play some of the teams in the other matchups eventually, but also because you may be at risk of having one of your preferred pickups stolen. If rebounds is competitive in your matchup and in another playoff matchup, then you are going to be competing for big man streamers with three other teams. You may have to make your move earlier than you’d like.
• If you have to wake up in the middle of the night to make a pickup, then wake up in the middle of the night. If you don’t know already, figure out when the next day starts in your time zone. To get your preferred pickup, you may have to grab the player seconds after the next day starts. It’s not the most enjoyable move in the world, but it can be the difference between a ring and a first-round exit. You won’t remember a bad sleep in March, but you will remember your championship. When I lived in Toronto, I had to wake up at 3 AM plenty of times to beat my opponents to the punch. Sometimes I wasn’t quick enough because I woke up at 3:01 instead of 3:00.
• No one is off-limits in the finals. If one of your studs only has one game left after Wednesday and you can pick up a player with three remaining games, then it may make sense to drop your stud. When making a move like that, consider when the dropped early-round player is due to come off waivers. Ideally, you’ll drop him at a point that will make it impossible for your opponent to pick him up. You don’t want to be dropping early-round players in the semi-finals, but there should be very few players on your roster that should be considered untouchable. Dropping a top-50 player will likely hurt you in the finals, but if making that move is your best path to victory, then make that move. Win the semis and figure out what to do in the finals when you get there.
• Don’t get cute with your final pickup of the week. A very common scenario in the fantasy playoffs is being up after the Saturday night games with one move left. Often, you’ll find yourself deciding between using your final move on a player who can give you a larger cushion in your current matchup and using that move to boost your chances in your next matchup (if you get there). If the matchup is even somewhat undecided, you will want to use your final move to shore up your current position. There will be a lot of surprise sits in March and the range of potential outcomes on Sunday will usually be wider than you think. Play it safe and figure out the next matchup when you get there.
• Some categories are harder to predict than others. For example, if you are projected to win points or assists by a moderate amount, you will almost certainly win both categories if you don’t run into injury problems. That is because points and assists are heavily tied to role and role doesn’t change much from game to game. The percentages also tend to be fairly stable, especially FG%. It’s not easy to pull off upsets in either category if you are projected to lose them by a moderate amount. The categories that are most likely to produce a surprise are steals, threes, and, to a lesser extent, blocks. The defensive categories are low-volume categories, so all it takes is one or two quiet games from your top defensive category contributors or your opponent’s top defensive category contributors to make the projections look a lot less rosy or rough. Threes used to be a fairly stable category, but that is no longer the case with everyone and their grandmother throwing up a million threes a game. If your opponent has a few random five-three nights from their role players or you run into one of those eight-three games from Steph Curry or Luka Doncic, you could go from being a healthy favorite in the category to an underdog overnight. Even if you are projected to win threes by 15+ going into the week, I would not get comfortable. That is not a big lead these days. That is the type of lead that can disappear in a day. Earlier in the year, I had a matchup where I was projected to win threes by one going into Sunday. I won the category by 18.