As previously promised when I wrote about my enjoyment of basketball in December, I am now writing after finishing my fantasy basketball season undefeated in a perfect season, with the highest number of points scored and the lowest points against. The consequence of this is $450 in my pocket (the objective now is back-to-back championships, inshallah).
Now if I were any of the Americans involved, I would feel embarrassed at getting thoroughly thrashed by a European who has barely watched basketball. But I can’t speak to their experience.
I can speak to my experience of getting involved in sports fandom, something I hadn’t done before. Sports, much like politics, are prone to a series of cognitive and emotional biases. This is glaringly obvious when you’re new to a sport.
When I first said yes to joining the fantasy league, I had a moment of panic. I knew nothing about basketball; honestly, I probably still know very little about the fundamentals of the sport, even after a season of watching.
But I spent a significant amount of time reading into the analytics behind the sport and trying to understand the value of each player. The format made it even more interesting. The league was set up as a Dynasty (meaning you keep the players for five years) and was an auction (meaning you assign a dollar value to each player and you have a fixed total budget to spend on all your players). This created excellent arbitrage opportunities.
First, I set a strategy. I knew I wanted to win in my first season, with the potential to win my second, and didn’t particularly care about the later seasons.
This put me at odds with the consensus of the league, as everyone was jumping to draft the younger players and leaning into “optimism bias” - which is when individuals overestimate the likelihood of positive future outcomes while underestimating potential downsides.
In this case, managers were overestimating the dollar value of young/rookie players whilst undervaluing the production of older players - the fear being that their age would lead to a decline in production. The result was that I could scoop up a variety of key contributors for much cheaper than I should have.
The auction part of the experience was key, as managers fell victim to in-group bias, which is when someone overvalues a player because they’re on their favourite team.
This is a common feature of sports fandom - you root for your own team - but when it comes to winning in what is a game of analytics, fandom shouldn’t matter.
An example of this was actually commented on in the draft as the “Celtics tax” - since a number of people in our league are Celtics fans, Celtics players were significantly overvalued to the detriment of the managers’ total budgets.
Another common trap was drafting players based on their highlight reels and the managers’ previous attachments to players - something I didn’t have. This kind of bias is known as the “availability heuristic,” which is defined as our natural tendency to assign significant importance to events that are either very easy for us to recall or have left a powerful impression on us. We use these easy-to-recall events as a more accurate tool to assess risks and outcomes than they actually are.
An example of this in my fantasy league was the drafting of Anthony Edwards, a player known for his flashy plays and amazing dunks, who this year has performed well at a rank of 20th overall. Yet when drafted, he was the 7th most expensive player. This gap between performance and money spent was detrimental to the manager’s team, as Edwards didn’t provide the same value of the top 7 players.
A major storyline in the NBA is to see Edwards potential as Michael Jordan’s successor, with fans often referring to him as being “tuff” and having “aura” versus other players who are better value but don’t do the flashy athletic work so commonly appreciated by basketball fans.
Players like LaMelo Ball or Anthony Edwards get overrated, whilst quiet operators like Domantas Sabonis and Josh Hart skate under the radar as they’re not as flashy.
The most frustrating bias encountered was the endowment bias, an emotional bias that causes individuals to value an owned object higher than its market value. Managers would commonly overvalue their players so much that it was difficult - if not impossible - to get a fairly valued trade.
Consequently, the volume of trades was actually much lower than it should have been, as managers were afraid of trading away their players. This meant a variety of teams sat in the middle of the pack with no clear direction, meaning no one could assemble a team good enough to truly challenge.
And, of course, the most common bias in all sports is recency bias. Managers were quick to bid high amounts on rookies who had come off a successful college season, such as Zach Edey, even though the projected outlook for them - in a year known as a historically weak draft class - was poor.
I could go on about the further biases that were in play and how they worked to my advantage. But the most obvious conclusion is that my lack of basketball knowledge was actually my greatest asset. This is because my opinion on players was unmarred by previous seasons of watching; rather, it was based on a strategy to arbitrage age against value in pursuit of winning my first season. Consequently, the statistics were all that mattered.
Now, after a whole season in which I’ve immersed myself in basketball fandom and had multiple conversations with strangers both in person and online, it strikes me how pervasive biases are in sport.
This was highlighted to me in a conversation with a friend whos a big football fan. He told me about the controversy surrounding 2024’s Ballon d’Or.
The Ballon d’Or is an award to honour the best player of the past year. The two most likely to win the award in 2024 were Manchester City’s midfielder Rodri and Real Madrid’s attacker Vinicius Junior. It has historically been dominated by attackers, with few wins by defenders and none by defensive midfielders - Rodri’s position.
The defensive midfielder gets no love on the stat sheet yet plays a crucial role on the team, and Rodri is the best among them. He was rightly recognised as such and won the award over Vinicius Junior.
Of course, this sparked enormous controversy on the internet, which my friend led me into, but it highlights to me the exact same bias shown towards players like Anthony Edwards: the availability heuristic. Because Vinicius Jr scores goals - the value of which can easily be seen - fans overrate his importance versus the crucial but harder-to-follow value of Rodri.
Sport is truly fascinating; bias is pervasive, and fans overrate their ability to judge players via the “eye test,” thinking they “know ball.” Knowledge and the ability to read the game do play a role, but everything is understandable through statistics.
Thankfully after my perfect season, I can turn the statistics brain off and truly enjoy some basketball. But this step into fantasy basketball has been an interesting journey into basketball fandom.