by Jimmy Patrick

Created on: June 13, 2008   Last Updated: June 14, 2008

The number one tip in fantasy basketball is to attach your team to the league's star players. That might sound really obvious, but it holds true more with basketball than with other fantasy sports.

A great example of what I mean happened a few years back when Tony Parker of the Spurs first entered the league. Nobody knew who he was, including me. Still, I saw his name on the roster as the starting point guard for the Spurs, so I drafted him near the end of my draft. My logic was if he was going to play with Tim Duncan, he would be passing the ball to one of the best big men in the game and probably rack up a lot of assists. It worked and I ended up winning that league.

Fantasy basketball is unique when compared to fantasy baseball or football. In football and in baseball there are bad teams that will rarely ever score an offensive point, but in basketball even the bad teams score a lot of points. A bad football team might lose 21-3. A bad basketball team will lose 120-92. The point here is that finding players to score you points isn't hard in fantasy basketball, so don't get caught up in looking for them.

The real key to winning fantasy basketball is in the manipulation of peripheral statistics like rebounds, assists, shooting percentage, steals, and blocks. Those are the golden statistics.

Say you draft Lebron James and he leads the league in scoring, averaging around 30 points per game. So what? You could have drafted Rudy Gay of Memphis and Monta Ellis of Golden State. Both are lesser known players on relatively bad teams, but both average over 20 points per game, so their combined 40 points will outperform Lebron's 30 on any given night. You might argue that it takes two players to beat one, but Lebron would have been your top pick while Gay and Ellis could have been had much later in the draft. Points are easy to find in basketball.

The real value of Lebron James lies in his assists. He averages over seven assists a game while Gay and Ellis only average about six combined assists per game, so with one player you are outperforming two combined players in the assist category.

Of course, drafting star players like Lebron is no tough task. You could put your draft on auto pilot for the first few rounds and get a nice set of star players. It is the middle rounds and late rounds that will make or break your team in fantasy basketball. You must attach your team to the stars.

A great example from this past season would have been Rajon Rondo of the Boston Celtics. In the 2006-07 season he played 78 games with a field goal percentage of 41.8%. In the 2007-08 season he played 77 games with a field goal percentage of 49.2%. Did he suddenly become a better shooter? No. He suddenly was playing with Kevin Garnett. Garnett draws so much attention from the defense that Rondo finds himself with more wide open shots and, predictably, he makes more of them. Rondo's stats increased for the better in almost every single category this season and it isn't because he worked hard on his game.

There are countless other such examples throughout the NBA. Look at statistics for players who play with Steve Nash and then look at their stats when they didn't have Nash on their team. You will see solid increases in almost all the peripheral stats when they play with Nash.

It is easy to identify the star players in the NBA. We all know who they are, but if you want to have that extra edge in fantasy basketball. If you want to know who you should draft in the last three rounds, look no further than those that are standing right next to the star players when the anthem is sung.

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