Skip to main content



Fantasy Basketball Draft: Following the Crowd

Source: http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/11800979/russell-westbrook-oklahoma-city-thunder-undergoes-surgery-injured-hand-least-4-weeks

I do not know anything about the NBA. However, when my friend asked for me to fill in the last spot for in his league so that they could play, I thought there was nothing I could lost. When determining how to go about picking my team, I found an effective strategy was related to what has been taught in networks: following the crowd.

Russell Westbrook was ranked in the top 50 by ESPN in the fantasy football league. However, last Saturday morning, the Oklahoma City Thunder announced that he will be out for four weeks and then he will only be reevaluated, not even guaranteed to play. Thus, while at first glance the ESPN fantasy playerrankings, which is how the players are listed in the draft, appeared to say that Russell Westbrook was a good draft pick, he actually was bad.

Everyone in the fantasy league watches several games a week compared to my zero. For the first few rounds, I went off of the information I had: a player was ranked high, so I drafted him when it was my turn. But then, I noticed that Russell Westbrook had not been drafted yet, which was obscure since over ten players ranked much lower than him had already been drafted. Thus, since I was part of a network, meaning a league in which everyone had more information about the players than I had, I followed the crowd by not picking Russell, reaping the benefits of the informational effect of following the crowd.

Since I could see what players were and what players were not being drafted, I could recognize that the crowd was not going towards Russell Westbrook. If Russell was a good draft, they would have picked them, but nobody had drafted him, so why should I? If everyone had to make a predetermined draft list, however, and I simply wrote that I preferred the player with the highest ranking, I would not have been able to react to the information my network’s choices was suggesting to me and I would have likely been left with a player who would have been useless for several weeks.

Luckily, it worked out for me; I did not draft him and I later found out about his injury, but the informational effect can be highly useful when you are certain that everyone in your network has much more information than you do, especially when playing competitively.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Blogging Calendar

November 2014
M T W T F S S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

Archives