This could be right. I think it's right. But, there is algebra and probability involved and those always confuse me. Then again, I could just be trying to get prof to drop Nocioni.

Here’s the logic for Monday nights.

• There are 22 Mondays with games during the regular season
• 135 games are played on Mondays
• That’s averages to 6.1 games each Monday night
• Double that to get the average number of teams that play on Monday – 12.3
• Divide by 30 to get the fraction of teams that play on Monday – 40.9%
• Multiply by 14 to get the average number of fantasy players you have available on Monday nights – 5.7

Seems o.k. so far. Here is the full week…

• Monday – 5.7
• Tuesday – 6.1
• Wednesday – 10.3
• Thursday – 2.4
• Friday – 10.7
• Saturday – 8.0
• Sunday – 5.6

Thursday is the odd night out. You will have the most players (on average) playing on Wednesday and Friday nights.

Now, suppose you don’t have 14 players from 14 teams. Suppose you have two players from the same team.

• Divide by 30 to get the fraction of teams that play on Monday – 40.9%
• Multiply by 13 to get the average number of fantasy players you have available on Monday nights – 5.3
• 40.9% of the time your 14th man will be available, but 59.1% of the time he will not be
• So, add .409 and subtract .591 (for when your duplicated team isn’t playing)
• Get an average of 5.1 players available on Monday nights
• 5.1 is only 90% of the average number of players available to a team with no duplicates

If you have three players from the same team it gets worse. On Monday nights you will only average 79% of the available players as a team with no duplicates.

If you have two players from the same team and 12 from unique teams you will have the following percentages of players available as a team with 14 players all from different teams.
Monday – 90%
Tuesday – 91%
Wednesday – 97%
Thursday – 65%
Friday – 98%
Saturday – 95%
Sunday – 89%

If you have three players from the same team…
Monday – 79%
Tuesday – 81%
Wednesday – 95%
Thursday – 31%
Friday – 96%
Saturday - 89%
Sunday - 79%

Feel free to use at your own risk.

__________________
"But first, are you experienced? Or have you you ever been experienced? Well, I have."
Jimi

maybe that's why i have fewer players than linwood playing this week. on the other hand, i'm not sure you can do the formulas in this manner. if you look over the course of the season, every player has an opportunity to be in 82 games regardless. the question to me is more of, do all teams average the same number of games per week? if yes, your numbers seem to have little effect. if no, your numbers are more significant.

you see what i'm getting at?

Yeah, and it's all giving me a headache trying to think about it.

You only have a fraction of your team available on any given day. Anytime this fraction falls below ten then you aren't scoring as much as you could with another mix. So, some proportion of the time having a team duplicated in your roster will hurt you more than others. I think the problem is that cnce you miss a potential player game, it's gone forever. It doesn't help you that your duplicated team has more games later in the week, you can never make that miss back up.

So even if every team played the same number of games per week, if your duplicated team is unavailable on some night, you lose potential games that never come back. Later in the week when your team is available, you are only at parity with a team with no duplicated since you only have 14 players.

I think.

__________________
"But first, are you experienced? Or have you you ever been experienced? Well, I have."
Jimi

As usual, very impressive DBA.

However..

The biggest problem with having multiple players on the same team is that you run into more situations where you have more players with a game for a given day than slots available. Having a team where you have 2 sets of same team players is rough, 3 sets is murder. The impact of this is just as bad as having greater than 2 players from one team. This doesn't come from calculations, just eexperience. I'd be curious as to how you could weigh that into your calculations as well.

I may not quite be understanding what you're saying. What I think I hear is that more often the problem is that you have more eligible players than you have roster slots. That doesn't seem possible to me with a 14 player roster. The one part I'm fairly sure about is the number of games on any given night. Tonight there are seven games, so 14 teams are playing - 47% of teams. So, the random fantasy team (with no more than one player from a team) of 14 players will have on average 6.5 players with a game to be played. On average between three and four slots will be empty for that team tonight.

There does seem to be an understandable pattern of games throughout the week. Thursday are low since TNT and ESPN don't carry games then. Weekends are high since game attendance is higher and the owners like that. So, on only two nights a week (Wednesday with 10.3 and Friday with 10.7) should the average fantasy team have more players available to play than there are active slots available.

Am I reading you wrong?

motown has a point. even in the 1st week i've had situations where more than 10 of my 14 players had a game that week, and i had to choose who to bench. so i lost a game (as you put it) that i can never get back. the situation *does* occur, especially since there's nights like wed/fri where so many teams play and the chance of it happening is greater.

you also said:

"So even if every team played the same number of games per week, if your duplicated team is unavailable on some night, you lose potential games that never come back. Later in the week when your team is available, you are only at parity with a team with no duplicated since you only have 14 players."

The difference here though, if your opponent has no games that day, and you have 3 guys on the same team who *do* play, you will get 3 games back that your opponent can't match. I think you have to look at this on a weekly basis and not daily, since stats are summed up over the entire week and wins/losses are *only* calculated at the end of the week.

Having more players than slots definitely does occur. (And a lot more often than I had thought until I started filling out rosters.) But I don't count that as a lost game since my opponent can only have ten active too. I may lose production by selecting the wrong 10 to play, but once I fill all the slots I get no penalty from having more than one player on my fantasy team from the same real team. Once I have ten, my opponent can gain no advantage since he or she can likewise only field ten.

The lost games are those in which you had could have had players active if their teams had been playing. If I have multiple players from the same team then that is more likely to happen. Based on the averages my opponent can field (for example) 0.4 more players than I can. That 0.4 you can never get back other than through luck. Over the course of ten such games we would expect the opponent without any duplicate teams on the roster to have had the advantage of 4 players games more.

But, I think your point is right - that since scoring cuts off each week the long term impact will be less since there is no carry over week to week. Your only penalty can come from the games within that week and next week you start over. That over time will lessen the impact of the multiple player penalty. Maybe later today if my head clears any I can think of a way to measure how much that is.

Anyway, multiple players from the same team do have the ability to hurt you in that you will at times have fewer players available than an opponent without duplicates. Even if that only averages a 10% penalty, it will impact close matchups. And those of us fielding Joey Graham need all the help we can get.

Fair enough, but here's a scenario. You have 2 fantasy teams of 15 players. Team 1 has players from 15 different teams. Team 2 has players from 10 of the same 15 teams, two from other teams, and then 3 more guys who are all on the same team (different from all the teams from Team 1).

Day 1: 10 teams shared by fantasy teams 1 and 2 play, and two more teams from fantasy team 1 play.
Day 2: 5 teams shared by fantasy teams 1 and 2 play, as well as the extra one from Team 2 (that he has 3 players for).

Team 1 gets 10 games (out of 12 possible) the first day, and 5 the second day, for a total of 15 games.

Team 2 gets 10 games the first day, and 8 the second day, for a total of 18 games.

Here Team 2 is at an advantage because he didn't have any missed games the 1st day, then racked up an extra 3 games on day 2.

Let's look at it more simply:

- Team 1 has 4 players from different teams.
- Team 2 has 4 players on the same team.
- Each NBA team plays 3 times that week.

- Team 1 plays (1 + 1 + 1 + 1) + (1 + 1 + 1 + 1) + (1 + 1 + 1 + 1) = 12 games that week
- Team 2 players (4) + (4) + (4) = 12 games that week

As you can see, for the week there is no difference as long as the number of NBA games matches up.

I wrote a response, but you did a much better job explaining than I did Warthog. Thanks.

You guys kill me.