Problems with Percentages
In Yahoo on October 9, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Lights Out!
I have a gripe with Yahoo!
In general, I am a fan of Yahoo. I think the service they provide free of charge for fantasy basketball is fantastic. I have played on other sites and I find Yahoo’s to be the best for me. And every year it gets a little better.
And every year now, I write to them about this significant flaw and they just respond with some BS about how they get a lot of requests, yadda, yadda, yadda.
I HATE the way Yahoo consistently treats FG% and FT% as just percentages, when this is far from the truth. When dealing with percentages, it’s important to know the numbers that go into the calculation or the number is worthless.
For example, let’s look at FT%, and ignore all other categories for now. Who would you rather have? A guy like Dwight Howard who shoots 50% and takes 10+ FTs per game, or some scrub who doesn’t play and shoots 30% and takes 2 FTs per game, on average? In this case, I would rather have the scrub. Even though he shoots 20% lower, it is much easier to make this up with the rest of your team than someone who shoots 5/10 from the stripe every night
ESPN fantasy basketball is good about this. When reporting numbers on a daily basis, your players FG% and FT% are displayed something like this: 4/8 (.500). This gives you a much better idea of how your team did in the percentages.
I write Yahoo every year asking for this feature which should be relatively simple, and they just ignore me. I encourage all of you to write to them and fix this. They have a support form you can fill in.
On another note, if you are preparing for your league’s draft, Matt Buser at Yahoo recently put out lists of ranked players by position:
I don’t entirely agree with his lists, especially since the rankings are calculated using the dreaded Turnovers category, but it’s a good place to start to get your draft sheets in order.
Lights Out!