THE FIVE TENETS OF ROTISSERIE (ROTO) LEAGUES

Yes, it is indeed Dan. I put down the microphone for one shining moment and picked up the quill pen.

Typically, I write one huge article for SportsEthos every year: betting season win totals. I wrote that piece again this year over the span of about 12 hours, though my hard drive died shortly after I finished and I just refuse to redo the dang thing on principle.

Instead, I figured this would be a fun year for me to dive into creating something for our NBA Draft Guide for the very first time, and not only give you all a primer on the most important strategies to winning a roto league, but also maybe, just maybe, convince a handful of you to give roto a try.

A little background: I’ve been playing fantasy basketball for over 20 years and I, like most of you, played exclusively head-to-head leagues at the beginning.

Over time, I came to realize that the coin-flippy nature of the head-to-head playoffs wasn’t fun… it was stupid. I had real money on the line – money that I was hoping to win to upgrade a computer or replace a broken appliance or any number of things that needed to get done. And I felt like I deserved to win after smashing all who opposed me in the league for 20 weeks only to see my top two players get hurt in the same 4-day span and everything come crashing down.

I hear people say that the uncertainty of the head-to-head fantasy playoffs makes it more like the real NBA, but is that really true? The real playoffs is when stars lace ‘em up despite injury. The fantasy playoffs is when everyone in the league sits because of a little gas. The real playoffs can go seven games over two weeks allowing the better team to usually prevail. The fantasy playoffs being a crapshoot is actually a heck of a lot more like best-of-three baseball playoff series!

A roto “try” was born. I was invited into a league that was mostly friends of a friend, and it took some real getting-used-to, but by the halfway point I had a good feel for the techniques that would carry over from head-to-head and the ones that I’d likely have to abandon.

For those uninitiated, a roto league does not feature matchups against other teams over short periods of time. Instead, your team accrues statistics over the entire season, and those vast totals stack up against all other teams simultaneously. Your club is then awarded points based on how far up or down the totem you fall against everyone in each category. The team with the fewest points, for instance, would get 1 roto point. The team with the most gets 12, and so on down the category list.

My first league had real issues, though. There was no games cap so teams could stream players for 175 straight nights and build up a massive advantage. The waiver time was long, so half the league was un-addable because of the aforementioned streams. These were easy fixes as I started to move toward asking to run the league.

Fast forward to 2023. I run every roto league I’m in, they all have a games cap (that I adjust annually based on average games played of NBA players), they have deep benches and no IL slots, and the leagues pay out the top four teams to keep mostly everyone engaged into the final few weeks.

And best of all, the silly season doesn’t determine the winner.

Perhaps this season you’re joining your first roto league like I did some 10-12 years ago, and you want to be in better position than I was in January of my inaugural run. Makes sense.

Here’s how to do it.

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