Evaluation of fantasy players

Abstract

The evaluation of players in the context of a fantasy sports league is disclosed. In order to evaluate whether a fantasy team owner should add one player to the starting lineup of the team and drop another, player stat predictions are first used to predict end-of-season stats for the current starting lineup of a team. Historical and current league stat / point functions may then be used to determine how many points the team is expected to earn during the course of a full season based on the predicted end-of-season stats. This same methodology is then applied to a proposed revised lineup to determine how many points the revised team is expected to earn during the course of a full season. The difference between the projected point totals for the current team and the revised team are an indication of the value of this specific transaction to this specific team.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001]Fantasy sports leagues have become a hugely popular form of recreation and competition for sports enthusiasts. In general, fantasy sports leagues contain a number of fantasy teams, each team managed by a fantasy team owner. The role of an owner is to manage a virtual team of real life professional sports players and decide which players to sit, start, drop, add, and trade with other teams. The goal is to have the starting players on the fantasy team accumulate the most positive statistics (“stats”) in their real-life games. These accumulated stats are directly converted to fantasy points using a rotisserie-style scoring algorithm. The team with the most points at the end of the season is declared the winner of the league.[0002]Rotisserie style scoring is accomplished by ranking all teams from 1 to N, where N is number of teams in league, for each stat category. For any given stat category (e.g. home runs (HRs), hits (H) and stolen bases (SB) for non-...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0008]Embodiments of the invention concern the evaluation of players in the context of a fantasy sports league. A player value, personalized for a specific fantasy team, is generated for a particular player being contemplated for addition to the starting lineup of that team. This value informs a team owner how that player is expected to affect the fantasy points earned by the team at the end of a season, and allows the owner to make managerial decisions optimized for earning the most fantasy points and winning the fantasy league.

[0009]For example, at any point in a current season, in order to evaluate whether a fantasy team owner should add one player to the starting lineup of the team and drop another, player stat predictions are first used to predict end-of-season stats for the current starting lineup of a team. Historical and / or current league stat / point functions may then be used to determine how many points the team is expected to earn during the course of a full season based on the predicted end-of-season stats. The historical and current league stats may be utilized in accordance with a blending function, which gives more weight to historical league stats early in the current season, and more weight to current league stats later in the season. Next, projected stats for the player under consideration for being dropped may be subtracted from the current team predicted end-of-season stats, and the projected stats of the player under consideration for being added to the current team may be added to the current team predicted end-of-season stats. These revised team stat totals may once again be applied to the historical and current league stat / point functions to determine how many points the revised team is expected to earn during the course of a full season. The projected point totals for the original team may be subtracted from the projected point totals of the revised team to determine a difference or delta. This delta is the value of this specific transaction to this specific team. This calculation can easily be performed for all combinations of players available to be added or dropped to locate the highest value roster changes available. Similar calculations could be used to determine which players to start and which to put on the bench.

Problems solved by technology

One problem with this approach is that fielding a team of players with optimal player rankings is not always the best way to try to win a rotisserie style fantasy league.

These rankings do not provide the owner or manager with rankings based on the ultimate criteria, points, and do not provide an assessment of how a particular player being considered for the team will affect the team's overall point totals.

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