So this post is mainly directed at Dan (because he keeps banging on about how Wes Matthews will tank your FG%) but happy for anyone else to chime in as well.
I've heard Dan say multiple times now on his podcast that he feels Wes Matthews has a particularly detrimental FG% and is someone to avoid unless he's getting large volume of shots (and therefore points) to make up for it. And on the face of it his 40.6% FG (4.5/11.1) from last season would corroborate this. But digging into the numbers a little more, the majority of his shots come from downtown (6.4 of his 11.1 FG attempts) and he hits them at a 38.1% rate (2.4/6.4), which is way above league average (~35%). His 2FG of 44.7% (2.1/4.7) leaves a little to be desired but is more than outweighed by his good 3FG.
If we take Russell Westbrook for the sake of comparison, his nominal 44.9% FG (9.5/21.1) would appear to be much better than Matthews' 40.6%. But again digging into his numbers we find that he hits 48.8% (8.3/17.0) of his 2s but only 29.8% (1.2/4.1) of his 3s, which is quite a way below league average.
So accounting for the added value of the 3pt shot then we see that Matthews (eFG 51.4%) is far more efficient from the field than Westbrook (eFG 47.9%) despite having a nominal FG% that looks much lower. Now obviously Westbrook gets a whole lot more volume and does a bunch of other stuff as well to make him an overall much better fantasy player. But if we ignore the rest and just concentrate on efficiency from the field, then Westbrook is far more detrimental to your team's FG% than Matthews. In fact, I'd argue that Matthews is actually BENEFICIAL to your team's efficiency because he accumulates points and specifically 3pts more efficiently than NBA average. And afterall, from a fantasy perspective, we do need to accumulate 3pts as one of our 9 cats.
So I for one am more than happy to have Wes Matthews on my team and firing away from deep because it means I am accumulating 3pts more efficiently than the majority of the league. And if my team's overal FG% is low it means one of two things. Either my squad collectively shoots too many 3s and I will be winning the 3pt cat and I can trade away some 3s to get other stats. Or I have some inefficient shooters amongst the rest of my roster and I'd be much more inclined to trade/cut them than Matthews. Now, I'd love it if he could up his steals a bit to really cement his fantasy value but that is beside the point of this discussion, which focuses on efficiency from the field.
I realise I've just rambled on for quite a while so apologies for that. And after writing all of this I think I realise what I'm trying to get at is just the difference between FG% and eFG%. I hope my logic is sound, but please feel free to point out if I'm going wrong somewhere.
Thanks in advance.
PS. As an interesting side note, last year Wes Matthews had a better eFG% than vaunted big men Embiid and Vooch. Go figure!
That's a deep dive you took there and I don't think your logic is off, although unfortunately eFG% is not a cat in fantasy.
I'll leave it to Dan to address most of this since I don;t have a problem with Wes.
Cheers Chef.
While it's true that eFG% is not an explicit cat in fantasy, it kind of is indirectly. In our quest to maximise all three of FG%, Pts, 3pts we are therefore inherently trying to maximise eFG% as well. If we want to throw FT% in the mix too then we're trying to maximise TS%. But that can be a discussion for another day 🙂
Hey now, I advocated a Wes Matthews PICKUP the first week of the year!
Also, fantasy doesn't reward eFG, which is why you need guys to take SOME 2-pointers to help boost their actual FG% -- maybe Wes has a better effective % than some of those big men, but his impact on your REAL FG% in fantasy is negative, and theirs isn't because they supplement their 3's with 2's.
My dig on Wes is that he's old and as the Mavs get healthy, he's likely to get fewer shots, which has already begun to happen.
But I still have him on my roster; I'm just wary of what he can become if his volume drops too much. He's a top-100 guy right now and you don't just drop that for no reason, but he's also a guy that needs to be paired with someone who can give a FG bump in many cases.
Thanks Dan.
Yes you did call for a Wes Matthews pickup so that's my bad. I thought I remembered you warning us after every Mavs game about his toxic FG% though. However I'll be the first to admit that I listen to your podcast half asleep each morning so I could be wrong. In which case this whole discussion is moot ha!
To the point about fantasy not rewarding eFG, but it absolutely does! We are in the business of trying to maximise Pts and 3pts while keeping our FG% high. That's the definition of eFG! Now I'm obviously not advocating a whole team of Wes Matthewses because that would be overkill (although maybe it's not such a bad thing because you'd have won 3pts by Christmas and then you can trade away some of your gunners for big man dunkers). You want to have a whole team of high eFG guys but who achieve that eFG in different ways, ie. a few high efficiency 3pt shooters (like Wes) and a few high efficiency 2pt shooters (like your Gobert/Capella types).
Anyway, it was fun thinking this all out so thanks for listening ha.
