It was about eight years ago—wow, time truly does fly, even for a young guy like me—when some of my best friends and I decided to delve into a new fantasy basketball league. This league was custom-built to make things highly interesting for the years to come. We opted for a points league since some friends were new to fantasy basketball and weren’t ready to dive immediately into categories action, since that requires much more diligence in terms of performance statistics from each player. One must not only know which players can consistently deliver 20 & 10 performances or score 30 points per game but also be aware of a player’s shooting efficiency from the field and the free throw line, their steals per game, or if you can count on their three blocks per game, and so on.

To add more depth to the points league, we decided to place additional value on players who were efficient in their field goal and free throw percentages while penalizing those who were not. This approach allowed us, especially me, to gain a deep understanding of how even top-performing, high-stat players could be detrimental to your team, particularly for seasoned fantasy managers who play in similar league settings or category leagues that may not weigh these efficiency metrics heavily. The goal is to make fantasy managers more aware of this efficiency perspective, as understanding how severely the percentage categories can negatively impact our teams’ stats is essential.

Field goal percentage and free throw percentage have another component that makes the percentage itself misleading: volume. Even seasoned fantasy players may not be aware of the majority of NBA players’ shot attempts per game. It’s the weighted percentage that is crucial to understanding the percentage killers.

In this article, I wanted to use my experience tracking these players over the years and utilize Basketball Monster’s 2023-24 top player rater—specifically the top 188 players—to determine last season’s ten worst performers (among fantasy-relevant players) in field goal percentage. In other words, this is a list of players who had the most negative impact in FG% on a per-game basis.

The percentage categories are more difficult to gauge than the standard counting stats. They force fantasy managers to focus not only on a player’s percentage but also on the number of attempts the player takes per game.

To pinpoint the percentage killers in field goal efficiency, I focused on one key metric:

Field Goal Percentage Value (fg%V): This metric doesn’t just look at a player’s shooting percentage but also factors in the volume of shots they take per game. The combination of these two aspects—efficiency and volume—gives us a clearer picture of how much a player’s shooting can drag down your team’s overall FG%.

I then sorted the players based on these metrics to identify the top 10 percentage killers in each category. These are the players whose shooting inefficiency had the most detrimental effect on fantasy teams last season. For each of these players, I’ve highlighted their team, their shooting percentages, and their shot volume, giving you a clear understanding of why they’re on this list.

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