FantasyHabit: Your Fantasy Basketball Headquarters

Welcome to FantasyHabit, the column for those HoopsHabit-ers who simply can’t get enough NBA, whether you be fantasy managers, league commissioners or simply numbers junkies like myself. I have been the commissioner of my fantasy league for three years now, and during the magical time of year that is the NBA season, I spend my days and nights trolling Basketball Reference, NBA.com, and RotoWorld trying to read the league tea leaves and gain an edge in competition. Generally, my thoughts and analysis will be geared towards the standard 10- or 12-team, eight-category league, except where I specifically designate otherwise.

Today, we’ll look at the top two picks in the league, Kevin Durant and LeBron James, a 1 and 1A situation if ever there was one. Tomorrow, we’ll break down the rest of the top five fantasy players (listed below, along with their stats from the 2012-13 season), before rounding out the top 10 the following day, so stay tuned in for an in-depth breakdown of the players you’ll want to consider with your first round pick. Next week, as the league gears up for the regular season, we’ll look at some second-round players and identify some sleepers and some overvalued names to steer clear of in the first couple of rounds (Pau Gasol, I’m looking at you). Without further ado, here are your 2013-14 top five fantasy players:

FantasyHabit Top 5 Fantasy Picks: By the Numbers

1. Kevin Durant

2. LeBron James

3. James Harden

4. Chris Paul

4. Stephen Curry

Provided by Basketball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 10/8/2013.

LeBron or Durant?

(All statistics are from the 2012-13 regular season unless otherwise noted)

If you luck out and manage to snag the second pick in your league’s draft, like I did last year, you’re set. You’ll take whichever of the Durant/LeBron duo falls to you, and be happy to have him. But if you’re picking first, there’s a legitimate argument to be made for picking either of the two and while there are pronounced differences in their respective numbers, I would submit that it’s not a clear-cut right or wrong pick. Durant vs. James is more a matter of preference or style than anything else.

Scoring: Durant has the slight edge here, with 28.1 PPG to LeBron’s 26.8. Given that King James plays alongside at least one future Hall of Famer (hard to imagine Chris Bosh as a candidate for the Hall, but stranger things have happened and if the Heat three-peat this season, that’s not an entirely unrealistic scenario), his responsibilities are more diverse and for the Heat to win, he doesn’t have to score as much as KD35 does for the Thunder.

With Russell Westbrook’s surgery keeping him out of the first few weeks of the NBA season (four to six weeks, according to reports), look to see Durant’s scoring numbers spike, but along with that is very likely to come a drop in efficiency. Durant, for someone who jacks up treys with such frequency, is startlingly efficient. Anyone who owned Durant in a league — or played against him — will likely remember that Durant punched his admission ticket to the 50-40-90 club (.510 from the floor, .416 from 3 and .905 from the charity stripe) last season, a feat that has only been accomplished nine other times since the ABA/NBA merger.

Though Durant is the more prolific 3-point shooter, knocking down 1.7 3-pointers per game to LeBron’s 1.4, it isn’t by a wide margin. Where Durant excels is in hitting his free throws. Hitting more than 90 percent of his 9.3 attempts a game, this is really where Durant outclasses LeBron, who shoots a comparatively paltry 75 percent of his seven attempts per game. Given that Durant is a volume free-throw shooter (last year, second in the NBA behind only former teammate James Harden), he can bolster a squad’s FT percentage in a big way, while James is merely adequate.

Hustle Stats: It’s worth noting that Durant played 81 games last season to LeBron’s 76. It may not seem like an enormous discrepancy, but given that the Heat locked up the East’s number one seed early and Erik Spoelstra rested LeBron down the stretch — AND given that the last week or two of the regular season happens to coincide with fantasy playoffs — it matters. I ended up in the championship head-to-head matchup in my league last season and could have gotten more production out of Michael Beasley than LeBron James, given that LBJ played zero games during the matchup. It’s something to consider.

Rebounds are basically a wash between the two. Durant nabbed 7.9 boards per game to LeBron’s 8.0. If your league scores offensive rebounds separately from defensive or total rebounds, give the edge to LeBron, who averages more than twice as many as Durant (1.3 per vs. 0.6 per), but in most leagues, neither player is more valuable on the boards.

Both Durant and LeBron are defensively elite and there isn’t much to separate them in regards to steals. LeBron holds the slight edge here with 1.7 steals per game in 2012-13, good for 12th in the NBA, to Durant’s 1.4, which was just outside of the top-25 range.

However, when it comes to shot blocking, it’s surprising not only that Kevin Durant holds the advantage on LeBron, but also by how much. Durant is second in the league among non-center-eligible players (to Josh Smith, with 1.8 per) at 1.3 per game, while LeBron averaged less than a block per game at 0.9. Taking into account LeBron’s prodigious physical skill set and work ethic, it’s not crazy to think that this might be an area in which he’ll improve this season and he actually has been notching more blocks every year he’s been a member of the Heat (0.6 in 2010, 0.8 in 2011 and 0.9 in 2012). I anticipate another marginal uptick in swats from James and a marginal drop in Durant’s blocks as he shoulders an enormous offensive burden with Westbrook out in the early going.

Ball Handling: Look for Durant to turn the ball over more with Westbrook out. Last season, he gave up 3.5 turnovers a game (fifth in the league, though on a list he’d like to appear further down on, I’m sure), while LeBron only coughed it up 3.0 per. With Westbrook out for a month-plus and the ball in KD’s hands all that much more, look for an increase to his giveaways, with LeBron’s number likely headed in the opposite direction (over three Heat seasons, Lebron averaged 3.6, 3.4, and 3.0 turnovers per game, likely the result of comfort with his teammates and Spoelstra’s energetic, movement offense).

LeBron holds a decided edge in the passing game, by about as wide a margin as Durant’s free-throw-shooting advantage. LBJ is as talented a passer as there is at the SF/PF positions, with an astronomical 7.3 per game (compare to second-best PF Josh Smith with 4.2 and SF-eligible James Harden with 5.8). Ultimately, those two categories — free throw percentage and assists — are the two most pronounced differences between the two most elite players in the game and which one you’d take first in a draft largely depends on your style of play and how you value one of those categories over the other.

LBJ or KD35?

Kevin Durant is the consensus No. 1 pick, with his higher volume of 3-pointers and drastically better FT percentage, alongside the huge number of free throws he takes and makes. I don’t disagree, especially since assists are not hard to come by. But with Durant putting the Thunder on his wiry shoulders through the first month-and-a-half of the NBA season while Westbrook recovers from surgery, it’s likely that Durant will be less efficient, even if his raw scoring numbers increase, and I expect some of his defensive stats to suffer, as well. LeBron, on the other hand, is likely moving in the opposite direction, perhaps scoring marginally less than last season, but at a historically efficient rate with solid defensive stats.

I’m going to buck the trend here; both players are elite and you’d be fortunate to have a chance to snag either of them, but given LeBron’s consistency and steady improvement — plus the strain on Durant with his All-Star point guard out — if I picked first in 2013, I’d take LeBron and pray that the Heat need to win the last few games of the regular season so he doesn’t register zeros across all scored categories in my championship matchup.

Kevin Cook is a third-year commissioner of his fantasy league (Yahoo, The Cook Foundation) and a stats geek of the highest order. Follow him on twitter @fantasyhabit and tweet him your fantasy basketball questions or gripes. 

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