Welcome to the Top 100 Roto, a ranking of the Top 100 per-game rotisserie contributors in one-year leagues. What this list brings to the table is a clear indication of not only per-game value, but where that value comes from. Is Steen’s value going to go up or down when your league adds hits next year? Download April 2014 Rankings (PDF).

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Well, the regular season is done and the Top 100 Roto is set for the year. Playoffs will not be a part of the equation for the Top 100 Roto, as the playoffs traditionally dampen scoring while increasing hits in a way that is not predictive of future regular season levels.

I would like to hope that this list helped some people out in the first year, and it has only scratched the surface of what it can be. This summer, I will be focusing on tweaking the formula, looking at possible feature additions and analyzing the predictive value of the rotisserie list. If you would like to contribute or have a suggestion, please send me an email, or just put in a comment at the bottom. At the end of this article I have listed some things that I would like to implement to make a better model.

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As a little taster, the PDF features the Top Ten Roto players from 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14 (using statistics from each respective season). The actual (April) list, is a weighted average of the three years and Dobber’s preseason projections. In brackets is the player's position on the current (overall) list. Only four players who made one of the yearly top ten's (including the only two defensemen to make the list) are not in the top fifteen overall. The Top Roto players tend to stay near the top. During the offseason, I hope to do some actual analysis of the whole Top 100, and how much their place in one season correlates to the next season.

One thing to take from this, is that even pre-Penguins, Neal was and is a dominant roto force. He has placed third, seventh, and first in the past three years. When he plays, he is unquestionably elite and is highly underrated in many leagues. His stats make him seem like an Ovechkin-lite, other than the fact that he ranks higher than Alex Ovechkin. Neal and Ovechkin have the same category scores in goals, assists and shots; Ovechkin is two tiers above Neal in hits and one in shots on goal, however Neal makes up for that by being a tier better in plus/minus and PIM.

It might seem odd that the average of Ovechkin’s category scores is actually better than Neal's, but that is just due to rounding. Neal is slightly better in assists, and is a hair away from being tier-four in PIM’s as well as tier-three in PPP. If you disagree with the ranking of Ovechkin in plus/minus, and you think he is going to be at even just plus-eight over in an 80 game season, that is enough to push him to the top of the list and overtake Neal. Even at the top of the list, there is a lot of upwards room in the projections and they become even more powerful when you modify them as you see fit.

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The two most notable newcomers to the list are Patrick Maroon (five goals, seven assists, plus-five, 12 PIM, two PPP, 22 hits in the past thirty days) and Ondrej Palat had not made it onto the list yet, but with strong months from each, they debuted at 69 and 70 respectively. Maroon is a tier-two PIM producer, while Palat is on this list thanks to a team leading, tier-three plus/minus. While they fill different roles in both real life and fantasy, they may have staying power on this list; Palat should continue to grow, producing more shots and goals to offset an inevitable drop in plus/minus. PIMs are much less volatile and it is likely that you can count on those from Maroon as he earns more powerplay time and shoots more often in a hopefully increased real life role. Palat is certainly the more talented, but could drop off in the short term if he hits a scoring slump and his plus-minus regresses; Maroon can be counted on to provide peripherals whether or not he is scoring goals.

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The Top 100 Rotisserie Players:

This list was assembled from a weighted average of the last three years, and players were ranked by how well they did in each (equally weighted) category compared to the other top fantasy players. It best applies to leagues with 250 fantasy relevant players, no positional requirements and equally weighted categories. It is easy to get the score that is relevant to your league though, just take the average of the categories you are interested in!

Other than the removal of players with few games played, this is a purely stats-based list. I don’t make any changes to what comes out of the formula; I trust that you can apply the numbers to your own intricate and unique situation better than I can. For example, since this is a per-game list you will have to account for band-aid boys and injured players yourself. Again, this is due to the differences in leagues. Injuries matter much more in a league with a highly limited number of transactions and no injured reserve than they do than in a salary-cap league with many injury slots and unlimited transactions. At the other end of the spectrum, 22 players get top scores in shots on goal. Even though a comparable number of players earn top marks in plus/minus in any given season, the shooting rates for top players seem to more repeatable. As always, comments or suggestions are always welcome at @austeane on twitter or [email protected].

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Here are some possible improvements to the list: making the statistics era-independent to allow for better comparisons, giving some weight to team-independent statistics (i.e. plus/minus relative to the team’s goal differential, PPP relative to PP%, etc.) to better project how a player will do as the team gets better (or just less unlucky), better weighting of counting and per-game statistics, a linear transition throughout the season to put more emphasis on the current season when a player has played more games, analyzing the data with more advanced statistical tools to look for trends and provide more valuable information in the articles, and many more now that some of the growing pains are out of the way! 

Enjoy the playoffs,

Austin Wallace
Writer at DobberHockey
Statistics and Video for the UBC Thunderbirds

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Download April 2014 Rankings (PDF).