On October 16 a single DFS late scratch sat in 29.1% of the NHL lineups I had built for a two-game slate. Egor Chinakhov, a $4,100 Penguins winger, was ruled out about 25 minutes before puck drop, and my Frozen Tools set had him in 134 of its 461 lineups. In the real DraftKings contests, 1.6% of entries had him. I have since rebuilt the night without him, checked four other nights, and added a “Check late news” button to my NHL lineup optimizer and the other three sports. The surprise is how little removing him changed.
Continue reading “One Scratched Winger Was in 29% of My NHL DFS Lineups”Tag: NBA
A Free NBA Lineup Optimizer for DraftKings and FanDuel
The free NBA lineup optimizer is live. It builds lineups for DraftKings and FanDuel classic contests, there is no signup, and it makes up to 150 lineups from the player file you download from the site. The last step is a CSV you upload straight back.
It is the basketball version of my MLB, NFL and NHL optimizers. Same engine, different rules on top. The NBA season opens on October 20, 2026, so the timing works.
Continue reading “A Free NBA Lineup Optimizer for DraftKings and FanDuel”NBA DFS Variance Without a Subscription
The NBA optimizer is taking shape, and the shape is strange: the stacking panel is empty, the position rules are the site’s own, and the one feature I actually care about is a number nobody else gives away for free. This is where NBA DFS variance comes in, and why it stopped being something you have to pay for.
Short version of the last three posts: basketball creates no linked scoring unit, so there is nothing to stack; I measured that across three seasons and the correlations are about an order of magnitude weaker than football’s; and the old Excel model I dug up had already reached that conclusion by deleting the columns. What survived all of that is one idea, and it came out of the spreadsheet.
Every Constraint in My Excel NBA DFS Optimizer
A few days ago I wrote that a basketball rules file would come out nearly empty, and that the interesting part of an NBA optimizer is not the optimization. Then I went looking for something else and found a workbook I had forgotten I wrote: FCP Optimizer — Master v6.7, an NBA daily fantasy optimizer in Excel, with a change log that starts at version 4. So rather than speculate about NBA DFS optimizer constraints, here is the actual model, read straight out of the file.
It is a mixed integer program with about 200 binary variables, solved by CBC through the OpenSolver add-in. Everything below is what the sheet and its macros really do, not a cleaned-up version of it.
NBA DFS Correlation: 3 Seasons, 500,000 Pairs
In the last post I argued that basketball gives an optimizer nothing to stack, because no rule of the sport links two players’ scores the way a batting order or a quarterback does. That was reasoning, not evidence. So I pulled three seasons of box scores and actually measured NBA DFS correlation — 62,681 player-games, 3,690 games, and 505,721 pairs of players who shared a floor.
The short version: the structural argument holds, the numbers are far smaller than most stacking advice implies, and the most interesting thing in the data is something I had predicted backwards.
