By Cash Heilman Sports.ws Analyst

FPPG or FPPM?

This is the debate that typically separates the great fantasy owners from the bottom feeders. Being able to balance FPPG (fantasy points per game) and FPPM (fantasy points per minute) when drafting your team is essential to fantasy success. While FPPM is how the league scoring is determined, be careful to not rely on it too much at the expense of FPPG.

While each individual player is scored based on their FPPM, your team total may be equally reliant on your players FPPG. The first key is to make sure you have all of your total minutes accounted for. Time after time, teams leave minutes unaccounted for. A team my have several high FPPM players, but if they don’t play many minutes, that team is not scoring many points. You get 48 center minutes, 96 forward minutes, and 96 guard minutes. Use them all!

If you draft a bunch of guys who only play 10-20 minutes per game but their FPPM is very high, you won’t do nearly as well as the guy who has players who are lower FPPM, but uses all his available minutes. Let’s lay out an example illustrating this fact with 2 different sets of forwards.

Team 1  Minutes  Fantasy Points F Brian Skinner 13 12 F Stromile Swift    19 13 F Marcus Fizer 15 10 F Troy Murphy 20 16 Total 67 51 Unused Minutes: 29

Team 2  Minutes  Fantasy Points F Richard Jefferson 38 27 F PJ Brown 31 19 F Mike Dunleavy 27 17 Total 96 63 Unused Minutes: 0

You can see that Team 1 has much better FPPM, but with 4 players contributing, they still don’t use all of their minutes available at forward. Team 2 has lower FPPM but fills all it’s minutes with only 3 players and in the end scores 12 more points at forward. In this case it’s clear that FPPG, and specifically the minutes a player plays, is more important than FPPM.

But let’s not dismiss FPPM entirely. The key to success is to strike a balance. It would be good to have a high FPPG player at each position, a player you know you can rely on to get major minutes and play every game, even if their FPPM is lower. Then you can fill in the rest with higher FPPM and lower FPPG players. If you can do this and maximize your minutes, you will win a lot of games. Your opponents will have unused minutes because they are shooting for high FPPM players. Don’t make the same mistake and you will have a lot more success.