Understanding Uniqueness in Best Ball Drafts
When we should and shouldn’t try to "get unique" in best ball drafts.
Uniqueness in best ball is a very common topic of conversation. For some context if you are new to the best ball streets or unfamiliar with the concept: The idea is basically that in large field-best ball contests with thousands to hundreds of thousands of entries, you need to have a unique roster to take come out on top of one of these contests.
The concept of “getting unique” is valid in theory. You are going up against rosters throughout the playoff rounds that will have naturally advanced a lot of the same players with the top scores from the prior rounds. To advance a different piece on your roster than most of these teams will put you in a favorable spot if said different piece can have a big game.
However, I do have some rifts with the way attempting to achieve uniqueness in these contests is gone about in these contests. I also disagree with the notion that you really need to even do anything too notable to “get unique”, and that the uniqueness factor is rather inherent to a best ball roster. I’m going to go through these “rifts” while also talking through how I would approach getting unique.
Lets get into it…
Why trying to achieve uniqueness is overrated…
For starters, I do think the concept of trying to “get unique” as a whole is overrated, or at least overdone. I believe this to be so, like mentioned above, because uniqueness on a best ball roster is inherently present whether you realize it or not. It will happen regardless of whether you try for it or not. Nobody is going to come close to having your exact 18-man roster, and it’s very likely nobody will even have a combination of 7, 6, 5 or even 4 of the players that you have in the playoff/championship rounds of these tournaments.
You are typically going up against a group of anywhere from 5 to 10 teams in most playoff pods, topping out at 16 teams in a pod in BBMVI. Even if you advance a couple high-owned pieces that several others in your pod have, the majority of your roster will still differ from the rest of the teams in your pod. Any of those guys could provide you with a big game that will bolster you to the following round. Let’s say you started your draft Justin Jefferson-Tee Higgins-Rashee Rice-Omarion Hampton. In week 15 (R1 of best ball playoffs), let’s say Tee Higgins and Hampton both go for ~25 while Jefferson and Rice score ~10 points. Yes, these guys will be highly owned, and you will likely see multiple teams with 1 if not both of these guys. BUT, you also have what should be a lower-owned Justin Jefferson and Rashee Rice advanced to the next round, your 1st and 3rd round picks. You very well could be the only team in your pod with 1 or both of these guys, giving you 2 unique pieces that are plenty of capable of exploding.
Now, the championship round (week 17) is obviously a little different. These championship rounds are much larger than the week 15 and 16 playoff pods. They have pretty large ranges in terms of size, with Underdog’s “The Golden” at a 26 seat final while BBMVI is all the way up at 539 seats. In a smaller contests like The Golden, the point stands the same. Your roster will be plenty unique enough regardless if you try to do so, just by the nature of having an 18-man roster. In BBM, it’s obviously going to be a little harder to have a completely unique combo of top-tier players in a 539 person final. However, the point does still stand, just to a lesser degree. Even if you share multiple players with certain rosters, you will have enough differing pieces to have the chance to get unique in the final round.
The reason I initially decided to write about this is because I keep seeing Christian McCaffrey getting pulled up to the top 3 of drafts now. It’s probably happened 1 in every 4 to 5 times of my last 20 or so drafts. I imagine many are trying to do this for the sake of getting unique, but I think this is a poor approach to doing so. That’s mainly because you’re sacrificing notably better profiles in Bijan, Gibbs and Barkley as well as Ceedee and Justin Jefferson (and obviously Chase). These guys all have similar upside to CMC, yet much less downside risk. And this is where I have a problem with trying to get unique, when your sacrificing talent + profile for the sake of a unique roster. On top of this, if CMC is getting pulled up to the top 3 this frequently, it also will naturally become a less unique move if everyone is doing it. It’s incredibly difficult to advance teams through these playoff rounds and into the finals as it is, so giving up a legitimate edge on a player profile to get a unique roster seems somewhat foolish.
That leads me too the next piece here…