Playing in best-ball leagues, like those offered by MyFantasyLeague, the FFPC, and PlayDraft, requires a different mindset than regular redraft leagues. These “draft expert” type leagues are draft and forget in nature, without any in-season management after your league’s draft. No trades. No waiver wires. No bailouts due to injury or suspension. They take the score from each player on your overall roster and optimize your best plays of the week to fill out your lineup.
This stresses the importance on the draft immensely. Selecting the right type of players that have high ceilings is a necessity. Most of these leagues are top-heavy, and you need to target the right type of players to put yourself in the best chance of capturing first place. To do that, I’ll be starting a series on the type of players to target in these best-ball formats to help you hopefully finish with some extra green in your pocket by season’s end.
We’ve already taken a look at quarterbacks and running backs, now it’s time to look at the wide receiver position.
Golden Tate, WR, Detroit Lions
Pop quiz time.
Last year, Antonio Brown, Julio Jones, and Odell Beckham Jr. each had three weeks as a top-six PPR wide receiver. There were only four wide receivers that had more. Three of them aren’t particularly difficult to guess – Mike Evans and Jordy Nelson each had four such weeks, and T.Y. Hilton led all receivers with five. But the fourth wideout? Golden Tate had four such outings.
Tate’s slow start to the 2016 season was unbearable for redraft fantasy players trying to decide if he’d ever break out of his slump. Following Week 5, Tate was fantasy’s WR75, behind the likes of Philadelphia’s Nelson Agholor. Tate finally broke out in Week 6 with an 8-165-1 stat line and was the WR7 over the course of the rest of the year. He had all four of his top-six weeks during that span, averaging a robust 9.5 targets per game. Now, with Anquan Boldin’s 95 target from 2016 departed, Tate will take over as the primary underneath receiver.
Last year, the Lions ranked third in pass-play percentage (64.6 percent), essentially using it as an extension of their run game. Matthew Stafford ranked 30th of 36 qualifying quarterbacks last year in average depth of target at just 7.9 yards and we shouldn’t be surprised if that number remains close to the same in 2017. Only the Jaguars threw more heavily in the red zone than the Lions’ 68.9 percent. It’s quite likely we see both Tate and Eric Ebron contend for Boldin’s valuable 22 red-zone targets (third-most in the league). That increased touchdown upside combined with Tate’s heavy target volume make him a fantastic best-ball candidate.
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