DraftKings has received its fair share of criticism for their NASCAR scoring rules, and after the first weekend the No. 1 lesson learned has to be this: It doesn’t necessarily matter where you finish.
Consider the following:
- Carl Edwards, the winner of Sunday’s race in Charlotte, finished with 57 fantasy points (seventh overall).
- In DraftKings’ $3, 30,000-entry GPP, there was a 26-way tie for first place, and the winning lineup didn’t feature Edwards. In fact, no lineup including Edwards finished higher than 82nd.
- Greg Biffle, who finished second in the race, only scored 46 fantasy points (11th overall). Chase Elliott, who started 28th and finished 18th while never leading a single lap, almost scored as many fantasy points (43.5).
So, what was the secret recipe for success? Well, virtually every winning lineup included Martin Truex Jr. (111 points) and Kurt Busch (100 points). If you didn’t have either one of those in your lineups, you probably didn’t even fare too well in cash games. Truex Jr. and Busch finished fifth and 10th, respectively, but they torched the fantasy field by leading for a combined 249 of 400 laps (and racking up tons of fastest laps in the process).
And that might be the biggest issue with all of this. Laps led and fastest laps appear to be highly correlated, because the driver in front gets that fractions-of-a-second advantage with “clean air.” But points are awarded for each of those statistics.
In yesterday’s post, we said that qualifying matters. The drivers who start up front can stay up front and rack up points for laps led and fastest laps. But it didn’t play out that way at all. In this handy scoring spreadsheet, the top three fantasy scorers started 10th, 14th and 15th. Kasey Kahne, who started all the way back at 33rd, was the sixth-highest fantasy scorer.
Meanwhile, the Top 4 qualifiers finished seventh, 10th, 11th and 22nd in fantasy points.
Now, all of this could be an anomaly, of course. It’s only one race. But based on the first weekend’s worth of evidence, at least some value can be gained by taking solid drivers who qualified relatively poorly but can and will move up (and, ideally, get the lead).
Our simple (and probably uninformed) solution: Just cut the fastest laps as a stat. That essentially gets rid of half the points for laps led, and would in turn place more emphasis on where you finish.