We have reached crunch time in the fantasy basketball season, with essentially a month left for all the marbles. Some deep leagues are already in their fantasy playoffs, and the others will all be there in the next week or two. Thus, from here on, the weekly schedule is more important than ever.
You want to have players who play a lot -- and in good matchups -- to maximize your output. That's where the Forecaster and Weekly Rankings articles that we put out each Friday factor into the equation. You'll absolutely want to continue to follow those for the latest projections in real time, as you set your weekly lineups.
However, though the trade deadline has passed in most leagues, the free-agent/waiver-wire game can still win you some important matchups. With that in mind, I put together a month-long Forecaster to help point out some team trends to keep in mind when deciding whom to pick up as we enter the crucible.
For this article, I ran four different week-long Forecasters (for the weeks of April 19, April 26, May 3 and May 10), utilizing the team and player information available today. I then summed, averaged and looked at various analytics, including variance, minimum, maximum and median scores to identify some team patterns of interest when making those roster decisions. Let's check them out.
On the total-games front, the vast majority of teams are scheduled to