GNL Season 14 Fantasy Wrap-up

A controversial ending to GNL Season 14 Fantasy causes rigging allegations to reach all time highs.

Published

GNL Season 14 Fantasy is finally over! It came down to just two players, Barren and Manadog, fighting for the title going into the final week, but in the end it was Barren coming out on top with 437 points. Congrats!

We had a really wide range of point totals, all the way from 155 to 437, with an average of 266.

Player Points

Here were the top performing players this season, ordered by fantasy point value.

The average player was worth 21.7 points, which includes their total of player and bench points. We each made 7 picks when creating our fantasy teams, so you would expect the average to be at least 152 points, which it was! We did a good job picking players this season, on average scoring 167 points. A lot of fantasy teams got above 175 points, but not many got above 200.

You can also see that many of the top value players were hardly ever picked. ThreeWayKay was only picked by themself. Blavon wasn’t picked at all, but as a rookie that is somewhat expected. Grinchy and Penguin were popular picks and delivered big time. Veterans like SoftIceCream, Madoka, and Dekker were all high point producers, like they always are. Overall there’s a healthy mix of veterans and newcomers delivering the most fantasy points, which is nice to see.

At the start of the season I talked about my model which is pretty dumb but tries to mathematically predict player value based on past GNL seasons. Here’s how it did:

I used this model to make my picks and ended up with 190 points so not too bad.

Bet Points

Once again bet points seem to be the most impactful category, as we see the top 3 on the fantasy leaderboard all collecting big time on betting. As a group we started slow but ended the season with a cumulative total of +194 points from betting. The week-by-week performance was as follows:

You can see a huge uptick in week 5 where we cleaned house with +210 points. This was much needed after weeks 1 and 2 where we finished -55 and -60 respectively.

Miscellaneous Observations

  • Bench points are really insignificant. We’ll consider updating this for next season.
  • Race points were a big separation factor this season, more than any previous season. This is because Orc and Random were worth a lot more points than the other three races, and they were also the two least selected races. So if you picked Orc or Random you got a lot of points on the field.
  • Team points were a little bit more evenly distributed, so it’s surprising to see such a clear correlation between team points and total points. Not sure why that is. It could be that people who picked GG as their team (the highest value one) were more likely to pick GG players, who also performed well? I’m not sure.
  • GNLB was the second most valuable team pick, even though TBB finished higher in the actual GNL standings.