NBA correlation for teammate’s minutes, DraftKings and FanDuel points for the 2021-22 season.
NEW: Correlation data for teammate trios – a tool for stacking three teammates
This data can be used to determine if two players are worth putting in the same daily fantasy lineup in either cash or tournament games.
NBA Correlation: Minutes, DK and FD Points
Glossary:
MP.Ply: Player’s minutes played in games the Teammate also appeared in
MP.Tmm: Teammate’s minutes played in games the Player also appeared in
corDK: DraftKings points correlation between Player and Teammate
corFD: FanDuel points correlation between Player and Teammate
corMin: minutes played correlation between Player and Teammate
Overview:
A deeper look at this tool and correlation in general is available here, but below is also a basic explanation.
In general, correlation can help explain what typically happens to Player A’s performance given that Player B performs better or worse than their average.
A negative correlation indicates that as one player’s performance moves a certain direction, their teammate’s performance moves the opposite direction. A positive correlation indicates both player’s performances move the same direction.
Correlation goes from -1 (perfectly negative) to 1 (perfectly positive), with values near 0 representing no relationship. The closer the value is to either -1 or 1, the stronger the relationship.
The higher the minutes played, the more you can trust the relationship (typically).
What does this mean for DFS? Negatively-correlated player pairings will have higher floors (the fewest points they combine for) and lower ceilings (the maximum points they combine for), while positively-correlated players will be the opposite: they will tend to combine for lower-floor and higher-ceiling performances.
Teammates both need at least 150 minutes played during games in which both players appeared. This removes potentially misleading small sample size correlations.
Example: Thomas Bryant and Moritz Wagner’s minutes were nearly perfectly negatively correlated early in the 2019-20 season (-0.977 as of 01/03/2020). They split the center minutes when both healthy: additional playing time for Bryant meant less time for Wagner. It is extremely unlikely for both to have big games at the same time, but they were also almost guaranteed to combine to get 48 minutes.
Box score data was gathered from Basketball-Reference.com