Editor's note: ESPN Fantasy is proud to announce the addition of André Snellings (follow him on Twitter) to our fantasy basketball crew of experts. You'll see him churning out content in the days and weeks to come, but we'll let him introduce himself to you in his own words.
Greetings, Earthlings. You want to know who I am? I am a man who loves and lives fantasy basketball, NBA hoops and NBA analytics. And first and foremost, I'm here to help you with your fantasy hoops dreams.
There are three things about me that make me a great guide for you on this journey:
1. I'm a sports nut and NBA head who absorbs all things basketball.
2. I'm a fantasy fanatic who plays in absolutely as many leagues as my wife will allow (and a bunch she doesn't know about, but don't tell her).
3. I'm really, really good with numbers and applying them.
Let me give you an example of how this combo works for me and leads to fantasy insights.
I flew out to Las Vegas in 2014 to watch the Summer League, expecting to be wowed by then-lottery picks Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker and Dante Exum. In fact, I went to see the Bucks play the Jazz specifically to check out those last two, who were getting quiet buzz as perhaps the two best players in their class.
Instead, this happened (forgive that spellcheck changed the first "posterizes" into "posteriors"):
Oh snap! Greek Freak posteriors Gobert with 2 hand dunk...next possession Gobert posterizes him right back! @RotoWire @CLNS_Nick
- Andre Snellings (@ProfessorDrz) July 15, 2014
I went on to write that Rudy Gobert and Giannis Antetokounmpo were by far the two most impressive players I saw in that 2014 Summer League, and because of it, I led both of their fantasy bandwagons as late-round sleepers that next season. As their stars began to rise, the analytics continued to suggest that these were not just impressive young players but that they also could be generational talents. By last season, I was arguing that Gobert was the best defensive player in the NBA (along with Draymond Green). But my tracking of Giannis was much more in-depth.
With Giannis, I argued in the fall of 2016, before last season began, that the great experiment of him playing more on-ball as a de facto point guard would work, and that he would be a star in both fantasy and actual basketball. By midseason, the analytics were telling me that Giannis might just have been the most improved player in NBA history. Thus, before the start of this NBA season, while many experts were projecting Russell Westbrook as the top fantasy pick, I went on record that Giannis was my pick for 2017-18 NBA MVP and should be the No. 1 overall fantasy pick.
To recap: My method is built on obsessive sports fandom, total immersion in fantasy sports and the fact that numbers and statistics come naturally to me. Let's unpack each of these things a bit, starting with my history with sports.
I've always lived and died with sports and was an athlete for as long as my body would let me be. My dad was 6-foot-3 and wore a size-14 shoe, so when I got my first sized-14 shoes myself at age 14, I was sure that I would hit a mega growth spurt (I was about 5-foot-5 at the time), end up 6-foot-6 like my favorite players Dr. J and Ron Harper and go on to NBA superstardom.
Only ... my growth spurt stopped at 6-foot, so my NBA dream ended early. But it turned out that I was pretty fast, so I ran track instead. I earned my Gold and White varsity letter jacket at Georgia Tech, specializing in the 110M high hurdles. When I went to the University of Michigan for grad school, I earned another letter jacket, this one in Maize and Blue. I've run with and against some of the fastest humans who ever lived, including several Olympic gold medalists, and I'm one of the few guys around who can say that he played varsity sports in both the ACC and Big Ten.
But, at some point, when my legs had carried me as far and as fast as they could, my running days were over, and I found a new sports love: fantasy sports.
One night, while waiting for a friend in the library, I set my first fantasy NBA lineup for a stock market league, and life would never be the same. I took the passion and energy that I used to put into running and started channeling it into my fantasy squads. I got really good at it.
Good enough to start winning fantasy leagues in enough volume that some leagues changed the rules to make it harder for me to make trades. Good enough that a serendipitous encounter with the fantasy advice website Rotowire.com resulted in my getting a job writing player updates in 2004. Good enough that, when Rotowire gave me my first chance to write a weekly fantasy NBA column in 2007, I ended up winning the first of my two FSWA Fantasy Basketball Writer of the Year awards for my work on the Hoops Lab.
Part of the reason I won those awards was that I was one of the first to start emphasizing analytics in my fantasy basketball coverage. In a numbers-based game, it made sense to me that more in-depth numerical analysis could only be a good thing.
Why am I so into numbers? Well, I'm the son of the best high school math teacher in the state of Ohio (in my clearly unbiased opinion), and as I grew up, the numbers just made sense. Later, I became a real-life Dr. Dre by earning my Ph.D in biomedical engineering, with an emphasis on neuroscience and neural prosthetics.
I used numbers, statistics and analytics approaches to help neurosurgeons identify the subthalamic nucleus as a target for deep brain stimulation surgery to treat symptoms of Parkinson's disease. I used numbers, statistics and analytics approaches to help develop prosthetics for inhibiting bladder activity in persons with incontinence or overactive bladder. I also used numbers, statistics and analytics approaches to optimize the insertion speed for three-dimensional Matrix multielectrode arrays into primate cortex to, for example, facilitate research on the brain-machine interface. [Editors' note: We don't know what these big words mean, either!]
It turns out that a very similar application of numbers, statistics and analytics techniques also helps predict and characterize NBA players, which in turn helps with fantasy basketball analysis.
So. Who am I? My teammates at Georgia Tech called me "The Drza," a variation of the names of two members of The Wu-Tang Clan. Sometimes "I'm Outkasted and Claiming True." My teammates at Michigan called me "GT" because I went to Georgia Tech. I've been called "Trotwood" because that's where I'm from, and some call me "Monopoly" because I'm better at that game than anyone you know. A lot of people like to call me "Dr. Dre," but that name is already taken on the big stage.
Officially, I suppose that my name is Dr. Snellings, though for a long time my own children didn't believe I was a doctor (where, they argued, were my patients?). Really, it doesn't matter what you call me. In the end, I'm the guy who wants to watch every game, who loves finding new ways to crunch the numbers to learn more about this game that we love, and I'm the one who will help you figure out just how fun fantasy basketball can be ... especially when you win!
Now that the intro is out of the way, let's have some fun with this thing.