RESEARCH: Team saves and closer quality

The last time we discussed saves in this space, we had found that there was no support for the idea that good teams get more save opportunities than bad teams because good teams win more games.

Sounds sensible, right? But there is a persistent theory among fantasy owners that good teams have more blowout wins and therefore fewer save opportunities. It turned out that this was sort of true—poor teams get more save opps as a percentage of their wins but good teams create more save opps overall.

We also found that guesstimating a team will get saves in roughly 50% of its wins works reasonably well, but that there are also tons of outliers, and the wins-saves connection was more tenuous (and therefore less predictable) than we’d hoped.

At...

Almost!

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