Fantasy Hockey Trade Analyzer Released

Great news hockey fans, the NHL trade analyzer that you have been waiting for has been released.  The initial release may be a bit buggy at first, but should improve as the season goes along.  We look forward to any feedback or suggestions that you may have.

In addition to the NHL trade analyzer, comes the NHL Team Analyzer!  The team analyzer will compare your team against others and provide a ranking.  The ranking is based on teams with similar starting lineups, i.e. if you have 2 starting goalies, so will the other teams.

FantasySP 2009 Fall Update

Our last site feature post was all the way back in May.  Rest assured, I am still here hard at work, just haven’t had the time to make a blog post.  A LOT has happened since then to FantasySP, and I will try my best to remember the more significant changes:

1. Player Searching has been completely revamped, it now shows the position of the player, team, and clicking on his name takes you to the player page. (This was a user request)
2. Nascar has been added to the site.
3. Dozens of site optimizations to boast speed.  This might be the most important change.
4. Several more news sources have been added, giving us the best player news one could ask for.
5. Several more columnists have been added for all sports.
6. Revamped the user panel for tracked players, loads faster and has more information when moused over such as injury status.
7. Fantasy Baseball Surprises, recommends players to pick up who are performing well, but remain under the radar.

I also want to talk about what is in stored for you guys this upcoming Fall season.  Enjoy the sneak peak for the 2009 Fall Feature List:

1. NHL Trade Analyzer: YES, its coming folks.  This has been requested for many times and I am proud to say its definitely going to arrive in October.
2. NFL Trade Analyzer Updates: I will be added some new stat categories to give more accurate player ratings.  Since this site is a year old, we can finally compare this year’s stats to last years.  This has been a heavily requested addition.
3. NFL Surprises: NFL Surprises will be added to help you guys pick up players that the experts might have missed.
4. Team Analyzers: Find out how good your team is compared to others.  Also a requested feature for a long time.  It will arrive first for the NFL, then NBA, NHL, and MLB will follow.

plus more….

List of 103 MLB players that failed 2003 steriod test

While I was playing hooky from work yesterday I heard about this on 1050 ESPN radio . I searched around the internet for the list of 103 players and yes it appears to be out there, I am not sure how/if these names can be confirmed. As an avid baseball fan I would say each one of these players meets the criteria for the most part. Say it isn]’t so Jose Lima…say it aint so! List courtesy of http://www.fantasysp.com

1.Nomar Garciaparra
2.Manny Ramirez
3.Johnny Damon
4.Trot Nixon
5.David Ortiz
6.Shea Hillenbrand
7.Derek Lowe
8.Pedro Martinez
9.Brian Roberts
10.Jay Gibbons
11.Melvin Mora
12.Jerry Hairston
13.Jason Giambi
14.Alfonso Soriano
15.Raul Mondesi
16. Aaron Boone
17.Andy Pettitte
18.Jose Contreras
19.Roger Clemens
20.Carlos Delgado
21.Vernon Wells
22.Frank Catalanotto
23.Kenny Rogers
24.Magglio Ordonez
25.Sandy Alomar
26.Bartolo Colon
27.Brent Abernathy
28.Jose Lima
29.Milton Bradley
30.Casey Blake
31.Danys Baez
32.Craig Monroe
33.Dmitri Young
34.Alex Sanchez
35.Eric Chavez
36.Miguel Tejada
37.Eric Byrnes
38.Jose Guillen
39.Keith Foulke
40.Ricardo Rincon
41.Bret Boone
42.Mike Cameron
43.Randy Winn
44.Ryan Franklin
45.Freddy Garcia
46.Rafael Soriano
47.Scott Spiezio
48.Troy Glaus
49.Francisco Rodriguez
50.Ben Weber
51.Alex Rodriguez
52.Juan Gonzalez
53.Rafael Palmeiro
54.Carl Everett
55.Javy Lopez
56.Gary Sheffield
57.Mike Hampton
58.Ivan Rodriguez
59.Derrek Lee
60.Bobby Abreu
61.Terry Adams
62.Fernando Tatis
63.Livan Hernandez
64.Hector Almonte
65.Tony Armas
66.Dan Smith
67.Roberto Alomar
68.Cliff Floyd
69.Roger Cedeno
70.Jeromy Burnitz
71.Moises Alou
72.Sammy Sosa
73.Corey Patterson
74.Carlos Zambrano
75.Mark Prior
76.Kerry Wood
77.Matt Clement
78.Antonio Alfonseca
79.Juan Cruz
80.Aramis Ramirez
81.Craig Wilson
82.Kris Benson
83.Richie Sexson
84.Geoff Jenkins
85.Valerio de los Santos
86.Benito Santiago
87.Rich Aurilia
88.Barry Bonds
89.Andres Galarraga
90.Jason Schmidt
91.Felix Rodriguez
92.Jason Christiansen
93.Matt Herges
94.Paul Lo Duca
95.Shawn Green
96.Oliver Perez
97.Adrian Beltre
98.Eric Gagne
99.Guillermo Mota
100.Luis Gonzalez
101.Todd Helton
102.Ryan Klesko
103.Gary Matthews

The question is…what do you guys think of this list? Is it fiction or fact?

More important team depth or superstars?

This is an age old debate amongst fantasy “ballers” out there what would you rather have a team with great overall depth? or a team with a few great starters sprinkled with some lesser players?

In my years playing fantasy sports I personally  always find that teams with “superstars” usually end up winning it for the most part. However they also are more than likely to lose easily if that big player gets hurt or doesn’t’ perform that week. While if you have depth and a good overall team 1 player being injured or under performing has less of an effect. My strategy in fantasy is always to have a good overall team depth wise.

Tell us in your opinion what is more important Depth or starters? What is your reasoning?

FantasySP is All About Accessibility

The best part about the internet is that it can be accessed just about anywhere.  This means that some of you are trying to access your Fantasy Sports News from mobile devices and at work.  Today the mobile version of FantasySP has gone live.  Any time the regular site is accessed via a mobile phone the visitor will be redirected to the much faster mobile version.

Features include:

• Super fast load time, a 500% improvement in load time
• Log in to check your player news
• Fast player search at the bottom of every page
• Check news from all 8 sports.

Also included in this update are customized RSS feeds based on your player news.  This is found on the regular site located next to your name when logged in.  The feed shows all news that you have yet to read.

After this update, you have no more excuses to miss out on fantasy news.

FantasySP Spring Update

The spring is here and baseball season is in its infancy.  What better time to announce a Spring Site Update?  So lets get to what I have been working on here at FantasySP:

1. Smarter Player Search
   Searching for players in the “Player Search” box will now provide the closest matches if you happen to misspell a name.  Which means, you no longer have to wait for auto complete.  The player search also allows you to type in some partial names such as “Jet” and press enter for Derek Jeter and get taken directly to their page.

   Thanks to user rash for these suggestions.

2. Import Fantasy Teams
   The ability to import fantasy teams to player tracking has finally arrived.  We are proud to have the easiest roster import feature around.  There is no need to fuss with exporting your teams to an excel spreadsheet.  To import a roster, simply copy and paste your Lineup page into a text box and click submit.  Yes, its really that easy.  We will sift through all of the extra stat values and garbage data and just add the player names.  This will work for any of our 7 sports featured on the site.

   Take a look at an example here. To access the import feature, log in and click on the “import” link in the control panel.

3. MLB Weekly Surprises
   We are introducing a new feature called MLB Weekly Surprises that showcases some of the lesser known players around the league that are performing well.  We analyze player trends and stats from the past 7 days to come up with a list of players that even the experts might have overlooked.  These feature players can be sorted by position.

   This feature is for members of the site only.

4. Server Upgrades and Optimizations
   The server upon which the website is hosted on has gotten some major upgrades.  I have also spent the past month analyzing and optimizating problem spots for the site.   This means a faster more responsive site for you.
5. MLB Trade Analyzer Updates
   It has been almost a year since the fantasy baseball trade anaylzer was built and it is now better than ever.  I have updated countless algorithims and added new stats to be analyzed to help rate players.  This will of course be an ongoing process throughout the baseball season.
6. New Section: Soccer
   Last but not least, the Soccer section has arrived to FantasySP.  Whether you are looking to keep track of players from the English Premier League or Major League Soccer, we’ve got it covered.  There are some Soccer fans out there!

FantasySP.com’s Fantasy Baseball League / Win an Apple iTouch

To celebrate the one year anniversary of Fantasy Sports Portal we would like to thank everyone that has made FSP a success…meaning you the fantasy sports fan! With the baseball season upon us we’d like to invite you the fan to join our fantasy baseball league to play against the founders of FantasySP…and to show what you’re made of! 8-10 lucky entries will play head to head for bragging rights while a live fantasy sports audience watches. Throughout the season we will be blogging about it to keep everyone updated…and to let the trash talking begin!

League Details: Standard Scoring, Head to Head

Any registered user of the site is eligible to play.  Tell us why you want in and sign up for the league here: www.fantasysp.com/contest

League champion wins an Apple iTouch

We Now Have Player Videos

The big craze these days seems to be videos. Just about every major news outlet has videos and lets fans embed them into their own pages. Thanks to the wonderful people behind the new ESPN.com, we have the ability to give you player specific videos, headline news, ESPN the Magazine articles, and even blog posts. Talk about complete player coverage!

Each player page for the NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB has a new category called “ESPN Bonus Content”. Below is a picture of what to users who are logged into the site will see. Clearly it may be awfully handy to be able to look at fantasy player news, then pick out the latest videos with ease.

Example of Arod's current page

The next question may be how will the videos play? We want to make this as easy as possible so the videos will overly right on top of the same page. Take a look at the following screenshot:

Still picking on Arod

If you have any problems with this feature or would like to chiming in, please do so!

Changes to Player News

FantasySP is dedicated to providing you the most accurate fantasy player news possible from dozen’s of sources. However, there is a limit to how much of each player update can be shown on our site due to legal reasons. From this day onward we can no longer show the complete player update for a number of our sources.

The good news is that most of the abbreviated player updates are accompanied with a link to the rest of the update.

Site Tweaks to New Layout

Since the launch of the redesigned FantasySP I have been working diligently behind the scenes in order to speed up the site. A few parts of the site were causing considerable slowdown during a pageload. These have since been rectified through various optimizations and tweaks throughout the week.

In addition to site optimization, I have included the ability to scan through latest player news. This feature was part of the old site and user romo55 wanted this feature back on the new layout. Now you can easily scan the latest player news throughout the day once again.