Fantasy football has taken the forefront of the fantasy sports world, but fantasy basketball is right behind. Overall, fantasy sports in general are growing rapidly. This year, the commencement of the 2013-14 NBA season coincides with the release of several revamped apps—some good, some bad—that can help users win some money and pride.
I am going to take a look at some of the most popular fantasy basketball apps and identify strengths, weaknesses, and suggestions to improve each.
There are several websites that offer fantasy basketball (ESPN, Yahoo, NBA) but NBA Game Time is an essential app regardless of platform. NBA Game Time offers scores, standings, stats, and schedules in addition to live gamecasts and league news. A $9.99 upgrade provides access to live radio broadcasts, game highlights, and video recaps, while a $49.99 subscription to NBA League Pass maximizes the experience with live access to NBA games all season on users’ mobile devices.
My favorite feature of NBA Game Time is the availability of real time notifications. These can be set at the league, team, and player level, keeping users updated on their favorite NBA team or fantasy players at all times. Even more impressive is the level of detail at which these alerts can be toggled. Whether subscribers are die-hard fans or part of a casual family fantasy league, notifications can be catered specifically to their desire. Although NBA Game Time is a terrific app for basketball fans, it is not necessarily ideal for a fantasy basketball fans.
NBA Game Time allows users to monitor individual players, but not collectively. Thus, it is tedious for fantasy owners to check box scores or receive notifications one at a time, solving a puzzle as to how their fantasy team did on a given day.
Adding a fantasy option to the sidebar alongside standings, schedules, and the like would allow the fantasy savvy to view stat lines of the players that matter to them in one picture. This easy fix would attract more fantasy-oriented fans while doing nothing to detract pure basketball fans who use the app.
ESPN produces apps for all their major fantasy sports—football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. As an avid fantasy football player, I’ve noticed dramatic improvements from 2012 to the 2013 edition. But the ESPN Fantasy Basketball app features few, if any, improvements from last year’s app.
The app is primarily used to monitor actual ESPN fantasy rosters and leagues that one participates in. Thus, it is a necessity in order to make last minute roster decisions, player adds and drops, and scoreboard checks.
Transactions, standings, and brief news stories are also available via the app. Regardless of its weaknesses, the ESPN Fantasy Basketball app is a necessity for anyone participating in an ESPN league. However, there are several things about the app that could be improved for greater accessibility and wider use.
My primary concern with the ESPN Fantasy Basketball app is technical issues. Through just one week of using the app, I have had to exit and re-enter several times due to freezing. Changing from screen to screen is slow, and general use is frustrating.
ESPN’s goal for this app should be to provide users with everything they get from entering the ESPN Fantasy Basketball home page on their computers, but in a more concise fashion. But just as books turned into movies never seem to fully satisfy viewers, the same goes for this app.
Viewing rosters and adding players, two critical uses for the app, hinge on a conspicuous button near the top left corner. Once I figured out what this was, three columns of sliders appear that are both confusing and dependent on users’ selections in the other columns. ESPN should follow the format of its football app for all other sports, where a large red button states “edit lineup.” This would improve clarity and help eliminate frustration for users.
Basic functioning and technical fixes are my primary suggestion for this app, but a goal for the future would be to offer live drafting through the application. Every fantasy draft has one member who forgets the day of and is left scrambling to find the nearest computer.
The ability to draft a team straight from the app—even in the most basic form—would be a lifesaver for many users. It would not only improve the flexibility of draft dates and times but also would provide a critical reason for people to download the app.
Yahoo Fantasy Sports are also very popular, so I dug into their fantasy basketball app. The layout is very similar to ESPN’s and provides for the same basic actions—roster changes, player additions, and player news or outlook blurbs. The apps are nearly identical minus design and platform, but Yahoo holds a major advantage as far as technical functionality.
Although I don’t use Yahoo as my fantasy platform, fiddling with app for a few hours in addition to consulting regular users and reviews show far smoother transitions from page to page. Although I doubt this is enough to convert an ESPN user to Yahoo, it would be wise for ESPN to make these technical changes and keep up with its competitors. Likewise, it would be wise for Yahoo to move towards a live draft option via the app, a feature that neither platform currently offers.
Unlike ESPN and Yahoo’s fantasy basketball apps, Team Stream presented by Bleacher Report is a more general sports app. Team Stream’s best feature is their timely notifications—like NBA Game Time alerts on steroids.
Whether users are interested in general NBA news, NBA Draft news, general fantasy basketball news, or specific team news, each is accessible at the press of a button. Team Stream is similar to a filtered twitter feed, except it is reliable, timely, and each update contains depth and useful information. Another benefit of Team Stream is that it is useful no matter what platform one uses to play fantasy basketball.
In fact, Team Stream always informs me about my fantasy football team’s injuries and breaking news before ESPN, Twitter, or any of my sports-crazed friends. Which brings me to my only criticism of Team Stream.
This app is biased towards fantasy football. Despite providing a “Fantasy Football News” and “Fantasy Basketball News” trigger for alerts, it has a special feature for fantasy football called “My Fantasy Team.” I input each player on my team when the season began, and I have been a step ahead of my league regarding breaking news and injuries since kickoff Week 1. Unfortunately, this is not available for fantasy basketball, and I await the day Bleacher Report makes this change.
Fantasy sports and technology are undoubtedly growing together, but the magnitude of fantasy football compared to fantasy basketball is evident. As technology expands, improved and diversified applications will be available to fantasy basketball users; but don’t expect to catch up to fantasy football any time soon.