How do i start a fantasy basketball league

ESPN Fantasy Basketball 101 - How to play

Sep 26, 2022

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You love basketball. You follow the NBA, root for your favorite team and watched in amazement as Stephen Curry led the Golden State Warriors to another championship.

And you still haven't played fantasy basketball?!

If that sounds a lot like you, this is the perfect season to give it a try -- there is just so much exciting stuff happening around the league. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic can do everything on the court. Luka Doncic and Trae Young have moved into the MVP discussion. Zion Williamson is coming back from a missed season. And superstars LeBron James and Kevin Durant continue to put their teams on their backs like they did 10 years ago.

There has never been a better time to jump right into the fantasy game.

Create or join an ESPN Fantasy Basketball league today and draft your league any time before the first game tips off every Monday. Your league starts fresh with 0-0 records for the new matchup period.

Sign up for free!

Imagine having Curry on your team when he gets on a roll from 3-point land and carries you to victory. Or what it feels like to have LaMelo Ball on your squad when he stuffs the stat sheet in his third NBA season.

These are the moments you remember as a fantasy manager!

In fact, many of those who've played fantasy basketball over the years can recall specific games that certain players had for them. An epic scoring night by James Harden or Damian Lillard, or maybe a timely triple-double by Russell Westbrook.

So fun. So, so fun!

If you're not an expert, don't worry -- we have everything you need to know about how to enter a league and draft a winning team. Even if you're a total beginner, you will still have the tools to experience the joy of fantasy basketball like millions do every year.

Make the league your own

Every fantasy basketball league is different. While there are basic rules and settings that apply across the board (you will learn about those below), each league takes on its own identity based on settings like roster size, injury spots, stat categories and other specifics.

We encourage you to join or start a league that fits what you're looking for. If you want to be more casual and set your lineups once a week, find a league that uses weekly lineup changes. If you're a little bit more diehard with all this and want to be able to add and drop players and craft new lineups on a daily basis, that's the type of league you should enter.

The bottom line is to do what's fun for you. Find a league that keeps you tuning in to watch your players every night.

With that in mind, we've put together ESPN Fantasy Basketball 101 to give you an overview of how to get started, how to prepare for your draft and how to play during the season.

Now it's time for you to sign up and join the fun!

ESPN Fantasy Basketball FAQ

Click here for a quick reference for basic game-related questions.

How to sign up on the ESPN Fantasy app

Were you invited to an ESPN Fantasy Basketball league? Do you want to create your own as a League Manager? We have complete instructions for you right here.

How to sign up online

Whether you were invited to join an already-existing league or want to create your own as a League Manager, you'll find everything you need to do so right here.

League settings

If you created your own league, you'll need to make sure all of your league's rules and settings -- including roster size, scoring, regular-season schedules and playoff schedules -- are to your liking. We have all of the details of how to do that right here. Note: This season

You've signed up, now what?

Check out your league and team pages

It's time to learn more about your league and team pages, so you know where everything is. We've got you covered with a detailed tour right here.

Know your rules

This might seem incredibly basic, but even veteran fantasy basketball players often assume they know their league rules even when they don't. The result of overlooking a rule can be costly, so be sure you know the rules before your draft.

Go to your fantasy basketball league page, click on League, then Settings. Here, you'll be able to find all the rules that are in place for your league this season. This includes roster construction, scoring, schedule, playoff structure and more.

Take the time to carefully go over every section. To make sure you understand the thinking behind each rule, check out our League Settings overview.

Draft prep

A good draft will put you in position to have a successful season, and taking time to prepare beforehand is key. That includes formulating strategies and printing out rankings that reflect your league's scoring format.

Don't worry, we have you covered with customized expert rankings and draft strategies in the ESPN Fantasy Basketball draft kit.

Autodraft prep

If you don't plan to take part in a live draft, that's OK. Our system will automatically draft for you.

Still, you have the option of guiding how our system will draft your team. Go to your Team page and click "Edit Autopick Strategy." Here, you can decide which player positions you'd like to pick in which parts of the draft and how many players at each position you want to select overall.

Mock drafts

Mock drafts are simply practice drafts that don't count for anything. It's a terrific way to get used to the ESPN draft software, make sure you know how everything works and test out different strategies. For example, that might mean drafting a point guard in the first round versus drafting a small forward in Round 1 and waiting on a point guard until the fourth round.

These practice drafts also let you see which players are going higher than expected and which are routinely slipping down a round or two (or more). This is extremely useful knowledge that you can take with you in your real draft and use to your advantage, avoiding those "sliding" players until later rounds when you have a good idea that they will still be available.

For an overview of how everything in the ESPN draft room works, click on this link.

The draft

Draft day is the most exciting day of the season, because it's when your team goes from a plan to a reality. It's when you finally get the chance to assemble the group of players you get to root for all season. Of course, you can always add and drop players throughout the year, but the draft is still the most fundamental part of your roster and you want to make sure you don't miss on your top players.

If you have prepared for your draft by reading up on players and strategies, and by participating in several mock drafts, you're on the path to success. Believe in your hunches and don't look back.

To make everything go as smoothly as possible, be sure to follow these handy rules.

The season is starting, let the fun begin!

Trading

In most leagues, there are at least a few managers who enjoy the art of the deal. If you're one of those people, trading is going to be one of the most fun aspects of fantasy basketball. When done well, it's a great opportunity to improve your roster while unloading someone you perhaps no longer want or need.

There are several important factors to keep in mind. You must look at the roster of the team you're trading with and understand which, if any players, that manager might be willing to part with. For example, it'd be unwise to make a trade offer for a point guard on a team that is battling injuries and down to one healthy point guard. Also, while you may never want to send your best trade offer with your first proposal, be careful not to offer up too little. That can be offensive to the other manager and can lead to that person not only declining your offer but ending all future trade talks with you.

In-season strategies

Beyond trading, there are other factors to consider during the season like how to manage your games played in roto leagues, how to approach head-to-head playoffs, and how best to work the waiver wire. Check out the in-season strategies section of our draft kit.

Fantasy basketball etiquette

Every few years, no matter what type of league you're in, you'll run into someone who causes problems. Sometimes it name-calling on the message board and being a bully. Other times it is a constant stream of wild trade offers and questionable transactions. Whether you are in a hyper-competitive league or just trying to have some casual fun, you want to avoid being this way or having others in your league who conduct themselves like this.

Generally speaking, that just means following the golden rule: Treat others the way you'd want to be treated in your league.

Fantasy Basketball 2022-23: Tips and draft strategy for category format leagues

Jrue Holiday provides numbers — and therefore value — across multiple categories in fantasy basketball.

Special to Yahoo Sports

Whether it’s your first time playing fantasy sports or you’re a seasoned fantasy football player looking for a new challenge, this guide aims to educate you about how to approach a category-based fantasy basketball league. The tips and advice found here should help you construct a serviceable — and hopefully league-winning! — team, even if you haven’t been actively following the NBA or have never played fantasy before.

Almost all category leagues are either “8-cat” (eight default categories) or “9-cat” (nine default categories). The eight default categories are points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, 3s, FG% and FT%. Turnovers are the ninth default, and they’re the only difference between 8-cat and 9-cat leagues. 9-cat is more common on Yahoo, but you can play either format depending on what you prefer.

A few themes to remember if you play in a 9-cat league: High-usage players are often turnover machines, and rookies tend to be particularly turnover prone, especially rookie ballhandlers. Catch-and-shoot specialists (think PJ Tucker) and big men who don’t pass (like Clint Capela) tend to see the biggest boosts in 9-cat value.

[Get in on the fun this fantasy hoops season: Create or join a league now!]

Occasionally, league commissioners experiment with some other category options. Some of the most common alternatives are double-doubles, triple-doubles, splitting offensive and defensive rebounds into two categories, or changing the way field goal efficiency is measured (i.e. counting made field goals, made free throws, eFG%, TS%, or some combination thereof). If you play in one of these leagues with atypical categories, the most important thing to remember is that most fantasy advice is not tailored for your leagues. There is still a lot to gain and a lot to be learned from articles, tweets, podcasts, etc, but remember that all of that advice assumes that you’re playing in either 8-cat or 9-cat.

This isn’t special to category-based leagues, but fantasy managers need to know whether they set lineups every day or once a week and whether they have an IR spot. Managers in weekly lineup leagues or leagues without an IR spot need to be more cautious on draft day. Someone like Kawhi Leonard, who is likely to miss games for “load management”, does more damage in a weekly lineups league than a daily lineups league — in a daily lineups league, you can insert a replacement for just that day. Injuries are also easier to wait out if your roster has an IR spot. That way, you can add a new player without dropping the injured one.

This is the big one. In an h3H (head-to-head) league, you face off against one team per week — your categories against your opponent’s. In h3H leagues, the teams with the best records qualify for the playoffs, and the champion is the winner of the playoff tournament. In roto (short for rotisserie), teams compete against the entire league over the course of the season. In a 12-team league, the leader in a given category gains 12 points, second place gets 11, third place gets 10, and so on until last place gets a single point. The champion is the team with the most cumulative points on the final day of the season.

The most important difference between h3H and roto is that punting (deliberately ignoring multiple categories, so that you can build an extra strong team in the remaining categories) usually leads to different results. In h3H, a well-crafted punt build is the optimal strategy. However, in roto, punting successfully is much harder and not rewarded as explicitly.

The reason you should punt in a head-to-head league is that you’re only trying to win a majority of the categories — it’s okay if you lose a few. For example, if you’re in a 9-cat league, you can effectively punt four categories in an attempt to win the other five. The more unusual build the better, as you’ll potentially be competing against other people who are punting, and you want to overlap as little as possible. Something strange like punting points, 3s, rebounds and assists will shift values, so you can reach to secure players who fit your build. Last season, that build — steals, blocks, FG%, FT% and TO — yielded increased value for players like Robert Williams, Herb Jones, Jaren Jackson and Mikal Bridges.

One other note on h3H category leagues: There are two types. The Yahoo standard counts each category as one game per week. So in a 9-cat league, a manager will receive a result in the standings for each category they win, loss or tie. Win five categories and lose four, you’ll be 5-4 that week.In “h3H One Win”, only one result is added to the W-L-T record per week, determined by which team wins the most categories.

Category Scarcity

Blocks and Assists

Blocks and assists are the scarcest categories. Most of the league’s assists come from the top point guards, with a few notable exceptions. All of the non-point-guard assists leaders are going to get drafted, and most of them will go in the first couple of rounds. When a point guard becomes worthy of acquisition off the waiver wire, they rarely are high-impact passers.

Similarly, there will be some shot-blocking big men who emerge off waivers as the season rolls along, but, as with assists, those players rarely block enough shots to make a major impact. As with assists, most of the best shotblockers will all get drafted in the first couple of rounds.

Rebounds and 3-pointers

Rebounds and 3-pointers are much easier to find. While the league’s elite rebounders stay pretty steady year over year, there are always several big men who emerge early in the season as reliable sources of boards. Furthermore, as big men get hurt, their backups usually step in and provide a decent facsimile of the starter’s rebounding load.

Threes are a slightly different story, but the results are the same. As the total number of 3s has increased, finding quality 3-point shooters later in drafts has become easier and easier. Every year, a few players emerge as semi-surprising additions to the 3s-per-game leaderboard. Perhaps more importantly, due to the streaky nature of long-range shooting, managers who remain active on the waiver wire can usually find a few players going through a hot streak and averaging several made 3s per game.

Points

Points are tricky. On the one hand, all the best scorers are going to get drafted early. Unless you are deliberately punting the category, you’ll probably need to draft at least one 20-plus-point scorer early to stay competitive.

On the other hand, points are often overvalued by fantasy managers. Low scorers often get drafted much later than they should. High scorers get picked up off waivers much quicker, even if they provide little value in the other categories. Furthermore, as NBA offenses have changed, there are more high scorers available in the later rounds of drafts than ever before.

Points do become available on waivers throughout the season, but most of the time, it’s only players who score between 13 and 18 points. Those guys can help, but, here too, waivers are unlikely to bail you out if you missed on this category on draft day.

Steals

Steals are always available on waivers. The problem? Most of those players don’t provide enough help in the other categories to be worth rostering. That means that managers in daily lineups leagues can get meaningful help off of waivers, especially late in the week in a close h3H matchup, but that managers in weekly lineups leagues will have a harder time using the waiver wire to bolster their rosters.

The best way to stay competitive in steals is to try to draft elite two-way players relatively early, like Chris Paul and Jrue Holiday, so you don’t have to reach late in drafts for players who have murky roles and are generally unreliable.

FG% and FT%

Players’ FG% and FT% are more variable than many counting stats, and therefore harder to predict, even if they stay in the same role on the same team.

For that reason, managers should remain careful when trying to build strength in these two categories. If you think your team is good, but not great, in either FG% or FT%, then remember that your margin for error may be small.

One last note — there are also some well-founded strategic arguments against punting either shooting efficiency category. Foremost among them, is that it is likely another manager in your league may attempt the same build, and that a punt-percentages team suffers more than other roster builds when their team has fewer games than their opponent in a given week.

If you’ve played in points leagues before, and this is your first time playing in a category-based league, make sure to compare last season’s final ranks in points leagues to last season’s final ranks in category leagues. This should help you get a good sense of which players make some pretty big jumps and which fall.

Remember that category scarcity is now much more important that positional scarcity. Positions still matter, but they matter a lot less.

Lastly, and this applies to points leagues as well as category leagues: remember that your last few picks are probably going to be dropped a few weeks later anyway. Take a few risks on upside, or focus on players who might fill some specific categorical weakness — there is no such thing as “reaching” at the end of a draft.

How to play fantasy league?

This season in the Parimatch Championship of the Nizhny Novgorod region we are again waiting for the fantasy league, which has already managed to catch the fancy of many fans over the past year.

1) A user registers on fantione.com. You can register through Vkontakte with one click, or you can use an email address, but then the mail will need to be confirmed - without confirmation it will not be possible to play fantasy.

2) Then the user searches for the league he needs (the list of active leagues will be on the main page). In our case, this is the Major League of the Championship of the Nizhny Novgorod Region.

3) After selecting a league, the user goes to its page, clicks "Play" and becomes a member.

4) Next, you need to open the card sets to find out which players can be fielded for the upcoming fantasy tour. You will have 15 sets of cards. Each set contains 5 cards (for each position - point guard, attacking defender, small forward, heavy forward, center).

5) After opening all the cards, ideally, you need to look at what has fallen. There will almost certainly be duplicate cards - duplicates can be removed, leaving only 1 card of the same cards available. When deleted, the user receives points, which can then be exchanged for new sets of cards (1000 points for 1 set). Removal of a simple card - 100 points, removal of a silver card - 200 points, removal of a gold card - 500 points. The difference in the color of the card is the bonuses that are awarded for each useful action by the player. Regular cards have no bonuses, silver cards have 1 bonus, gold cards have 3 bonuses. Bonuses and which cards drop out are all randomly generated. There will always be 1 silver card in one set. Possibility of getting into the gold card set - 10%. You can delete not only duplicate cards, but also cards of players that, in the user's opinion, will not be useful in fantasy, and he will not put them on upcoming rounds. It is impossible to remove a previously played card in one of the rounds. It is also not recommended to delete everything in a row - a situation may occur that there is no player in the position, and then 0 fantasy points will be awarded to the user for this position.

6) When all the cards are open, you need to go to the selection of the composition in the menu. The choice of the composition is 5 players for the next games, one player for each position. You just need to scroll down and choose from among the available cards those that, in the opinion of the user, will be most useful in the next tour. The choice is simple - scroll down, find a card from the available ones, click on it, and it should automatically appear at the top. Click "Save", etc. no need. Everything is saved. Changes to the selected five can be made before the start of the first game in the upcoming round. You can replace an already issued card if the changes are not blocked yet.

7) After choosing the composition, you can go to the prediction league. The League of Predictions is an additional opportunity to earn points for new sets of cards. There you need to guess the outcomes of matches and some random events. Correct predictions go to the overall standings, as well as to the standings of points that can be sprayed.

At the end of all games, the results for the round are processed, and the site in the "Leaders" section displays user data with their five players by fantasy points. And in the section "Statistics" - indicators of fantasy-points of the players of our Championship. By default, summary indicators are opened, but you can switch to a specific tour.

Please note that one round in the Parimatch Championship of the Nizhny Novgorod region lasts 2 weeks, but in the fantasy league we play for a week, so points are calculated every Monday.

You can play the Fantasy League here - https://fantione.com/

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The first team with bronze, the second ninth place

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The first team with bronze, the second nine

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Where to play fantasy NBA?

Since the season in the most spectacular basketball league has already started, which means that the most attentive daily fantasy sports sites have already taken care of that part of their players who follow this sport, and have launched tournaments within which you can play fantasy NBA.

We have compiled a selection of DFS sites for you where you can play fantasy basketball for money or for free. But first, we offer a refresher on the basics of NBA daily fantasy so you can approach the game fully equipped.

How to play fantasy NBA?

Below is the general principle of NBA Daily Fantasy. However, we ask you to be careful, as details may vary from site to site. Therefore, before you start playing on a particular DFS site, study its rules. In general, daily fantasy basketball is the following.

NBA Fantasy Team Recruitment

Each tournament gives you a budget to build your own fantasy team, which on most sites will consist of 9 NBA players. The list of available players will include the participants of the matches of the selected game day.

The cost of of a player usually depends on:

• Average points for the season
• Number of points earned in the last game
• Popularity (% player ownership)

Normally your team will consist of 9 players from the following positions:

• Point Guard (PG)
• Shooting Guard (SG)
• Small Forward (SF)
• Power Forward (PF)
• Center (C)
• Guard (G)
• Forward (F)
• 2 Utility Players (UTIL) - Player of any position

What are points awarded for in NBA Daily Fantasy?

In Daily Fantasy Basketball, during matches, your team members earn or lose points for their actions on the court. On most DFS sites where you can play NBA fantasy, the following events are taken into account when calculating points :

• Point (Point)
• Three-Point Shot (3pt FG Made)
• Effective transmission (Assist)
• Rebound
• Blockshot (Block)
• Interception (Steal)
• Double-Double (Maximum 1 per player)
• Triple-Double (Max 1 per player)
• Loss (Turnover)
• Technical Foul
• Flagrant Foul

Before recruiting players to a team on a specific DFS site, study the available positions and the scoring system, as they differ on different sites.

Where can I play NBA Daily Fantasy?

Now that you've got the NBA Daily Fantasy Rules in mind, check out the main articles from the Daily Fantasy Basketball Strategy section, as well as recommendations from DFS pro Peter "DraftCheat" Christensen . After that, you can start choosing a platform for playing daily fantasy basketball for money or for free.

Among the sites that provide the opportunity to play fantasy basketball, and the NBA in particular, we would like to highlight the following sites where you can play daily fantasy NBA from Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia or other European and CIS countries.

Sites where you can play NBA Daily Fantasy for money

The above sites accept players from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other CIS and European countries, and provide an opportunity to play NBA fantasy for money or for free.

In addition to these sites, there are other sites, but it is impossible to play for money there if you do not live in the USA or Canada. On such DFS sites, you can register using special programs to bypass blocking and play fantasy basketball for free. We do not recommend depositing money on such sites, as it may be difficult to withdraw winnings. 9Ol000

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