How to draft basketball fantasy

Fantasy: 5 tips to help you nail your basketball drafts

LeBron James and the Lakers will look to bounce back this season.

The NBA season starts next Tuesday, and if you’re like me, you will be knocking out your final fantasy drafts this weekend. Here are five tips below that will help you cram last minute and dominate your drafts!

Utilize Yahoo’s Draft Analysis Tool

Do you want to know where players are being drafted? The Draft Analysis tool is the easiest and best way to do so. By evaluating the Average Draft Position (ADP) for a particular player, Yahoo is essentially conducting a market analysis across their draft platform for when players are being selected. ADP is a valuable data point when constructing a fantasy team because you’ll want to make decisions based on the latest trends in the market. Which, at times, may be viewed as an overcorrection (an opportunity to capitalize on falling value) or a reaction to new information (such as LaMelo Ball’s recent ankle injury).

Rankings are not one-size-fits-all but similarly to ADP, they are another data point that can help fantasy managers come draft time. It’s impossible to predict the correct outcome for every player. However, you can get a feel for which players are higher or lower than the ADP. If I’m higher on a person, there’s a good chance I’ve mentioned them in my positional tiers articles, my guys, or sleepers columns.

These guys are the NBA insiders that you’ll want to follow for the latest NBA news that may impact your fantasy draft. From injuries to player absences, projected starting lineups and more, it’s critical to get an understanding of the latest news so that you can go into drafts with the most updated information as possible.

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

I prefer to evaluate players on their per-game value instead of their total value because injuries are, unfortunately, part of fantasy basketball. Players like Mikal Bridges are often ranked higher in head-to-head leagues because of their ability to play in a majority of games each season. Using Mikal Bridges as an example, he finished last season 24th in total value, but if you look under the hood, he finished outside of the top 50 (54th) in per-game value. So he got a significant boost by simply playing more games.

On the flip side, if you look at LeBron James from a season ago, he finished fourth in per-game value versus 16th in total value. You have to be somewhat optimistic and look at the ceiling before heading into drafts. Several players in the first three rounds of fantasy basketball drafts will be load managed this year, but that doesn’t mean they won’t produce. Availability is certainly something to consider, but don’t bypass a player’s upside. Basketball Monster is a great resource that allows you to toggle between the per-game and total values from last season.

Are you wondering who might be the Ja Morant of last season? Or who makes the All-Star leap? Well, I often use betting markets to determine those candidates. Evaluating the player award markets and their respective odds of winning provides another data point for consideration. The markets I’d be most interested in viewing would be most points, assists, rebounds, steals, blocks, most improved player, MVP, rookie of the year and defensive player of the year.

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It may seem trivial, but I’m confident you’ll see several of the names listed for those markets emerge as viable candidates to win their respective awards and be valuable fantasy assets this year.

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.

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 made for you a selection of DFS sites 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

In each tournament you get a certain budget to create your own fantasy team, which on most sites will consist of 9NBA basketball players. The list of available players will include the participants of the matches of the selected game day.

The cost 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) - Point Guard
• 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 fantasy NBA, when scoring the following events are taken into account :

• Point
• Three-Point Shot (3pt FG Made)
• Effective transmission (Assist)
• Rebound
• Blockshot (Block)
• Interception (Steal)
• Double-Double (Maximum 1 per player)
• Triple-Double (Maximum 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 to 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 tips 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 want to mention 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.

There are other sites besides these sites, but it is not possible to play for money there if you do not live in the US 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.

Sites where you can play fantasy basketball (including fantasy NBA) for free

How to choose a site where to play fantasy basketball (NBA)?

You are now pretty well prepared to start playing fantasy basketball. You know the basic rules of the game, refreshed your memory of the strategy, and received complete information about all the existing DFS sites where you can play NBA daily fantasy. It remains only to choose one or more, make a deposit and enter the game. Here are some guidelines to help you choose the right DFS site for your needs:

• Look in what language is the platform interface . If you are uncomfortable playing on a site where most of the information is in English, pay attention to the DraftGaming site, which has a Russian-language interface. There is also Zweeler, where the main part of the site is machine translated. The rest of the sites presented in this review are created for an English-speaking audience, so you will need at least a superficial knowledge of English to play there.
• Read the reviews of our members of the forum in the Daily Fantasy Sports Sites section. You can ask for advice or take an interest in their opinion about this or that DFS site, as well as leave your feedback, which will help other players.
• Chat with the site's support team. Ask a few questions that interest you and wait for an answer. If the support service answers clearly, politely and quickly, this is a big plus.
• Learn the daily fantasy basketball rules on the websites and the scoring system. When it comes to fantasy NBA, there aren't as many differences across sites as there are, for example, in fantasy football. However, certain details in the scoring system can significantly influence your choice. If you are a beginner, choose the simplest scoring system to make it easier at first.

That's all we wanted to tell you about where to play NBA Daily Fantasy. Now you can register on the selected site and start playing fantasy basketball for money or for free. We hope that this review was useful to you, if you want to know about something in more detail, write about it in the comments, and we will supplement it.

Now stop reading! It's time to start playing!

Choose a site and play NBA daily fantasy!

Where to play Fantasy NBA?

H No wonder Fantasy NBA is considered one of the most exciting fantasy sports. This is a very dynamic sport, and that's why fantasy points are accumulated here at a crazy speed.

There are many daily fantasy sports sites where you can play Daily Fantasy NBA. In this article, you will learn about the best of them. And besides, we will tell you how to play fantasy NBA.

How to play Fantasy NBA?

The Fantasy NBA rules will be summarized below. The rules on each individual site where there is daily fantasy basketball may differ from the generally accepted ones. Please check this before you start playing.

Fantasy NBA Team Recruitment

Basically, you are the owner of a virtual NBA team and you must recruit 9 players from any other teams within a limited budget.

Positions of players to be taken to the NBA fantasy team:

• Point Guard (PG) - point guard
• Shooting Guard (SG)
• Small Forward (SF)
• Power Forward (PF)
• Center (C)0024
• Guard (G)
• Forward (F)
• 2 Utility Players (UTIL) - Player of any position

As you can see, it will not work to make a team of point guards alone.

Each basketball player has his own virtual salary, which will be deducted from the budget.

DFS websites independently determine the virtual salary of each basketball player. As a rule, the calculation of the salary of the basketball player is based on the following:

• Average fantasy points per game
• Number of fantasy points earned in the last game
• Popularity (how often other members choose this player for their team)

You probably have a question:

How are points awarded in Daily Fantasy NBA?

While real NBA players play their real matches, their virtual counterparts earn or lose fantasy points for your team. That is fantasy points are awarded for actions of players on the court .

On most fantasy sites, points are given for the following actions:

• 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

We would like to remind you that the rules on each site where there is daily fantasy basketball may differ from those generally accepted. Please check this before you start playing.

Advanced strategies for playing NBA Fantasy Center

Knowing the basic rules of NBA fantasy is, of course, good. However, this is not enough to start beating your opponents. For a more in-depth study of the subject, check out articles from the Daily Fantasy Basketball Strategy section, as well as daily fantasy basketball recommendations from well-known DFS professional Peter "DraftCheat" Christensen. Or study the detailed statistics on the NBA Fantasy Center website. After that, you can start choosing a platform for playing daily fantasy basketball for money or for free.

Where to play Daily Fantasy NBA?

Below you will find the best sites to play daily fantasy NBA.

Red Star Fantasy

Red Star Fantasy is a daily fantasy sports project from the famous poker room Red Star Poker. The site presents a lot of types of games, among which there is an overseas NBA. Read review Visit site

FanTeam

FanTeam is one of the leading European DFS sites.

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