Printable Fantasy Basketball Cheat Sheet
The category board, rebuilt for paper: tiers for the categories your league counts, with your punts and weights applied, one column each for guards, forwards and centers, the overall order on the second page, and a checkbox beside every name so you can cross players off as they come off the board. Print it, or save it as a PDF from the same button.
Tap a category to add or remove it. Punt keeps it on the board, greyed, and takes it out of the sum. The weight counts a category more or less than once, from a quarter to three times. 9-cat is points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, threes, field-goal and free-throw percentage and turnovers; 8-cat drops turnovers; roto is the same nine, standings-style.
Drafting against the clock? Run a mock draft against a room first, on the same board.
Field guide
How to draft with this sheet
Print a sheet built for a 10-team points league, take it to a 12-team 9-cat draft with two center seats, and the order in front of you is wrong by the second round. Which categories your league counts, which of them you have decided to punt, how many teams draft and how many centers each roster starts each change which players are worth a pick and by how much. Set those at the top of this page and the sheet rebuilds itself around them: one column each for guards, forwards and centers, the overall order beside them, tier lines kept, and a checkbox beside every name so you can cross players off as the room takes them.
Draft the tiers, not the ranks. A tier groups players whose value is close enough that the difference is inside the projections' own noise, so inside a tier take whoever fills the column your roster is missing. The line between tiers is where the real cost lives: when a tier is down to its last center and it is your pick, that player is worth more than his rank suggests, because the alternative is the top of a meaningfully worse group.
Read the rest
Read the rest
What the value number means
Under the 9-cat, 8-cat and roto formats the number beside each player is his summed z-score: in every category in play, how far his projected line sits from the middle of the projected pool, in standard deviations, added up across the categories you left unpunted and multiplied by any weight you set. A player at plus two in blocks and plus one in rebounds carries the same three units as a player at plus three in points, which is the honest way to compare a rim protector with a scorer when your matchup is decided column by column, best of nine. Field-goal percentage is weighted by projected field-goal attempts and free-throw percentage by projected free-throw attempts, so a low-volume shooter with a pretty number cannot out-rank a high-volume one, and turnovers are flipped so that a bigger number always means a better player. Under the Points format the number is the stat line scored with the table you picked, as a season total: the makes-and-misses table that most points leagues start with, or the six-stat one. The small grey figure at the end of each row is the player's overall rank on the full board, so you can see at a glance whether the fourth center on the sheet is the 15th player overall or the 60th.
Why a player can appear in two columns
Most basketball players are listed at two positions, and every roster has group seats that either one can fill, so a sheet that files each player under one position would hide half his usefulness. This one lists him in every column he can fill: a PG/SG under guards, an SF/PF under forwards, and a PF/C under both forwards and centers, with his positions printed beside his name so you know which seat he is for. Cross him off in every column when he goes. The guard and forward columns run to fifty-four names at twelve teams, which is half again the seats a league that size fills from each group; the center column runs to thirty-six under two center seats and shorter under one, because a draft runs out of real centers before it runs out of anything else.
Where a tier line is drawn
Each column is tiered on its own values. A break lands where the drop between two neighbours is a real cliff against the drops around it: at least three times the typical gap in the twenty rows either side, and never smaller than a floor so the bottom of a column does not splinter into tiers of one. The tier row says what the drop is, in the sheet's own units, so a tier that ends with a drop of 0.9 is a wall and a tier that ends with a drop of 0.15 is barely a line. Inside the top dozen a tier may be one player, because the gap between the first pick and the second is exactly what a drafter wants named; below that no tier is smaller than three.
The center column is the one to watch
Position scarcity is weak in this sport, with one exception. Under a roster rule that starts two centers, a twelve-team league needs twenty-four starting centers on draft night, and the pool of players eligible at center who are worth a starting seat is smaller than that. Once the room notices, the center column empties in a round and a half, and the manager who waited is choosing between a backup and a punt. Keep the column in view from the fourth round on. Under one center seat the pressure eases and the same players slide back toward their raw value, which is why the roster-rule chip changes the depth of that column and nothing about the z-scores themselves. The sheet has already made the adjustment for the rule you picked, so the center tiers you print for one shape will not match the other.
Punts on paper
A punt sheet is a different sheet, not the same one with a column crossed out. Give up free-throw percentage and the bigs who were mid-tier for their free-throw line jump a tier or two, the guards who were carrying a lineup's free throws fall, and the order of the middle rounds changes more than the order of the first. Set your punts at the top before you print, and print one sheet per build you are seriously considering: a manager who walks into a draft with a nine-cat sheet and a punt-assists sheet can switch plans in the fourth round when the room takes the guards early, and a manager with one sheet cannot. The weights do the gentler version: a build chasing blocks and steals can count those columns at twice their weight and read the sheet as a map of where those players sit.
Reading the sheet across an 82-game season
The values on the sheet are season totals, and a fantasy week is not a fixed thing: some clubs play four times in a week, some twice, and over a matchup that is the difference between two starters. In the last five rounds the gap between neighbours inside a tier is small enough that the schedule can settle it, and the schedule planner deserves a second sheet of paper for the playoff weeks in particular. Cross off every player as he is taken, by anyone, not only your own picks, so that by round nine the question of which tiers still hold a live name is answered in one look. If your league carries keepers, settle them first and strike the kept players before the first pick, or the top of every column is fiction.
When to put the sheet down
Paper cannot see your roster. If you hold three centers and one guard in round five, the best value in the center column is not your pick, and the sheet will not say so. It cannot see injuries announced after it was printed, a rest day, or a minutes limit on a player coming back from surgery, which is why the build date is on every page and why the morning of the draft beats the week before. If you would rather have the crossing-off done for you, the mock draft room runs this same board against a room. Export CSV writes the same order, with every position a player fills, his games this week and a column per category, to a plain file you can open in a spreadsheet; the values behind it are explained on the methodology page.