Compare Players

What each card says

Every player gets a card before the tables start. The gold badge is his rank on the category board under the format you chose, so it moves when you switch from nine categories to eight or to points. The value underneath is the number that rank comes from: his z-scores summed over the categories in play, weights and punts included, or his projected fantasy points in a points league. The average draft position is the room's price. The last line is the schedule: how many games his club plays in the current fantasy week and the week after. In a head-to-head league a four-game week against a two-game week is a real difference in volume, often larger than the gap between two similar players, and it is the first thing to read when the choice is a streaming spot rather than a draft pick.

Per game or over the season

The page opens per game, because that is how a basketball line is read and how a daily lineup is set: on the nights a player is active, what does he give you? Season totals ask a different question, what he adds across the whole schedule, and the two part ways whenever games played part ways. A star projected for sixty-two games and a starter projected for seventy-eight can be close per game and far apart in totals, and the sixteen missing games are sixteen nights your roster spot produced nothing. On totals the projection's z-score decides each row. Per game the figure on the screen decides, the lower one taking turnovers. Two figures equal at the precision shown are a tie, and nobody takes that row.

Why the percentages are judged on impact

A player who shoots sixty percent on four attempts and one who shoots fifty-two percent on nineteen do not affect your field-goal percentage the way the raw numbers suggest. The second moves the column far more, in either direction, because his attempts dominate your weekly total. On season totals the page therefore decides the two percentage rows on the attempt-weighted z-score the category board uses, which measures made shots against what an average shooter would have made on the same attempts. Per game, the percentage itself is shown and decides, and the caption says so. Read the attempts behind a percentage before you trade for it.

Punting, from the row

Punting is the basketball strategy with no football equivalent: give up one category entirely and draft to win the rest. Tap Punt beside a category and it stays on the table, greyed, and stops deciding anything; the value on each card and the verdict are re-scored without it. Punt free-throw percentage and a big man who looked a round too expensive can become the right pick, which is exactly the check a punting manager wants before the draft. The eight-category chip drops turnovers; the points chip replaces every category with one projected total.

The record, and what a window can tell you

The record is per game over a window: the whole season, or the last 30, 14 or 7 days, built from the box scores. Minutes sit under the categories because they lead: a bench player whose minutes have climbed for two weeks is usually a starter the projection has not caught up with, and a veteran whose minutes are falling is telling you something before his line does. The games row comes first, because a seven-day window can be two games, and two games are two games of evidence. Before opening night every window is the end of last season, and the caption says so; a player traded in the summer is compared on a record he built on another roster.

The verdict, and the room

The stamp names the player with the higher value on your format. When the gap is under half a z-score summed across every category, less than half of one category's spread, it says too close to call. In a points league the threshold is three percent of the leader's projected total. Beside it the page shows where the draft room disagrees, from each player's average draft position. When our value and the room point at different players, the room is either wrong or knows something a projection cannot, a new role, a minutes promise, a health question, and it is worth ten minutes of reading before you pick. The players, the format, the punts, the figures and the window all live in the address, so the link the button copies opens the same comparison for whoever you send it to.

The projection refreshes with the category board; the game logs are rebuilt nightly from the box scores. If the pool cannot be priced, the page says so rather than showing a stale comparison. See the methodology for how the values are built.