Draft Intel

Centres and point guards, the two seats that run out

Every categories league has two positions the room runs short of. A classic Yahoo roster starts two centres and asks for a point guard, a shooting guard and a guard, so twelve teams want twenty-four centre starts and thirty-six guard starts a week, and there are not that many centres who anchor rebounds, blocks and field-goal percentage, nor that many point guards who carry assists without bleeding turnovers. The table names, for every manager, the first round they took a centre and how many they took, then the same for point guards. The sentence under it finds the run: the first round in which a quarter of the room took a centre is called the run on centres, and the note says how many went in that round and how the centres were spread across the draft. A manager who took two centres in rounds one and three started it; a manager whose first centre came in round nine got the leftovers, and their category grid usually shows it in blocks. Next year the same manager starts the same run.

Reaches and steals against the draft market

The market is average draft position from real fantasy basketball drafts, the same order the cheat sheet and the mock room use. For each pick with a market price, the market position minus the pick number is the gap: positive means the manager took the player before the market would have, a reach; negative means the player fell to them, a steal. The five biggest each way are listed with faces, and every pick carries its gap in the board below. Keepers are not choices and are left out; a player the market does not rank has no gap rather than a made-up one. The per-manager sentence folds the average gap in with when they took their first centre and how long they waited on a point guard, the same three clauses the football page writes, in basketball words.

The nine-category grid, and the punt you did not know you drafted

A points league sums projected points per roster and ranks the rosters. A categories league gets the grid: for each category the league counts, points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, threes, field-goal percentage, free-throw percentage and turnovers, every drafted player's category score from our projections, the same attempt-weighted per-player z-score the rankings board and My Team price, is summed per roster, and each roster is ranked in the room for that category. Green cells are the top third of the room, red the bottom third. The roster that ranks first in blocks and rebounds and last in free-throw percentage has drafted a punt, and the honest move is to lean into it: the rankings board re-sorts with that category struck out, and the streamers page fills the weekly seats with players who help the eight you are still playing. A category the league spells in a way our pool does not price is left out of the grid and named, never guessed.

Where the draft comes from

Basketball leagues live on Yahoo, ESPN and Sleeper. Yahoo and ESPN are read through our own server for a league you linked in Front Office, under your own login: Yahoo through its documented draft results resource, ESPN through the league document its own draft recap reads. Only a league you are a member of can be read, and only by you. A Sleeper league is public by its ID, so it is read the way the football Draft Intel reads one: you paste the ID, our server reads the league's completed drafts through Sleeper's documented API, holds the answer for an hour so the next reader costs the platform nothing, and keeps no copy. Each pick is matched to our player pages by id where the platform's ids are ours already, which they are for ESPN, and by name and club where they are not, the same match the trending list on the players page uses; a pick that cannot be matched keeps the name your league gave it and is counted in the note under the league name. Manager names are the team names your league uses. No account id, no email and no avatar leaves the platform.

Keepers, auctions and the load-management season

A keeper league's draft opens with the keepers already placed, so a first-round seat that is really a keeper slot is not a choice anyone made this year; the page flags keepers where the platform reports them and leaves them out of the reach and steal lists. An auction league arrives with a dollar cost on every pick, shown in the board; the gap column still measures against the market's draft position, a weaker comparison for an auction, so read it as a hint. What no draft record can see is the season itself: games per week, back-to-backs, the nights a star sits for rest. That is why the week starts on the schedule planner and the injury page, and why the draft page is for reading the room rather than setting the lineup.

After you have read it

Three buttons take the draft somewhere. The mock room opens with this league's roster shape, its size and your seat, so the reps are against a room the right shape. Grade this draft sends the picks into Grade My Draft, where every roster gets the four-component report card and the category balance strip. Open it in the companion replays the draft onto the companion board, useful for a league that drafts in stages or for following a friend's draft on a second screen. There is no bye week in basketball, so the football page's stacked-week check has no counterpart here; the tendency sentence and the room's habits are the same maths in a different sport.