Mock Draft RoomDraft against a basketball room

Why the centers and the point guards go early

Position scarcity is weak in fantasy basketball compared with football, because a PG/SG fills two dedicated seats, the guard seat and any utility seat, and most players carry two eligibilities. The exception is the center, and on the standard two-center roster it is a hard one: twenty-four center seats in a twelve-team room, the fewest players eligible to sit in them, and a category profile (rebounds, blocks, field-goal percentage, and often a free-throw percentage that hurts) that nobody else on the board supplies. The elite point guards are scarce in a softer way: the assists and steals pool is shallow at the top, and a build that waits on it ends up chasing assists off the waiver wire all season. The room reads the tiers of both positions off the board as it stands, where the value between two consecutive centers, or point guards, steps down unusually far, and the watch tile above the board counts the best remaining tier down. When it says three top-tier centers are left before a drop of nine, the suggestion card says the same thing in the same words, and the drafter with an open center seat should weigh it. The computer seats are not pushed by that tile; they draft off draft position, which already sends the top centers in the first three rounds, so the run you see in a Realistic room is the market’s, not a rule we invented.

Punting, and what the room does with a punt

A punt is a decision to lose a category on purpose so the other eight are easier to win. The classic ones are free-throw percentage, which lets you take the big men who dominate rebounds, blocks and field-goal percentage without paying for their line at the stripe, and assists, which frees a roster to load up on scoring wings. Some managers punt turnovers, on the argument that the players who commit them are the players who have the ball, and some punt threes. The room treats a punt as a pricing change, not a note to self: strike FT% on the punt row and the pool is fetched again with eight categories instead of nine, every z-score summed without the one you dropped, so a poor free-throw shooter’s value rises and a specialist’s falls, and the tiers redraw. The suggestion card then reads in those terms: your punt is FT%, this pick adds so much z in the categories you play, and his figure in the punted category costs you nothing. The my-team panel keeps a running balance of your roster’s z per category with the two thinnest marked, because the second half of a punt build is making sure the categories you kept are actually winnable, and a card will say when a player lifts the ones you are short in.

Points formats, and the best-game formats the hosts push at beginners

Every host now defaults a new league to a points-style format: an eleven-stat points table on one platform, a six-stat table on another, and best-game formats where each starter’s single best game of the week is the one that counts. The two points chips price the board by those tables, and a points room is a simpler draft: the value is one number, the punt row disappears, and the question is mostly how early to take a high-usage scorer. The best-game formats are not offered as a chip because they change what a player is worth in a way a season total cannot see, a high-variance scorer is worth more when only his best night counts, and we would rather not price something we cannot yet measure. A mock in the points table nearest your league is still the right rehearsal for the draft itself: the seats, the run on centers and the timing of your picks are the same.

How a computer seat picks

Each seat looks at a window of the next players by average draft position, weights the nearest most heavily, and bends the choice toward what its roster still lacks, counting every seat a player could fill. The three styles are those two settings. Chalk looks two players deep and weights need at about half strength, so it takes the consensus pick nearly every time. Realistic looks seven deep with need at full strength, which is what a room of people who each have a list and a roster looks like. Chaotic looks sixteen deep and lets need slip, so a seat can reach for a name you had pencilled in for three rounds later. A basketball seat pulls toward an open lineup seat a little harder than a football seat does, because ten of the thirteen picks are starters and a seat that carries an open center seat into the bench rounds is a seat that finishes without one, and it discounts a player who fills nothing while starters are still open. Every room draws a seed and writes it into the page address along with the roster, format, punts, size and your seat, so the link in your address bar re-runs the same room, for you a week later or a friend in the group chat.

What the room gets right about basketball, and where it is weak

The roster presets are the shapes the hosts actually run: one host’s default of PG, SG, G, SF, PF, F, two centers, two utility, three bench and three injured-list seats; another’s of one center and three utility seats; and a third shape with four bench seats that we have not been able to verify against a published default, and say so where it is chosen. Nobody drafts into an injured-list seat, so the room drafts thirteen rounds on all three. Every player carries the eligibility his host lists, so a forward with center eligibility can be seated at center when that is what the lineup needs, and the grade seats him the same way. Where the room is weak: it knows nothing about games per week, back-to-backs or the schedule of your fantasy playoffs, which matter for the last three picks more than value does; it cannot model a best-game format; and its values are our own, because no crowd trade-value feed exists for basketball, so they are stated as MustDraft numbers everywhere they appear. Once the order is settled the draft order page draws it with a link as the receipt, and if your league bids instead of picks, the auction values are this same pool priced in dollars.