Mock Draft RoomDraft against a basketball room

Match the room to your league before you start

The three roster chips describe seats rather than brands. Two centers is the classic category lineup: point guard, shooting guard, a guard seat, small forward, power forward, a forward seat, two centers and two utility seats, with three players on the bench. Three utility keeps a single center seat and turns the second into a third utility spot. Four bench starts nine players, with one center, two utility seats and a longer bench. Nobody drafts into an injured-list seat, so every shape comes out at thirteen rounds. The format chips cover nine-category head-to-head, the same list without turnovers (8-cat), rotisserie over all nine across the whole season, and two points tables: one that scores eleven box-score figures, made and missed shots included, and a lighter one built on six. League size runs from eight to sixteen teams. A five- or ten-round draft is there for the evening you only want to test your opening picks. The three preset cards at the top fill every setting in one tap for the setups most leagues use, and anything can be changed afterwards.

Your slot shapes the draft more than your list does

In a snake draft the slot sets the rhythm of everything that follows. The strip under Your pick shows each slot's first two selections, and the sentence beneath it spells out yours: from the sixth slot of twelve you choose sixth and nineteenth, with twelve picks in between; from either end you take two players back to back and then sit through twenty-two picks before your next pair. That wait matters in basketball because a player's value comes as a bundle of categories. Take a high-assist point guard at the turn and the rebounding center you planned to pair with him may be gone before you pick again. Run the same plan from the first slot, the middle and the last before draft day, and use Random seat if your league only draws the order on the night.

How the board prices a player in a category league

Under 9-cat, 8-cat or roto, a player's worth starts as a set of z-scores: for each category in play, how far his projection sits above or below the rest of the pool, measured in that category's own spread. Added together they say how much he helps across your whole stat line. Field-goal and free-throw percentage are scored on impact rather than on the bare percentage, because a center who makes two-thirds of four shots a night moves your weekly percentage far less than a forward shooting a little worse on fifteen. Turnovers are flipped so that fewer counts as better. On the board, the Value column is MustDraft's overall figure for the player on this format, which is what the value rank, the suggestions and the grade all read, and the column beside it is the raw material: his summed category z, or projected fantasy points under a points table. Sort by draft position to see the room's order and by our value to see where the two part company. Those gaps are where a draft is won: a player the market takes forty picks before our numbers would is a reach you can leave to someone else, and the reverse is a player you can afford to wait on.

Punt builds, and why the pool is priced again when you strike a category

Punting means writing a category off on purpose so the others become cheaper to win. In a nine-category matchup five category wins make a winning week, so a team that concedes free-throw percentage every week and takes five or six of the rest is a strong team. Each common build pairs a punt with the players it unlocks. Give up free throws and the rebounding, shot-blocking centers who struggle at the line turn into bargains. Give up assists, often with threes, and a roster built on forwards and centers gets much easier to assemble. Give up the big-man categories (rebounds, blocks and field-goal percentage) and you can stack guards and wings who score, pass, shoot threes and steal. Tap one or more categories on the Punt row before the draft and the pool is fetched again without them. It is a genuine re-pricing, not a filter: every z-score is measured against the categories that remain, so a poor free-throw shooter climbs, a specialist whose value lived in the struck column falls, and the tiers redraw around the new numbers. You can strike every category but one. The row only appears in a category format, because a points table has nothing to give up.

What the room tells you while you are on the clock

Once the draft is running, three readouts help you choose. The Next turn column plays the picks between now and your next selection out a hundred and fifty times and shows how often each player survives to reach you: under twenty percent and he is almost certainly gone, eighty or above and you can safely wait. The Suggestions panel names a handful of players with their reasons in plain sentences, such as how far the market ranks him ahead of or behind this pick, which open seat he fills, how much z he adds across the categories you kept, whether he lifts your two thinnest categories, and whether he is the last of a tier. Under My team a balance strip adds up your roster's z in each category as you go and marks the two weakest you are still playing, which is the fastest way to notice that four straight big men have left you with no threes. Star a player to queue him; with Auto-pick on, the room takes the first queued player still on the board, or its own best choice when the queue is empty. Undo winds the draft back to your last pick if you clicked too fast.

Centers, point guards and the scarce-seat warning

Many basketball players are listed at two positions, and the guard, forward and utility seats accept a wide range of them, so position usually matters less in a basketball draft than it does in other fantasy sports. Two spots break that rule. On the two-center shape a twelve-team room starts twenty-four centers, the smallest group of eligible players has to fill those seats, and centers supply rebounds, blocks and field-goal percentage that a guard-heavy roster cannot replace. Assists are the other pinch: they are concentrated among a fairly small number of lead ball handlers, and a team that waits too long on them spends the season chasing them on waivers. The room draws value tiers for centers and point guards from the board in front of it, breaking a tier wherever the step down from one player to the next is unusually large, and the Scarce seats tile above the board counts how many remain in the best tier still available. When only a few are left before a drop, the suggestion card says so in the same words. The computer seats do not read that tile; they follow draft position, so a run on centers in your mock is the market's own habit, which is exactly what you want to rehearse against.

How the other eleven seats choose

Each computer seat looks at a short list of the next players by average draft position, favours the ones nearest the top, and leans toward anyone who fills a lineup seat it still has open, counting every position a player is eligible for. Basketball seats lean on that need harder than the football room's seats do, because most of the thirteen picks are starters. The Opponents chips change how long that list is and how strongly need pulls. Chalk looks two players deep and gives need about half its weight, so it rarely strays from consensus; it shows you the earliest a player can realistically fall. Realistic looks seven deep with need at full weight, the closest match to a room of people working from their own lists. Chaotic looks sixteen deep and lets need slip, which produces the strange drafts: an early pile-up at one position, a favourite gone three rounds before you expected. Once a seat has no more picks left than open starting seats, it must fill them, and from then on a player who fits nowhere is passed over. Every room gets a seed, and the seed goes into the page address with the rest of your settings, so you or anyone you send the link to can open the same room again. Their own picks change it from there, but the start is identical.

After the last pick: the report

The report seats your roster in its best legal lineup, lists your three best bargains and three biggest reaches (the picks where the pick number and our value rank disagree most), and lines up every team in the room by the value of its starters, the value of its bench and how many center-eligible players it took. The grade sits at the top and its formula is folded just below. Draft this room again keeps the seed and your settings, and New room starts over. Signed in, the draft saves to your account as you go, and a saved draft can be shared as a report, sent to a friend as a challenge in the same room, or turned into a grade card for the group chat.

What a mock cannot tell you

The values are MustDraft's own, built from our projections rather than from a crowd market, so read them as one informed opinion among several. The room ignores the calendar: how many games each club plays in your fantasy playoff weeks, which clubs are buried in back-to-backs, and the four-game weeks you will stream around later in the season. Those questions matter most for your final few picks, and the schedule grid answers them. It does not price best-game or high-score formats either, where only a player's top night of the week counts and streaky scorers gain value. And it cannot know the people in your league: the friend who always takes his hometown club early, or the manager who punts the same category every year. If your league drafts by auction, the auction values page prices this same pool in dollars, and the draft order page draws your snake order with a link anyone can check.