NBA Player Directory: Search by Position and Club, Trending Adds

COURT GUIDE

How to use the directory, and what multi-eligibility does to a roster

This is the front door to every player page on the basketball side of the site. Type a few letters of a name and the list narrows as you go; the search forgives a missing accent, a nickname or a typo, so Jokic finds Jokić and Shai finds Gilgeous-Alexander. The position chips filter by eligibility rather than by a single listed position, which matters more in basketball than in any other fantasy sport: a player listed at two positions matches both chips, and the Guards and Forwards chips match anyone eligible at either position in the group, the way a lineup's G and F seats do. The club menu narrows to one roster, and the three figures on each row are last season's per-game points, rebounds and assists.

Above the directory, the trending module lists the players added and dropped most over the last day across thousands of leagues, which is the fastest read on who the waiver wire is moving on right now.

Read the rest

Why eligibility is the column that matters

A basketball roster is a set of seats with rules about who may sit in them, and on the two major hosts most of the seats are flexible: a guard seat takes a point guard or a shooting guard, a forward seat takes either forward, and two or three utility seats take anyone. The scarce seat is the centre, because one host starts two of them and the eligible pool is the smallest. A player who carries two positions is worth more than the same line from a player who carries one, because he can move between seats as the nightly schedule shifts, and a manager checking whether a trade target can actually start on Wednesday needs to know which seats he fits before the projection. That is why the directory prints every position a player is eligible at rather than the one his club lists him under, and why the chips filter on the whole list. Eligibility is set by the hosts from the positions a player actually plays, and it can be added to in season; the list here follows the feed and updates when it does.

Reading the per-game line

Points, rebounds and assists per game are the three figures most managers recognise on sight, and they are printed here as a quick sorting aid rather than as a ranking. Two things are worth remembering when you read them. The first is games played: a 22-point average over 40 games and a 22-point average over 78 are not the same season, and the GP column sits beside the figures for that reason. The second is that per-game lines describe last season's role, not this season's. A player who changed clubs in the summer, or whose club added a scorer ahead of him, will not repeat the line the directory shows, and the player page carries our projection for what he does next beside what he did last. A rookie or a player who spent last season outside the league shows dashes here, because there is no honest number to print.

Trending adds and drops

The two columns at the top count the players added and dropped most over the last day across a large sample of leagues, and the count beside each name is how many leagues moved on him. In basketball the list turns over fast: a starter goes down on Tuesday and his backup is the most-added player by Wednesday morning, and by the following week the backup is the most-dropped player when the starter returns. Reading the list is a shortcut to the news, but it is not a recommendation. A player everyone is adding is usually the right add only if you have the seat and the games; check him on the streamers page, which knows the schedule, before spending one of the week's adds on him. The drops column is the more useful half for a patient manager, because a player dropped in a hurry after two bad games is often worth a claim.

What the directory does not do

It does not rank anyone. The order of the list is the directory's own, and a search sorts by how well a name matches, so the top row of a filtered list is not the best player in it. The category board is the place for a ranking by value, with punts, and the schedule grid is the place for games per week. The directory does not carry injury designations either; the player page does, from the injury feed, and it carries the next seven days of the club's games with the back-to-backs marked. A player listed here without a club is a free agent in the real league, not in yours, and is kept so that his page and his last season stay reachable.

The directory and the trending counts are refreshed on our own feeds. If a feed is unavailable the page says so rather than showing a stale list.