Standings

The columns

W and L are wins and losses; PCT is winning percentage, which orders the table because the eighty-two-game schedule is uneven for weeks at a time and a club with games in hand deserves its place. GB is games back of the conference leader, the figure the seeding race is actually run on. Home and Road split the record by venue, which is a fantasy fact as much as a basketball one: a club that is twelve games better at home is a club whose stars play the whole fourth quarter there and sit it on the road. L10 is the record over the last ten games, Strk the current streak, and Diff the average point differential, which at this level of play predicts the second half of a season better than the record itself. Pace and scoring come from the same feed and are read on the club pages.

The seed view, and the two lines

Switch to the seed view and each conference is one list from first to fifteenth, with two rules drawn across it. The solid line under sixth place is the playoff line: the clubs above it are in. The dashed line under tenth is the play-in line: seventh to tenth play a short tournament for the last two places, and clubs below it are done in April. The lines are the whole reason the standings matter for fantasy in March. A club sitting ninth with a week left plays its starters forty minutes a night to reach seventh, and a club sitting fourth with its seed locked rests them, so the same fantasy playoff week is a different proposition depending on which side of a line your players' clubs are standing.

Tanking, and what it does to a roster

A club with nothing to play for by February rests its best players under the load-management rules, gives its second unit the fourth quarter, and hands its rookies the minutes the veterans used to have. For a category league that is the season's largest single supply of free-agent value: a fringe forward on a lottery-bound club can play thirty-four minutes a night for six weeks, and the standings are the first place it shows. Read the bottom of each conference in the seed view with the player directory open, and look at the third and fourth options on each of those clubs before their minutes become common knowledge.

Home, road, and the second night

The home and road split has one more use. Clubs rest stars far more often on the second night of a back-to-back, and far more often when that second night is on the road. A player whose club is a strong home side and a poor road one is, in practice, a player who plays his full minutes about half the week; the schedule planner marks the back-to-backs, and this table tells you which clubs have a record worth resting for.

Before the season, and the season marked

Until opening night the table shows last season's final standings and says so above the list, because a page with nothing in it helps nobody and a page pretending a new season has begun helps less. The feed marks the table it carries, the notice repeats the season the numbers belong to, and the band names the date the table was rebuilt. Once games are played the notice goes and the current season takes over, rebuilt after each night's results.

Standings are rebuilt from our own feed after each night's games. If they are unavailable the page says so rather than showing an old table as though it were new.