COURT GUIDE

Streaming is the in-season game, and the add cap is the rule it is played under

Fantasy basketball lineups lock one game at a time, every night, and a thirteen-man roster never has every seat busy on the same night. Streaming is the habit of filling the idle seats: drop the bench player whose club is off, add a free agent whose club plays, and take whatever he puts up. Over a head-to-head week the extra games add up, and the edge is largest on the nights when almost nobody plays. A Wednesday with twelve games gives every manager a full lineup; a Thursday with three games leaves most benches dark, and a rotation player on one of the six clubs dressing that night is worth more to you than a star sitting at home.

The rule that shapes it is the weekly acquisition limit, four adds a week on the host most category leagues use. Four adds is not four nights; it is four decisions, and this page is built to make each one count.

Read the rest

Which night the page opens on, and why

The strip along the top shows the next fourteen nights with the league-wide game count under each, and the page opens on the night inside the coming seven days with the fewest games. That is the thinnest night, and the thinnest night is where a streamer is worth most: on a twelve-game night the player you add has to beat a starter you already own for a place in the lineup, while on a three-game night the seat is simply empty and anyone who plays beats nobody. Through most of the season the thin nights are scattered rather than fixed, because the league's calendar does not run on a weekly rhythm the way a football one does, so the strip is worth a glance every Monday rather than a rule learned once. Before the season opens the page shows the first week of the schedule and says so in the band. Tap any night to move the list to it, and the link you copy carries the night.

Games left this week: what one add actually buys

The column beside the night says how many games the player's club has left in the fantasy week, counted from the chosen night to Sunday. It is the number that turns a nightly pickup into a weekly one. An add on Monday for a player whose club plays four times before Sunday buys four games out of one acquisition; the same add on Saturday buys one. Under a four-add cap that difference decides the week, and it is why the column sits ahead of the category figures rather than after them. A player whose club has a back-to-back inside the window is flagged on the night column, because the second night of a back-to-back is the night a coach is most likely to rest anyone with a sore knee, and a player with fewer games left is a smaller bet whatever his line says. The fantasy week here runs Monday to Sunday, the default on the major hosts.

The roster-percentage ceiling

A streamer has to be available to you, and the closest thing to a league-wide measure of availability is the share of fantasy leagues that already have a player rostered. The slider sets a ceiling, 50 percent by default: a player rostered in more leagues than that is left off the list because in a typical league he is probably already gone. Drop it to 20 percent for a deep fourteen-team league where only the genuinely unowned are left, or push it up to 80 percent for a shallow ten-team league where useful players sit on waivers for weeks. The figure on each row is the current share, and a player the roster data does not list at all is shown as unlisted and kept on the list, because the most likely reason nobody tracks him is that nobody has him.

How the value is scored, and why the percentages are different

Every figure in the category columns is a per-game rate from our own projection model, the same one behind the player pages, and the value at the end of the row is that line scored the way your league scores it. In a category league each stat is turned into a z-score against every player the model projects and the z-scores are summed over the categories you keep. Turnovers are turned so that fewer counts as better. The two percentages are handled differently, because a percentage on its own says nothing about how much it moves a lineup: a 60 percent shooter on three attempts a night and a 60 percent shooter on twenty are not the same player. Each is scored on its impact, makes minus attempts times the pool's own percentage, and the z is taken on that, which is how the category reference sites do it and how your league's weekly FG% is actually computed. A punted category stays visible on the list, greyed and struck through, and leaves the sum; the picker remembers the punt in the link. In a points league the same line is multiplied by the point weights instead and shown as points per game, in either of the two shapes a points league takes.

Punting on the waiver wire

Punting is the category strategy of giving up one or two categories on purpose to win the rest, and the waiver wire is where a punt is maintained. A team punting free-throw percentage wants the big man who shoots 55 percent from the line and blocks two shots, and the standard rankings bury him for the very thing the punt ignores. Tap the punt button under a category and the list re-sorts without it, so the same three-game Thursday shows a different top five for a free-throw punt than for an assists punt. Position chips filter to a slot: the five positions, or the guard and forward groups a lineup seat is usually named by, with a player matching whenever his eligibility list holds the position.

Injuries and what this page does not know

A player ruled out on the injury report is left off the list and counted in the band, because a player who is not playing is not a streamer whatever his line says; a player listed day-to-day stays on it with the designation beside his name, because day-to-day in basketball usually means he plays. The page does not know your roster, your league's free-agent list or your opponent's, so a player shown here may already be owned in your league and the ceiling is only a proxy. It does not know tonight's starting five or a late scratch, and the projections are ours alone, not a consensus; before the season opens they rest on last season's game logs and an ageing curve, so a rookie or a player who changed clubs over the summer is projected from less than the rest. The night, the ceiling, the categories, the punts and the position are all written into the address, so the link you copy opens the same list for anyone in the group chat.

The schedule, the roster percentages and the injury report are refreshed on our own feeds. If a feed is unavailable the page says so rather than showing a stale list.

Streamers