COURT GUIDE

Fill the empty lineup seats on the quiet nights

Basketball lineups are set one night at a time, and on most nights part of your roster has no game. Streaming means spending your waiver adds to put a player who does have a game into one of those idle seats. The payoff is largest on the light nights, when only a handful of clubs play. On a full slate your bench is already crowded with starters you cannot fit in; on a four- or five-game night half your lineup may be sitting, and nearly anyone who takes the floor is an upgrade.

Most leagues cap the adds, commonly at four a week, so each one has to buy as many useful games as it can. This page opens on the lightest night of the coming week, lists the players on the clubs in action who are rostered in fewer leagues than your ceiling, and ranks them by what one game is worth in your categories.

Read the rest

The night the page lands on

The strip at the top covers the next fourteen nights, each with the number of games scheduled across the league, and the quiet ones are marked. The page opens on the night inside the coming seven days with the fewest games, taking the earlier night when two are tied. That is where a streamer earns the most. On a crowded slate the player you pick up has to beat a starter you already have for a place in the lineup, and often he cannot. On a sparse one the seat would otherwise sit empty, so any productive player who suits up is a pure gain. The NBA calendar has no fixed weekly shape, and the light nights move around from week to week, which is why the strip is worth checking every Monday rather than memorizing once. Before the season starts the strip begins on opening night and the band says the season has not opened yet. Tap any night to rank the players for it instead, and the link you copy will open on that night.

Games left: how much one add buys

The Left column counts the games a player's club has from the chosen night to the end of the fantasy week, that night included, with the week running Monday to Sunday. It is the figure that turns a one-night pickup into a weekly decision. Add a player on Monday whose club plays four more times and one transaction buys four games; make the same move on Saturday and it buys one. When your league allows only a few adds a week, that difference often decides the matchup, so read the Left column before the category figures. The small number under it is his projected minutes per game, a quick check on whether those games come with a real role. Managers who stream hard also chain their moves, timing each add to the next stretch of games for a new club, so a single bench spot works most nights of the week. The column tells you how long each link in that chain lasts.

Back-to-backs work both ways

The Night column shows the opponent, with vs for a home game and at for a road game, and flags any back-to-back. A first-night flag means his club plays again tomorrow, so one add covers two games on consecutive nights, which is the simplest streaming move there is. A second-night flag carries more risk, because teams are most likely to rest a veteran or a player managing an injury on the second night of a pair. Neither flag makes a player a bad add on its own. It tells you what to check: a young rotation player on the second night is rarely a concern, while a thirty-something starter with a sore knee might be.

Setting the rostered ceiling

A streamer only helps if he is on your waiver wire, and the best broad signal for that is the share of fantasy leagues where he is already on a roster. The slider sets a ceiling between 20 and 80 percent, 50 by default, and anyone rostered above it is left off. Pull it down toward 20 in a deep league of fourteen or sixteen teams, where only the genuinely unowned are left. Push it toward 80 in an eight- or ten-team league, where useful players can sit unclaimed for weeks. The Rostered column shows each player's current share. A player missing from the roster data is labelled unlisted and kept on the list, since the likeliest reason nobody tracks him is that nobody has him.

Scoring a single game in your categories

Each category figure on a row is a per-game rate from our own projection model, and the Value column scores that one game the way your league does. In a category league every stat becomes a z-score, its distance from the average of every player the model projects in units of that stat's spread, and the z-scores are summed over the categories you keep. Turnovers are reversed so that fewer is better. The shooting percentages are scored on impact, makes minus attempts times the pool's own percentage, because a high-volume shooter moves a weekly percentage far more than a low-volume one with the same mark. Cell shading shows where each figure sits against the pool, from well above to well below. Pick 9-cat or 8-cat to fill the categories in one tap, or tap individual stats to match your league exactly, including field goals or free throws made if your league counts them. Under either points format the line is multiplied by that table's point values and shown as points per game: one table counts eleven figures including made and missed shots, the other counts six.

Streaming for categories, not just for games

By the middle of a head-to-head category week the scoreboard tells you what is still in play, and the smartest streams chase the categories that are close. If you trail by four blocks and lead comfortably in points, a shot-blocking center with modest scoring is worth more to you than the best scorer on the list. If you hold a narrow edge in field-goal percentage, a high-volume, low-percentage shooter can cost you that category while adding points you did not need. The picker handles this directly. Use Punt to switch off any category you have already won or already lost this week, and the list re-ranks by the ones still worth fighting for. The position chips (PG, SG, SF, PF and C, plus G and F for the guard and forward seats) narrow the list to players who can fill an open lineup spot, matching any position on a player's eligibility list. In a points league the logic is simpler: games and minutes are almost everything.

What the list leaves out

Players listed as out, out for the season, on the injured list or suspended are dropped from the list and counted in the status line under the page title, because a player who is not suiting up cannot help tonight however good his numbers look. Any lighter designation, day-to-day for example, keeps a player on the list with the status beside his name, since many of those players do suit up; check the news before tip-off. The page cannot see your league, so a player shown here may already be taken in it, and the rostered ceiling is only a stand-in for your own waiver wire. It does not know tonight's starting lineups or a late scratch. The projections are one model's view, built by us, and they rest on less evidence for rookies and for players who changed clubs or roles. The night, the ceiling, the format, the categories, the punts and the position all go into the address, so Copy link to this night shares the exact list you are looking at.

The schedule, the rostered shares and the injury report are refreshed on our own feeds. If one of them is unavailable the page says so rather than showing an old list. For the week-by-week counts behind these nights, open the schedule grid.

Streamers