Teams
Court guide
Why a fantasy manager reads the league by club
Fantasy basketball is won by the game, and games belong to clubs. A player's week is his club's week: four games or two, a back-to-back or a rest day, a Saturday against a slow team or a Friday on the road on the second night. That is why this page is arranged by conference and division rather than as a flat list, and why each card carries the club's game count for the current fantasy week beside last season's record. The count is the first thing to check before a trade or a start, and the record is the plain context for a club's pace and its rotation: a club that won 60 rests its starters in April, and a club that won 25 plays its young players every night.
Every card opens the club hub, which carries the roster by position with last season's per-game lines and the games-per-week strip for the coming month.
Read the rest
Read the rest
Conferences, divisions and the schedule
The league schedules by division and conference: a club plays its four division rivals four times each, most of its conference twelve more clubs three or four times, and the other conference twice each. The shape does not change a fantasy week much on its own, but it decides the road trips, and road trips are where the back-to-backs pile up. A west-coast club on an eastern swing plays four games in six nights in four cities, and its veterans sit one of them; the same club at home plays every other night and everyone plays. The hub's games-per-week strip shows the nights, and the schedule grid shows every club at once with the back-to-backs in gold.
Reading the record for fantasy
Last season's record is here as context, not as a projection. Where it matters is the end of the season, which is where fantasy playoffs are decided. A club that has clinched its seed by late March rests starters and hands minutes to the bench, so a star on a 60-win club is a worse playoff-week asset than his line says and his backup is a better one. A club in the play-in race plays its starters through the last week. The margin figure on the hub, points scored minus points allowed per game, is the quickest read on which kind of club it is likely to be.
Which clubs a category manager watches
Three kinds of club matter more than their record suggests. The first is the club with a thin bench, because its starters play 36 minutes and its backups are the first names worth a waiver claim when anyone sits. The second is the club that plays fast: a club near the top of the league in possessions per game turns the same minutes into more shots, more rebounds and more steals for everyone on the floor, which is why a mid-rotation guard on a fast club can out-produce a starter on a slow one. The third is the club whose calendar runs against the league's: a club with several games on the thin nights of the season, when only a handful of teams play, is the club whose spare parts are worth streaming most often. The hub's games-per-week strip and the schedule grid's day-by-day view are where those nights show up.
What this page does not know
It does not know a trade that has not reached the feed, tonight's starting five or a rest day announced at shootaround. The record and the per-game lines are last season's until this season's games are played, and every figure comes from our own feeds and refreshes with them; when a feed is unavailable the cards say so rather than showing a stale number.