Basketball Trade Analyzer

Z-scores, and shooting percentages that count the shots

Before two packages can be compared across columns, the columns need a common unit. Steals and points are both counted in ones, yet one extra steal a night separates a disruptive defender from an ordinary one, while one extra point a night barely separates anybody. The standard fix in category basketball, long used by the dedicated ranking sites, is the z-score: measure how far a player's projected line sits from the middle of the player pool in that stat, and express the distance in standard deviations of the pool. A player at +1.5 in steals is a rare ball hawk; one at -0.3 in threes is a little below the typical rostered player. The pool on this page is the set of players our projections price for your league size and roster rule, the same pool the category board is built from, so the figure beside a name here matches the one you see there.

Field-goal and free-throw percentage take an extra step because they are ratios, and what a ratio does to your team depends on how many shots stand behind it. A reserve forward who hits 60 percent on three attempts a night barely nudges your team mark, while a lead scorer at 45 percent on twenty attempts pulls it down every night he plays. So each percentage is weighted by volume: the pool's average and spread are computed with every player weighted by his attempts, and a player's distance from that average is scaled by how much shooting he does compared with a typical player. Under each side's figure the ledger also prints the plain arithmetic, the package's combined makes over attempts and its attempts per game, so you can check the direction yourself. Turnovers are the one stat where less is better, and they arrive already flipped, which means a careful ball handler shows a positive number like every other strength.

Reading the net, and the too-close band

The bottom row adds up the edges: Team A's summed z minus Team B's in every category still in play, plus the open-seat line when one exists. A net of +0.8 says that, spread over the whole ledger, Team A finishes a little under one standard deviation of one category ahead. When the net lands within 0.25 of a z on either side, the stamp reads too close. Projections are estimates, 0.25 of a z is well inside how far a season line can miss, and in that band the individual rows should settle the question rather than the total.

How you read those rows depends on how your league turns categories into results. In a head-to-head league scored by each category, every column is its own win or loss in the standings, so a deal that wins five columns narrowly and loses four heavily can still improve your record even with a negative net. In a most-categories league the week is a single win or loss for whoever takes the majority, and the useful question is narrower: does the trade turn a column you usually lose into one you usually win, without giving back a column you rely on. Either way a category taken by a sliver counts exactly as much as one taken by a mile, which a summed total hides and the edge column shows.

Punting, and why roto is different

Punting means deciding in advance to lose a category every week so the roster can be built to win the rest. It is far more common in basketball than in other fantasy sports because the stats pull against each other so hard: the bigs who rebound and block shots often struggle at the foul line, and the guards who pile up threes and assists tend to give the ball away more. A manager who has given up on free-throw percentage should not care that a deal costs him free throws, and an analyzer that keeps counting that column is judging a team he is not building.

Each category in the picker carries a Punt button. A punted row stays on the ledger, struck through so the movement stays visible, but it leaves the net and the verdict sentence. Punts travel inside the shared link, so a league mate who opens it sees your build; if he punts something else he can flip the toggles and read his own answer from the same players without retyping anything. This fits head-to-head play, where a majority of columns is all you need in a given week. In a rotisserie league every place in every category is worth standings points across the entire season, so conceding a column usually costs more than it returns. If you play roto, leave the toggles off and read the full net.

Consolidation trades and the empty roster spot

Two-for-one deals are the everyday trade in category basketball, and adding up two players against one flatters the bigger package. The side that receives one player and sends two ends up with an empty roster spot, and in a sport with daily lineups an empty spot has real worth: it can hold a waiver pickup, or rotate through short-term adds on nights when your regulars sit. The fair comparison is therefore the single player plus whoever fills that spot, against the pair.

The ledger puts that on a line of its own. Our pool sets a replacement level at each position, roughly the value of the best player still unrostered there in a league of your size, and the shorter side is credited with it, labelled as an open seat rather than folded into anyone's figure. The seat counted is the one vacated by the cheapest player that side sent away, and when he was eligible at two positions the better of the two replacement levels is used, because a manager would fill the spot from whichever position is deeper. League size matters a great deal here. In eight- and ten-team leagues the waiver wire is rich and consolidating is cheap; at fourteen or sixteen teams the free agents are thin and the open-seat credit shrinks with them. Change the league size chip and watch that line move.

Combo guards, bigs and the center seats

Basketball positions overlap far more than positions in most fantasy sports. Plenty of players are listed at two spots, point guard and shooting guard or power forward and center, and standard rosters add a guard seat, a forward seat and utility seats that accept anyone. Positional need therefore rarely decides a deal on its own. The line under the verdict that describes roster shape counts players by full eligibility, writing a PG/SG as PG/SG, so you can see whether a trade leaves you holding five combo guards and nobody to start at forward.

Center is the exception, and the roster rule sets how sharp it is. The default shape starts two centers and two utility players, which in a twelve-team league means twenty-four center seats to fill from a short list of players with real center eligibility, so a genuine center is worth more than his raw stat line suggests. A shape with one center and three utility seats softens that pressure considerably. Because the pool is priced separately for each rule, and the replacement level at center is the figure that moves most between them, set the Roster rule chip to match your league before you trust a verdict on any deal that involves a big.

Game counts and the mid-week trade

Fantasy basketball lineups are set day by day, and inside one scoring week a club can play as few as two games or as many as five. The values on the ledger come from season-long projections, which is the right lens for a player you will keep until your playoffs and the wrong one for the matchup in front of you. The roster-shape line therefore adds the games each side's clubs play in the current fantasy week, so a mid-week deal shows at a glance that you are taking on, say, three games this week and sending out seven. Those are games scheduled, not games played: a veteran resting on the second night of a back-to-back sits one out, and a player ruled out plays none.

When a trade is close on the ledger, the calendar makes a fair tiebreaker. Most head-to-head leagues hold their playoffs over the last few weeks of the regular season, so check whose clubs are busy then. The schedule planner lays out every club's games and back-to-backs week by week, and the streamers page ranks the short-term pickups that could fill an open seat on the quiet nights.

Points tables and best-game leagues

Switch the format to Points and the ledger becomes a plain sum: each side's projected season points under the table you choose, MustDraft's value index beside it, the open seat at replacement, and the difference. In this mode the stamp calls a deal too close when the gap is within four percent of the larger package. Two tables are offered because points leagues disagree about shooting. The makes-and-misses table charges a point for every missed field goal and every missed free throw, so efficient scorers gain and high-volume, low-percentage shooters lose ground. The six-stat table scores points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks and turnovers and never charges for a miss, so minutes and usage drive nearly everything. If your league also rewards double-doubles, technical fouls or other extras, neither table is exact and the ledger is an approximation.

Some newer formats count only each starter's single best game of the week. That is a different contest from a points total: a player who posts one huge night and several quiet ones can beat a steadier player with a higher average. The ledger has no measure of a player's ceiling, so this page does not attempt to model those leagues.

The limits of this ledger

Every number here is ours. Basketball has no public trade market built from thousands of real deals that we can read, so the page has no way to say what your league mates would accept, only how the players compare in your categories under our valuation. It cannot see either roster, so it does not know whether the columns you gain are columns you were losing. It knows nothing about your league's trade deadline, roster limits, weekly add cap or veto rules. Position eligibility comes from our player directory and can lag a host's own update by a few days; a forward who has just gained center eligibility may still read as a forward on the roster-shape line. Injury news also moves faster than projections: a player ruled out for months is still priced on what he would produce if healthy, so check the injury report before you accept anything. The players, format, league size, roster rule, categories and punts are all stored in the page address, and anyone who opens your link sees the identical ledger.

Values are recomputed from the projections every day. If live pricing fails, the page falls back to a saved copy of the default board and says so in the status line, and when that saved copy does not match your settings it tells you nothing can be priced instead of showing the wrong ledger.