If you’ve never played fantasy basketball before the NBA’s season is just about to start and now is your chance. You play by picking your favorite superstars and letting them accumulate points, rebounds, blocks, etc. for your team. There are several ways fantasy basketball leagues can be run and we’ll look at the different popular setups you will be able to choose from.
So exactly how does fantasy basketball work? Well if you’ve ever played fantasy baseball or basketball it will seem very familiar. To start the season you’ll draft a roster, usually with around 10 starters and several bench players to serve as backups. There are five positions in basketball: point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center. Depending on where you play fantasy basketball, they will judge what positions each actual player in the NBA is eligible to play for your fantasy team, based on their real playtime positions. Several spots on your roster will be combo spots, where you can start either type of guard, or either type of forward, or perhaps utility spots where you can start any kind of player.
Now what kind of team you draft will be very dependent on what type of league you use: a points based league, like fantasy football, where your players get a certain amount of points for each good thing they do, or a category based league, like fantasy baseball, where you try to beat your opponent by getting higher stats in different important categories. The big eight categories in fantasy basketball are points, 3-pointers, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals, field goal percentage, and free throw percentage. Those are usually the ones you will need to be concerned with for your team.
If you play in a points based league, you just want the players who get the most points from doing all of these. If you get two points for a rebound, two points for a steal, one point for every point scored, -1 point for every shot missed, and so on and so on, then basically everything goes into the same pot. It doesn’t matter how the guy gets his points or avoids losing points in some cases, just so long as he gets a lot of points.
If you play in a category league, things are very different. Here you need to lead in a category over your opponent to win that category. So if your team gets 30 rebounds and your opponent gets 27 rebounds you win that week’s rebound category. You want to win as many categories as possible, but it’s not possible to get a team of players who are great in all eight categories. Some players are league leaders in rebounds, but not in points. Some guys are great on defensive categories like blocks and steals but are bad at making their free throws. You could try and draft a team that covers all your bases, but that means while you might not have any weakness, you won’t have any overwhelming strengths.
Also in category leagues you can choose to play head-to-head against an opponent each week or rotisserie style where you compete against your whole league to win each category for the whole season. This creates some difference too as it’s not possible to take advantage of an opponent’s weak categories by just being decent at that category and getting a win. In roto you compete against everyone, so just being solid in a category puts you in the middle of the pack.
As you can tell there’s a lot of popular variation in fantasy basketball so you can pick the style of play that most suits you. In fantasy sports basketball is that sort of third child people aren’t sure what to do with. Is it an intricate statistical game like baseball that lends itself to category based play, or is it a more in-your-face direct game that lends itself to points? It’s a little of both, not quite so individual a sport as baseball nor quite so much a team sport as football.
In the 2nd part of this series I will look into where you can play fantasy basketball on the web, provide more in depth discussion on strategy, and introduce some of the better known fantasy stars in the NBA. Until then—
