Last Updated on September 30, 2025 4:27 pm by Keston Paul | Published: September 30, 2025

I originally dubbed this article “Quarterly Ranks Analysis” when I first had the idea last year. I have rebranded it as “Player Trends by Season Segments” to portray the idea more clearly. Fantasy seasons are in part, about runs. That is especially applicable to H2H where it’s “what have you done for me lately” with the weekly performances mattering a lot, but you might want to add extra stats for Roto from a guy on a hot streak too. Or, to sell high on that player. In H2H, a player might be extraordinary from a season-long perspective but fail you in the fantasy playoffs. A player may get off to a slow start and then pick things up. Another player’s value could be elevated by a couple of hot runs or even depressed by a poor stretch of play.

My goal is to review some of the most interesting names from different season segments and provide takeaways that we can carry forward. Those takeaways could be player-specific or they could be a broad view of how we perceive value. I want us to be better at identifying sell highs, buy lows, true breakouts and players hurtling toward a decline. What can be replicated and what can’t? What is sustainable and what isn’t? We will look at all of those things.

I collected different types of samples for this exercise.

Specific rankings and stats over an isolated time frame of 6-to-7 weeks which naturally splits the season into four quarters.

Cumulative rankings at the specific time frames. That would have been our “live” rankings at those points of the season from which we made decisions.

Pre-All-Star Break and Post-All-Star Break comparisons which mostly sums up production during the fantasy regular season and crunch time — pre-playoffs and the fantasy playoffs itself.

Season Quarters (per-game ranks)
First Quarter: 10/22//2024 to 12/01/2024 (6 Weeks)
Second Quarter: 12/02/2024 to 01/12/2025 (6 Weeks)
Third Quarter: 01/13/2025 to 03/02/2025 (7 Weeks)
Fourth Quarter: 03/03/2025 to 04/13/2025 (6 Weeks)

Cumulative Season-Long Ranks (per game)
6-Week Rank: 12/01/2024 (6 weeks)
12-Week Rank: 01/12/2025 (12 weeks)
19-Week Rank: 03/02/2025 (19 weeks)
25-Week Rank: 04/13/2025 (25 weeks)

Pre-All-Star Break Per-Game Rank: 10/22/2024 to 02/13/2025
Post-All-Star Break Per-Game Rank: 02/19/2025 to 04/13/2025

Note: The All-Star Break is in the third quarter, so if you combine the weeks before and after All-Star Weekend like the fantasy season does, it is also technically a six-week period.

Samples from the 2023-24 Season

Cam Thomas (2023-24)

Mikal Bridges (2023-24)

Jordan Poole (2023-24)

What’s New?

For our 2024-25 review, I have added the 8-cat per-game rankings alongside the 9-cat per-game rankings, as well as the Pre- and Post-All-Star Break averages.

Let us introduce things with Tyrese Haliburton.

It should be obviously clear by now that Haliburton is willing to play through injuries. He played through a hamstring strain in 2023-24 that impacted his numbers. He also played through a back injury at the beginning of 2024-25 that was barely even spoken about. Haliburton is already more of a pass-first player, but his efficiency dips and he becomes a bit more passive when he is playing through injuries. Now, we all know the result of him playing through a calf strain in the 2024-25 NBA Finals and we will not see him in the 2025-26 season. However, Haliburton is a good example to explain why we should pay very close attention to injuries and their impact on a player’s numbers, plus it should have been an easy bet that Haliburton would not continue shooting 40.5 percent from the field. He was an easy buy-low candidate.

2024-25 Quarterly Analysis

SLOW START

These are players who were underperforming expectations signifcantly early in the 2024-25 NBA season. We will try to see if there are any tells in the trends that could have alerted us to impending improvement, therefore making them a buy-low during their slow start.

Jalen Duren

Duren struggled in the first half of the season, only truly picking up his form around the beginning of January. Defensive issues were compounded by constant fouling and his free-throw percentage dip also did not help fantasy managers. In retrospect, you could say he was an “easy” buy low or player who could be projected to improve, but I disagree. Duren had a solid-to-strong first two seasons depending on who you ask, but there were clear defensive holes in his game that were concerning. I recall recommending patience with Duren consistently in our ask-the-pros discord, but that wavered just a little before he really picked up his play. Whatever his faults may be, Isaiah Stewart is a good backup center and was actually outplaying Duren at times during that early phase of the season, hence the minutes split. Also, remember Stewart was not in direct competition with Duren before, due to the head-scratching Stewart-at-PF experiment in prior years. I could see the FT% ticking back up, but the slightly expansion in role and minutes were not guaranteed if Duren didn’t fix some of his fouling issues and gain extra trust from JB Bickerstaff. However, the young big did seem to figure some things out. Perhaps the learning point here is being patient with a young player who can figure things out, but that seems a bit too vague and may not always be applicable.

Here are the positives for this season. While Isaiah Stewart was injured in the 2024-25 playoffs (only appeared in one game), Duren was able to “survive” 33.8 MPG in a six-game series against the Knicks with 4.3 fouls per game. He had five fouls in three of those games, but never fouled out. Duren still has some work to do, as those numbers still weren’t ideal, but he played a major role in a competitive series against the eventual Eastern Conference runner-ups. He also shot 82.6 percent on 3.8 free-throw attempts per game in the high-pressure environment of the playoffs, so Duren seems more likely to be a a respectable or below-average free-throw shooter than a bad one. He may just have some cold spells and hot spells at the charity stripe.

All that said, there will be clearer cases where you should have simply trusted a player’s history of work despite a slow start.

Desmond Bane

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Keston Paul

Keston majored in Biology and minored in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies (U.W.I.), St. Augustine. Hailing from Trinidad & Tobago, Kes grew up loving cricket, then football (soccer, not NFL) & never missed a Barça game in the 2010s. Later on, he grew obsessed with basketball/fantasy basketball & unfortunately claims to be a Sixers fan for some reason.

• Fantasy Basketball Draft Guide 2025: Player Trends by Season Segments
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