SportsEthos 2026 Fantasy Basketball Draft Guide

2024-25 NBA Draft Guide: Best Ball & H2H Weekly Variance

By Keston Paul Published September 5, 2024 Updated August 19, 2025 3 min read

While the main target audience of this is NBA Best Ball players, any fantasy GM should be able to learn something as we look at the weekly performance data of players from last season. If you also play in weekly leagues or a format like Sleeper, then this data should also be useful on some level.

Let’s dig in.

TABLE LAYOUT

Player Name
Just as indicated, it is the name of each player who made an appearance in the 2023-24 season.

Best Ball Position
Best Ball uses the following positions:
Guard (usually PGs + SGs, but some forwards & wings sneak in)
Wing (Usually SFs + PFs but some SG/SF players qualify and some PF/C players also qualify
Big (Almost always Cs, but may have some PF/C exceptions)

Note:  these are utilizing this season’s positions despite the data coming from last season’s performances as we look backwards to look forward.

Season Per-Game FPTs
Average Fantasy Points on a game-to-game basis using the Yahoo/Best Ball scoring system. 

Season Total FPTs
All Fantasy Points scored by a player (Average x Games Played).

Best Ball Starter-Level Weeks
Best Ball has 16-man rosters, which include 10 bench spots and starting spots of 2xGuard, 2xWing, 1xBig and 1xUTIL for six total spots across 12 teams. This equates to 6×12 = 72 starting slots from a 192-player pool.

If players are equally distributed across all teams, then the top-72 performers each would be the starters. This is unlikely, but it gives us more of a “guaranteed to be a starter” picture compared to trying to approximate which of the stragglers could sneak in.

To be clear, I’m referring to one team having, let’s say eight of the top-72 and thus not having two of them in their lineup, which could allow the 73rd and 74th best players to start for another team. However, we aren’t accounting for that since we want to know the concrete, guaranteed starter-level players.

Top-120 Weeks for H2H
This is a little throw-in for our general H2H managers. Since a standard league is usually 12 teams with 10 starting spots, that equals 120 starters per week. This is useful insight for Weekly Lineup leagues but also gives us a look into the general variance of weekly performances for H2H, even if you play in the more common Daily Lineups league type.

DNP Weeks (Did Not Play)
All the weeks when a player failed to appear in any game. This may be due to injuries or other circumstances.

#1 Position Weeks
The number of weeks when a player was the top points producer within their specific Best Ball positions of Guard, Wing or Big.

Weekly Groupings
Week 1-25 Overall Rank: Individual Rank among all players that week. if a player did not play, they are given a rank of 600.
Week 1-25 FPTs: Total Fantasy Points scored that week
Week 1-25 Position Rank: Individual Rank in a particular week for specific Best Ball positions of Guard, Wing or Big.

*Note: Weeks 17 and 18 would have been combined in most H2H Leagues due to the NBA All-Star Break. 

NAVIGATION TIPS

Use FILTER BY POSITION or FIND PLAYER by typing into the rectangular box next to it. If you type Guard then only players with the Guard position will be shown. If you type Claxton, only Nicolas Claxton’s data will be shown, allowing you to easily find any player you are looking for or performances you may be interested in.

SORT by using the little triangles/arrows on the header of the table which are labeled the same as the table layout explored in the previous section.

See table below.

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About the Author

SportsEthos Contributor

Keston Paul

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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.

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