Fantasy Basketball Draft Guide 2025: How to Play Fantasy Basketball

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  • By Mike Passador

    Last Updated on August 31, 2025 3:08 pm by Keston Paul | Published: August 20, 2025

    Based on the title, we’re going to guess that if you’ve clicked into this article, you’re relatively new to fantasy basketball. Welcome! It’s going to be a blast.

    Whether you found us on Twitter or through the grapevine or by randomly clicking around the internet, it’s great to see you. Maybe a fellow fan of your favorite team referred you over here, or your league winner spilled the beans about where they’re getting their advice. Perhaps you’re looking to scratch the fantasy football itch in a new way. Regardless of what the reason is, we’re glad you’re here.

    Here we’re going to lay out all the basics of fantasy basketball. What the game is, how it’s played, and how you want to work your way through a season, from draft day to the playoffs. It’s simple in the abstract, but each phase of the process requires steps of its own. In general, you join a league, pick your rules and settings, assemble the players, count up the stats and let the chips fall where they may.

    Be sure to check out our Glossary of Terms and our Settings Guide for Commissioners as well! You’ll get more clear-cut definitions and clarifications for some of the things we’ll mention here, and there’s plenty more included that you’ll want to think about as you begin your fantasy basketball journey. With that said, let’s get into it.

    The Basics

    Fantasy basketball allows you to be your own general manager. Like other fantasy sports (most of you used fantasy football as the gateway), you pick a team of real players and your fantasy team’s performance is based on the individual performance of each player.

    We’ll get a little more into this in a second, but the two most common ways to reward performance are by simply going category-by-category or assigning a fantasy point value to each statistic that is being measured. You’re competing against other teams doing the exact same thing and the end goal is to outscore them, either by winning more categories or accruing more fantasy points over the length of your matchup or season.

    As for the categories you’ll be competing in, the standard nine are: Points, Rebounds, Assists, Steals, Blocks, 3-pointers, Field Goal Percentage, Free Throw Percentage and Turnovers. When you hear people mention “9-cat” leagues, these are the nine categories they’re talking about. The other most common setting features only eight categories, with turnovers taken off the board. You can customize your league to include as many or as few categories as possible. Double-doubles, 3-point percentage, technical fouls, eFG%, so on and so on can all be added if you wish. Just know that typically we focus on those nine categories, with some wiggle room in points leagues to factor in overall shot attempts.

    The first thing you want to decide is the size of your league. You’ll most definitely want an even number of teams, with 10 or 12 being the standard choices. Anything under 10 and you end up with rosters that are a little *too good*, whereas anything more than 12 tends to tilt the scales heavily towards players with a greater knowledge base. If you’re new to fantasy and want to get your feet wet, we’d recommend staying in that ballpark, but by all means feel free to try out a deeper league, especially if you’re a big-time NBA fan who knows the rosters up and down. You can go all the way to a 30-team league to simulate an actual NBA season if you want, but that’s not a great jumping-off point for most players.

    As far as the rosters themselves, things are pretty straightforward. The main positions are typically represented: PG, SG, SF, PF and C, and many leagues also default to having F and G spots (in which you can play anyone with PF/SF designation or PG/SG designation, respectively) as well as UTIL or FLEX spots, which can be occupied by any player. The nature of the modern NBA means that very few players are locked into just one roster spot, as most guys have eligibility at at least two positions.

    In terms of roster size, most leagues will have somewhere between 12-15 players on the roster, not including Injured List spots where you can tuck away injured players without counting against your roster limit. This is also customizable, and you can also choose to participate in a standard-sized league with larger rosters if you want to flex your knowledge without getting into a league with more than 12 teams, or leagues that have no IL spots to force managers into tough decisions when guys get hurt.

    League Types


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    August 20, 2025, 6:34 pm