Last Updated on August 25, 2026 9:45 am by André Lemos | Published: September 8, 2025

What is the value of having awareness of out-of-position stats?

There are two scenarios.

Scenario 1: If you are trying to build a balanced team, having players who contribute in the areas typically attributed to their position — in this case, guards and wings are expected to provide some combination of threes, FT%, assists and steals — plus respectable-to-above-average (or elite) value in one or two unexpected areas, the overall strength of your team is broader. Even then, having a guard or wing who is only “below average” in a big-oriented stat is more manageable than someone who completely tanks that stat.

This is not me telling you not to draft a guard or wing with a .400 FG% or 0.2 blocks per game, as that weakness can be offset by a major strength in other categories like Fred VanVleet with his assists, steals and threes.

However, not every team will have a draft that can compensate for that.

Scenario 2: You are punting and looking for guards and wings who support the categories you want to dominate. Maybe you are punting FT% and you want to dominate FG%, rebounds and blocks. There is a guard/wing who is a golden choice in that scenario, who will be mentioned a lot throughout this article.

Of course, if you are still looking to compete in threes, assists, FT% and steals, you will also need guards who can provide those stats so you don’t end up punting too many categories and possibly punting winning too.

That is explored more in my Punt Strategy and Punt Builds Review pieces for our draft guide.

The aim here is to review the top out-of-position stat players among guards and wings last season. I included SF-eligible players who are more associated as frontcourt players because those players are “cheat codes” that could fill your SF spot with options who literally produce frontcourt-oriented stats. I will focus most of the analysis on the true PG-SG-SF players (actual guards and wings), however. The inclusion of SF-eligible frontcourt players is for you to have the sample. Some of those players may or may not retain their SF eligibility in the future.

Before we go into the analysis, I tabulated 2024-25 data to show you the averages of backcourt players for Rebounds, Blocks, Field-Goal Percentage (FG%) and also Turnovers. I also included the rank among frontcourt players for each of those stats and the table is sorted by their average rank among three of those four stats. Turnovers are not included in the average rank. We tradtionally have not included turnovers in this article and I will not focus on it since low turnovers are mostly skewed toward low-usage players with very few exceptions.The values are included to have a general knowledge. I removed players who ranked outside of the top-355 on a per-game basis for 9-cat and I also removed a few names inside the top-355 who would not be considered true rotation players or are expected to play overseas next season. Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton and Damian Lillard are included for future reference when they return in 2026-27, but you can feel free to ignore them in the table and I am not going to focus on them at all in the analysis.

Click here to read the companion piece: Out-of-Position Stats for Bigs!

2024-25
Out-of-Position
Stat Ranks for Guards/Wings

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• About the Author
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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.

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