While points leagues are known for being simple, there is a bit of beauty in getting one over on your fellow manager to gain some value. The gain of value is everything in points leagues since players have a more concrete outlook. You can’t punt a poor category like you do in 9-cat, you have what you have. Every fantasy point must be earned. That’s why I began Points League Palindrome last season. In a fantasy world full of category-league content, a change of pace is a nice thing for those who enjoy points leagues. I used the word palindrome because it’s something that reads the same backwards and fowards (like the word RACECAR), but the idea is to examine recent trends (look backward) and determine how they will look moving forward.

If you only play category leagues, you may still find some of the buy-low and sell-high content in this piece useful. Although, we will also be bringing you that type of content for 9-cat in the future too.

To get back on topic, let’s examine the two major scoring systems for points leagues and then get into it.

The notables about the two scoring systems are the differences for efficiency. A player who scores a lot efficiently will be rewarded more on ESPN for making their shots. A low-efficiency player loses shots. If you can get a bunch of assists without turning it over, your ESPN FPTs will also be better. The same goes for defensive stats. Therefore, we must also remember that poor efficiency and turnovers means that player will be slightly better in Yahoo’s system. Keep all of this in mind as we discuss players from a more general POV for buys and sells, though I will point out some being better for the ESPN or Yahoo systems.

I first compiled this list by scrolling though the players on Yahoo and ESPN on Monday, picking out everyone who could be considered to be performing over or under an expected threshold. Jaylen Brown, Dejounte Murray, Terry Rozier, Anthony Edwards and Mikal Bridges are some players I removed as buys after Monday night’s games. Tobias Harris was also removed as a sell. We are early enough in the season that one game will swing people’s outlooks tremendously. So, if those players falter or push higher in the next few games, they could become buy-lows or sell-highs again.

It is impossible to give you targets for everyone, so while I will try, the idea is to give you more of a picture of how you should value a player to allow you to make better decisions with your transactions.

These players are not listed in any particular order.

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