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Friends, welcome to the 2023-24 Bruski 150!

I’m so thrilled and so happy to bring this product to you for so many reasons and right at the top of that list is because it’s clobbering time.

There are a lot of people at this website who have been working around the clock not just to get this list to you guys, but to build something sustainable in an industry that is trending toward used car sales — despite the clear draw we all have to living and breathing the NBA via this wonderful game we play, fantasy hoops.

This list embodies all of that hard work and this list continues to power this website.

Rather than spewing this work product for free to get 10 seconds of Twitter fame in July, August and September, we want our subscribers to win and they do. We know you are willing to pay for a product that gives you our edge, our education and most importantly our energy behind the pay wall. And yes our blurb feed is the best in the industry by many miles and it is free, but we take care to make sure that it’s the customers that matter and not just raising our profiles in the race to the bottom known as #engagement. So we wait for the market to set itself and then we stalk it and then here we are.

Our team also understands that in order for us to stand apart in an industry with low barrier to entry via a twitter account and at the same time a very high bar to clear in order to actually produce compelling work product, we have to provide the goods and wallop the competition.

These ranks do exactly that.

It’s a 400 hour exercise that accumulates corporate knowledge every single season and this season I have unveiled a secret weapon, albeit accidentally if we consider that the thoracic outlet syndrome causing me to be unable to type was the driver behind that weapon.

I’m talking of course about Andre Lemos, our European hoops podcasting/former basketballer/stat supreme analyst who joined the squad a few years back. He took the reins in the second season of me having somebody do all of the data entry as I dictate all of the processes behind the B150 because, again, I cannot type with my hands.

I did this last year and it was a revelation to be able to explore even more angles as a result of the exercise of talking everything through with another person. Last season I used somebody who was definitely knowledgeable about basketball, but this season talking everything through with Andre allowed me to break down the game with somebody who can also evaluate basketball players and fantasy data at the highest levels – a rarity we happily used to our advantage.

Whether it was data manipulation or breaking down defensive philosophies for new coaches with new personnel, or figuring out which play types were most likely to be used in places with players wearing nametags, or getting factors such as player degradation or player improvement completely nailed down with extreme efficiency because dammit we have more angles to figure out… I strongly feel all of that has led to my best B150 ever.

And feel free to ask Andre about it but aside from working through all of these basketball angles this list is still decidedly mine. There were countless times I could hear him panicking because once again we’re going for it and there is no such thing as playing it safe. This, of course, is exactly how I like it because to beat the players that I need to beat in high-stakes contests who are almost all using this list against me I can’t think about mailing a ranks lists in with safe analysis or the echo chamber stuff.

The ringers understand everything I’m talking about here even if the industry at large does not. And I’m simply not wired to approach the game in any other way. I can’t sit here and tell you guys that I’m an expert and not treat this like the full time, often 80-hour per week job that it is. You have to do the work to get the angles, not just tweet every once in a while or invite people on your weekly podcast. The fact that we have people representing themselves as industry experts with that kind of philosophy is always going to work in our favor.

And whether it was Andre, our tech team, our content team or site management, we have all taken that approach that it is the customer that matters and for that reason when we lean into a product like this it’s clobbering time.

Anyway, thank you all for the support as I’ve battled this medical issue and thank you for all of your support in helping SportsEthos grow to what it has become… A multisport, multi-vertical beast leading the way in industry sustainability.

Speaking of Andre and all of the forementioned folks… You all need to be using the site projections and tools we are creating heading into the season. They are Vegas grade projections that can be used not just for traditional fantasy but also for DFS and betting.

We are out for blood this season and even if you’re playing just for fun, which is entirely acceptable of course, it’s also very fun to win so please do enjoy.

*Editor’s Note: Also please do enjoy our major release of the preseason – the B150 draft tracker – which incorporates the projections behind the B150 as well as the B150 ranks into an Excel based spreadsheet programmed with draft logic you simply can’t find anywhere else. Once you have access to the B150, you have access to this tool including everything just discussed, whereas if you didn’t have access to the B150 yet you might have been using the demo tool based on industry consensus projections. Make sure you get a fresh copy and also check back as we are constantly updating and building in improvements. Drop us a line in our forums if you have questions or feedback! Get the tool right here with this link.

Without further ado the ground rules for this list!

The ground rules….

♦ This is a fearless list. I’m not trying to play it safe. I’m not trying to stay in the friendly confines of industry consensus. I’ll probably have a high profile miss. But as regular readers know, we’re going to hit far more than we miss. And we’re going to hit real big on a bunch of them. This list will guide how much you should pay, who you should reach for and who you should run the other direction from.

♦ This is a Roto list. It’s not a head-to-head list or a points league list. It’s not a list to account for playoff formats. Frankly I’d prefer it to not even include 9-cat rankings because it’s terrible to penalize better players for handling the ball a lot. But because we all play 9-cat I include my ranks for 9-cat and the associated Average Draft Positions (ADP), as well. While I’m banging on 9-cat leagues I’ll bang on playoff leagues, too. Why go through the nightly grind of the NBA season to have the ever-growing problem of shutdowns determine your league’s championship.

♦ You can now sort the list. The ADP losses and gains don’t relate well for players toward the beginning and end of the draft as they do for players in the top 30-100, nor does it correlate well to actual fantasy value being returned.  But it does give you a quick way to know how early or late a player is going.  We’ll always be looking at new features like this as we grow but we will also want to maintain the simplicity of this list.

♦ Though this is a top-150 list (including 50-100 or more honorable mentions at the end), each player in the top 400 or so has been hand-projected for each category. Those projections have been scrutinized in every context that might affect the final outcome. A proprietary blend of methodologies – both quantitative and qualitative – is used to weave the resulting numbers into these rankings.

♦ This is a season-long list. By ranking a player (for example) No. 33, I am predicting they will finish as the 33^rd ranked player at the end of the year, cumulatively. In that respect, it is vital fantasy GMs know that I am not intending for them to draft players in this order.  You may also consider a player’s early or late season trajectory.  A young player that profiles better at the end of the year will probably play under that rank to start and over that rank to finish.  As a result, it might not be easy to roster certain players early on in the year.

♦ Again, fantasy GMs need to consider their specific marketplace and determine where they would like to draft players based on ADP, strength of their league and the like. Just because I rank a guy way ahead of his ADP, or if the ADP doesn’t exist because the guy isn’t getting drafted enough – it doesn’t mean you grab him where I rank him.

♦ ADPs are pulled from ESPN, Yahoo and other sites. Early ADP data can be pretty rough so just keep that in mind. For undrafted players they are given ADPs of 200 or 225 when the systems aren’t providing that data, but you’ll notice for ESPN they give players an ADP of 140 when they’re selected and nothing when they’re not. Yahoo stops somewhere in the 150s. Do with that what you will.

♦ These are pure values that don’t account for any punting or specialized team builds you might want to look at. If you want to adjust for punting or a specific type of team build you’ll need to do that on your own.

♦ The only place on this list where I might eschew predicting end-of-season value is toward the bottom of the ranks. I do build in some logic for flier picks and upside guys over the plodders who are going to get three yards and a cloud of dust for 76 games.

So without further ado, I give you the Bruski 150:

UPDATED THROUGH ITEMS POSTED: October 24, 10:54 p.m. ET