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Editor’s Note: To get 50% off the first month of a SportsEthos 360 membership including early access to the Bruski 150 RIGHT NOW use the promo code WhoIsTheNextJalenJohnson at checkout.

RELEASE SCHEDULE

SportsEthos 360 Members: September 30
All-Sport and All-Fantasy Members: October 7
NBA FantasyPass Members: October 14
NBA Draft Guide Members: October 19

INTRO

Friends, welcome to the 2024-25 Bruski 150!

I usually write something about how things are going at SportsEthos or with myself because especially over the last five years I haven’t been able to write as much as I would like due to Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, which has resulted in some combination of me not being able to type, hold the pen, sit or stand or all of them at the same time.

You’re right if you’re thinking that might be tough on somebody in the content business or any business in most capacities. It is quite the overlay but let’s be real, I was never going to let that beat me. And the bottom line was that if I didn’t beat this thing I’d just keep facing worse and worse odds every day for the basic function of my body – due to the progressive nature of nerve injuries – every day essentially became a fight to get better odds the next day.

Every damn thing I’ve had to do over the last five years was measured in opportunity costs. And you know what … That kind of pressure and challenge is actually really good for training your mind to get much better at analytical contemplation. Mistakes with TOS often happen in a nano second when you do something with your hands and arms — or even the way you sit or stand — and it causes nerve compression or taps into the network of the injury such that it lights the whole thing up like a Christmas tree.

Click here and mouse over there and do that for longer than five seconds and boom, you just lost four days to a nerve flareup. Scroll on your phone or click around on the laptop to try and find leads to cure this thing and you just lost two to three weeks to a flareup, a hockey style penalty box for pushing the injury too far and the 10% capacity you were working with to begin with just got 10 times smaller…

One of the most fucked up things about it is that 99% of the searching for answers and especially online are fruitless. But the 1% represents the biggest advances that you made in the odds department.

So you search and you search and you search and you basically ride the line between flareup and finding a new process to deal with the TOS, whether it’s on the knowledge side or the physical therapy side … or on the surgical intervention side (which I did when I had a rib bolt-cuttered out of my body in February) ….and then you’re also running a business … and you’re a full-time father and family guy never not on call with that tops on the priority list… And you’re also unwilling to cede any ground on the competitive side of the fantasy hoops mountain you’ve climbed again and again… And you also want to see this once proud industry get out of its downward spiral… And you’re building something that’s hell-bent on providing value rather than farming for engagement … You’re going for ethics and honesty even if it means more work and less ROI because the long view requires sustainability and only a fool would do it any other way.

As I sit here in my 16th season covering fantasy hoops in a full-time capacity, with a pitstop also covering the Sacramento Kings for about a decade on the reporting side, not to mention the birth of my now 5-year-old son, the thing that I can’t get over is how much the experience of everything matters the most.

Last season was a banner season on the Bruski 150 side (click here for last year’s results and receipts). The high stakes fantasy league side for me went bonkers, I won another FSWA Writer of the Year award and SportsEthos really started getting traction. We were able to bring on true industry legend/my old boss/friend Steve Alexander and true industry legend/new friend Rick Kamla. Our baseball division decided to throw down on the work ethic front and ran a full-fledged blurb feed and premium content platform. Our NFL division built off its redshirt campaign and pushed the boat off into the water with expanded efforts in both blurbs and premium content, positioning itself to expand into very competitive territory. Wagering and DFS are cranking out profit and members are enjoying some of the lowest prices in the industry for all of that.

Perhaps the most exciting development is all of the new tools and the improvements on old tools that combined with our industry-leading analysts provide a truly unprecedented fantasy service.

On the personal and medical front, having a rib bolt-cuttered out of me to relieve compression of the nerves coming out of my cervical spine was a hit! Or so it seems right now. I’m sitting on about two to three months of positive developments and there are great indicators all over the place. I’m not out of the clear just yet and everything continues to carry an opportunity cost with significant risk. I’m in the best shape of my adult life even if I had to be held at virtual gunpoint to get there and I’ll take it.

All of the mental challenges surrounding this injury and even life as a whole have really come into focus during this time and the aforementioned odds equation, the one in which each day was a fight to have better odds the next day, has been mirrored in my work life and my personal life as I have realized the value of improving the experience on a day-to-day basis.

Appreciating what you have, letting go of what you don’t, honesty and authenticity over everything and surrounding yourself with people willing to value that same Ethos.

This whole project here at SportsEthos exists because the experience of going all out for something you believe in … that you’re good at … With the humility to try and get it right … How often do you get that in life?

I have put my heart and soul into this list and so has everybody else that works with us here at SportsEthos. It wins because we are damn good at what we do and we outwork everybody while we’re doing it.

It was extraordinarily fun to put together.

Now go enjoy destroying the public.

Quickly about the Bruski 150

Creating the Bruski 150 takes about 400 hours between July and October and we accumulate corporate knowledge every single season. I evaluate just under 300 players that end up in the ranks, which as you might have guessed started off as a 150 player list starting in 2010 I believe. Overall I evaluate about 500 players and do full-blown evaluations on just under 400 of them. This is how we win.

And WIN we did! Even with the competition buying the Bruski 150 and using it against me, I was still able to post top-3 finishes in four out of five public high-stakes leagues and bring back just under $30,000. I also won another FSWA Writer of the Year due in large part to the previous season’s Bruski 150.

I see a lot of statistical know-how out there but the key difference I’ve noticed among high-end analysts is the ability to quickly understand basketball film and then predict far into the future or predict with low evidence or in long-shot situations. One thing about blurb writing and written content production within a premium platform is that it forces you to either be good at that or get good real quick. With almost 20 years in a full-time capacity working these angles, along with the corporate knowledge accumulated, we can out-produce, out-rank and out-project everybody each and every season. We win at the highest levels each and every season. Our subscribers boat race their competition each and every season. All of this comes from the ability to work all of the angles, hunt down all of the leads and process it at an apex level.

New Product Benefits

The Draft Tracker Season 2 is easily the thing I’m excited about the most. We have basically put B150 projections and ranks into a quick and easy drafting death machine. Using it for all of my high stakes drafts last season I felt like the whole drafting process was turned on its head. Being able to see the angles more clearly and from further away, not to mention having all of the right intel plugged right into it, it was as if all of the sliders of difficulty moved favorably in my direction. When your membership has access to the B150, that’s when you get access to the Draft Tracker.

New In-Season Benefits

In-season benefits for NBA FantasyPass members, DFS players and folks that are wagering are at a whole new level.

For the first time ever I will be producing two additional B150 releases in the middle of the season. One during the In Season Tournament and the other during the All-Star break. Between that and the B150 projections you can just keep making great moves all season long.

On top of that, the tools for in the aforementioned in-season products just can’t be beat. At the center of each of them are the B150 projections that get updated constantly all season long. We can do this because we have functioning blurb feeds that give us the intel to plug into the know-how and away we go. The smartest basketball minds in fantasy are running all of this and all we care about is quality over everything. Now subscribers can analyze their teams, break down trades and head-to-head matchups, get daily and weekly projections, use start/sit tools both daily and weekly, view streaming schedules and schedule grids and low traffic days and so much more including exclusive access on Discord and in chats to get their questions answered. DFS players, player prop enthusiasts and wagering buffs of all levels get access to the best projections that money can buy and analysts that care about both teaching the game and playing it the right way.

The best thing about all of these memberships is that if you keep them active you get to keep the price that you’re paying. We want our early supporters to enjoy great pricing as we inevitably start charging market rates for these memberships. Some of you guys are getting well over 80% off or whatever the number is and that’s the least we can do for your continued support. Your memberships don’t just help to power this current iteration SportsEthos – they also represent support for a platform that has paid more to content producers than any other site in the fantasy basketball space. We’re tired of watching the slow decline and rot within the online sports space, fantasy or otherwise, and your memberships allow us to keep leading the way with value and create the economic circumstances to keep this wonderful game from decaying.

Get a Premium Membership! 

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.

♦ 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. ADP data is a total mess 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 22, 05:54 p.m. ET