Fantasy Insider: What is Fantasy Basketball?

Though it wasn’t as popular as fantasy baseball or football at first, fantasy basketball has gotten quite the following, as services such as Yahoo Sports, CBS Sports, ESPN, and more offer players a chance to join for free, either with friends in private leagues, or with other people in public leagues.  But what we want to focus on are daily fantasy basketball leagues, which is where the fun really can be found. In here, you don’t join actual leagues, but rather choose a team of players from those scheduled to play on a given day, making sure you don’t go above the stipulated salary cap.  First, though, let’s tell you a little more about how things are on the other side of the fence, meaning standard and rotisserie leagues.

You can choose to play in standard leagues, which are based on your players’ combined weekly stats in the real-life NBA, or in rotisserie leagues, where you are ranked from best to worst per combined weekly stat, e.g., in a 16-team league, a perfect 16 in points if your team scored the most points in that week, or the lowest possible score of 1 if your team scored the least.

While a good number of fantasy basketball players favor rotisserie leagues, standard leagues remain the most popular. These leagues require an even number of managers, as all the managers in the league face off in head-to-head competition per week. The matchups rotate in round-robin form so everyone has a chance to go head-to-head with everybody else. Your record is based on how many stat categories you win, and playoffs are typically held in the last three weeks of the actual NBA regular season.

Going back to daily fantasy basketball, signing up to these tournaments is quite easy. Simply go to websites such as FanDuel.com and DraftKings.com, and enter some basic information, such as your name, email address, desired user name, and password. You can play for free, but you would definitely want to try your luck in joining the money games. For a small fee, you can win big money if you come up with the best-performing lineup. All you have to do is choose two forwards, two guards, and a center, plus three more players. In Yahoo’s daily fantasy tournaments, for instance, that would be one more forward, one more center, and a utility player of any position. Once you’ve selected your lineup based on good fantasy insider advice, all you have to do is wait for the games to play out and hope your chosen players, who should meet the stated salary cap, perform well on that day.