Stop Trusting 9-Cat Totals Rankings! Build a Smarter NBA Fantasy Basketball Team

Stop Trusting 9-Cat Totals Rankings! Build a Smarter NBA Fantasy Basketball Team

Let’s talk about rankings. Let’s talk about how we can’t or shouldn’t be confused about some of the numbers that we might see. You know what this is about, Michael Bolton. Thanks, Josh. It’s Michael Bolton here and it’s time for another episode of the Locked On Fantasy Basketball Podcast. Let’s get to it. Let’s get to it. Indeed, you are Locked on Fantasy, your daily NBA fantasy podcast, part of the Locked On podcast network, your team every day. Hello and welcome to the Locked On Fantasy Basketball Podcast, brought to you by Basketball Monster. My name is Josh Lloyd and this is going to be 30 minutes about talking about all of the hits of the Troy Weaver eras. I’m also the lead fantasy analyst at basketball.com and today’s episode is brought to you by FanDuel. Right now, new customers get $150 in bonus bets when your first $5 bet wins. Thank you also for making Lockdown Fantasy Basketball your first listen every day. We are free. We are available on all platforms. So, hit the thumb, hit the double bang, leave your comments down below. That would be great. So, what are we going to do in this show here, which is, I believe, will be the last of the pre-recorded shows that I’m doing while I’m over having uh some time away, so a holiday. This will be the the final one of those shows. So, the next time I think that you see me, we’ll be back live. We’ll be recapping all of the offseason moves. We’ll be recapping summer league and updated dynasty rookie ranks, all that sort of stuff. what we’re doing today. And you know that I rail about this because I think it’s important because it gets promoted and it gets shown in a lot of spots about default rankings for category leagues. If you’re in a points league, don’t worry too much. Actually, that’s not true. There is something for you to talk about here for points less and I’ll explain in a second. But on Yahoo, when they use a straight ranking system for category leagues, I believe is incredibly misleading. I’m not going to go into all the details about my Durant ranking system, which if you don’t know what Durant stands for, it’s dynamic unbiased rankings applying normalized transformations. Obviously, just manipulating words to make it sound like Durant, but basically what it is is that the way that NBA stats are distributed, it’s not a normal bell curve distribution. In the past, we’ve used standard and zed scores to produce valuations of stats. Unfortunately, the way that those things happen, it means that outlier numbers and and weird numbers and percentages have outsized value. Like something might have a zed score of like a five for blocks, which in reality when you’re talking about normal distributions, a five is like a 1 in 10 billion. You know what? Let me double check that. Let me double check that number cuz I don’t want to give you false information. Look, if you have a zed score of a five, it’s a 1 in 3.3 million chance of something occurring, right? Incredibly rare. incredibly rare. The problem here is if you go and look at standard zed score rankings from this season, we had someone with a steals zed score of 4.94. I know you know who that is. 4.94 in a zed score. That is a chance of like 1 in 3.3 million. We had someone with a zed score of 5.84. That was Victor Webyama in blocks. You know what the chances of that happening are? 1 in 1 billion. And then we had Giannis who had a free throw percentage negative zed score of -6.07. And the chances in a normal distribution of that zed score being prevalent is a 1 in 10 billion chance. All right? So let those numbers sink in. Even if you have a one a zed score of 3.5, it is a 1 in4 12,000 percentile chance of that occurring. Yet we see those numbers all the time and it leads to skewing of rankings. So Durant uses a Yo Johnson transformation to adjust those numbers, but it also uses things like category waiting in terms of the importance and the um uh the availability of stats off waiver wires, the correlation between numbers as well as well as a minus one component to what I believe gives a more accurate representation of value for head-to-head category links. So why am I telling you all of this? Well, when you go onto Yahoo, even if you just use once the default page and we have Durant into all of our systems that you can look at as well, but if you use those default numbers, ESPN player rider, Yahoo rankings, they’ll use that standard Nikat number and it will give you information that is not accurate, I believe, in terms of how fantasy is played. Now, points there, guys. Again, I I’ll give you why I think it’s important for you is because when we see ADP numbers in drafts on Yahoo, I’ll use Yahoo. It’s like 60% of people playing fantasy play on Yahoo. The ADP numbers are heavily driven by the ranking numbers that get put onto Yahoo. And those ranking numbers are very heavily driven by standard NIKAT rankings. So ADP numbers for points leagues get influenced by this Nikat ranking system which then influences where you pick guys in points leagues. I’m not not here to tell you about the the benefits and the stresses of using Durant. I just firmly believe it’s better. I’m going to give you some examples of stuff here. But what I want to do now is that because when you go on to Yahoo and if you look up and you do player research, one of the things that they often show and I think it’s their default setting is they will provide a players ranking based on Yahoo. Well, it’s on Yahoo based on nine category totals value. Now totals of course is the total number. So instead of averaging 20 points per game, if you play 50 games, you average 20 points per game, that is a,000 total points. and they’ll rank that 1,000 points versus someone who’s got 1,200 points and 800 points versus the per game numbers. So the more games you play, the more beneficial it is. But as much as you want to say availability is the best ability, it’s not. Availability is not the best ability because I I can give you give you a million examples of why that’s not the case because that would mean that the guys playing 82 games are the guys that you want on your team. Like you know, um, Buddy Heield and Julian Champi and who else have we got 82 games guys? um Chris Paul like they’re they’re they’re your first round picks. Malik Beasley, they’re the guys you’re picking in round one. Jaylen Green, obvious answers to picking round one. So, it’s not right. It is important obviously, but when we’re talking head-to-head leagues, having guys available in head-to-head playoffs, especially your top end guys, is important. It’s obviously more important, but having them there all season long. Now, if you get too much stuff stack up with guys missing, then we get into problems. We understand all of this, but it’s not it’s never as simple of a nuance of like, well, you’ve got to have those numbers accumulate all season. You absolutely do not. You do not because guys go up and down. They fluctuate. And you use guys off the wave and you add guys in. When someone goes out, you replace them, but you can then use that spot to stream. Instead of getting three and a half games or 3.8 games out of a player slot, you can turn it into six games. And then therefore, you make up some of that gap. That’s not always the case. But that’s why I there’s so many reasons why that nine cat total ranking that is displayed on Yahoo is just incredibly um incorrect. It’s just misleading. And you’re going to see these numbers. You’re going to hear them referenced. You’re going to see them put out. You’re going to see them on player profiles. You’re going to see all this stuff. And it’s going to give you the impression that these guys are useful. And you might instinctively go, “They’re not.” And that’s great from you. Well done to doing that. But what I should also do to you is if that and part of the reason why I did do a lot of work with minus one leading into Durant with rankings is that if you can instinctively say well of course Giannis isn’t the 65th best player because you got to account for punting free throws or of course that this player is not ranked this good. You got to take into consideration that then the rankings the ranking that sort of ranking formula is completely useless. If you have to then do mental gymnastics on every number to work out whether it makes sense or not then none of them make sense. Some of them can’t make sense and some of them can make sense. That’s not how it works. If some of them are so wildly misplaced, that means that all of it is useless. And again, I I you can have some and just because something might look the same either way and you go, “This guy’s number one. I think he’s number one.” That doesn’t mean that the list is useless. If there are outliers everywhere that don’t make sense, that means that the rest can’t possibly make sense. because those ones that don’t make sense need to put into the place they do make sense, shifting everybody else around. I I hope that makes sense. And I’m going to go through a bunch of examples here of players that are just insanely ranked on Yahoo Ncat rankings that just have no use. Now, I don’t know if Malik Beasley’s in jail by the time I’m recording this. I don’t know if he signed a contract. Things don’t look good for him. But Malik Beasley had out of the players who were ranked inside the top 120 on Yahoo’s total ranks last season, he had the biggest discrepancy versus what I would rank him as a fantasy player. He was 257th for me in Durant over the course of the year. Yahoo’s Nineat totals ranks him 77th. 77th is a seventh round player. Seventh round player on a 13-man roster. That’s the middle of your roster for a guy that he did hit four threes but was below average in points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, field goals, free throws. Below average contributor, yet considered an average fantasy starter, which is obviously just not accurate. Obviously not accurate. Putrid rebounds and putrid assists, steals and blocks of invisible bad percentages. But again, he’s listed as 77th. Why? Well, he played 82 games and you got a large um zed score for his threes and then he’s obviously lack of turnovers apparently really helps a lot. It doesn’t. So obviously you’d be avoiding him because he’s not playing anywhere. What about the pencil Harrison Barnes? Barnesy, [Music] he is another one of those players that did get to 82 games. Barnes played 27 minutes a night. He was ranked in my rankings 247th. On Yahoo, he ranked 89th. 89th, a top 90 player. Harrison Barnes was someone that you would love to have drafted in round eight or kept on your roster all season. Yes. No, of course not. Because there’s not a single thing I believe that he did there. Oh, that’s not true. Actually, he’s 50.8% from the field is above league average. 80.9 from the line is about on league average and then everything else is useless. Now again, we would never in a million years consider drafting Harrison Barnes next season. But that ranking number suggests that he was a clear draftable player and a rosterable guy. It’s just a pointless number to look at. I’ll go through a bunch of these other ones just so you’ve got a bunch of names that you don’t you can’t be fooled with. Today’s episode is brought to you by Fanel. Summer sports are in full swing and it might be baseball games you’re going to see, golf games, soccer that you’re watching, might be the WNBA, whatever it is, Fanil is the best way to make all of your sports knowledge, sports interest, make it pay off. You’re already following the action. So, why not get in with Fanil and put that knowledge to the test? Especially if you’re a new customer. With Vanel, you can track your favorite matchups. They got new daily promotions every day. That’s what daily means. It’s easy to use and it’s fast to pay out. And when you’re watching, you’re putting that knowledge to the test. Well, see how you see what you can turn it into. If you’re new to Fanul, new customers can bet just $5 and get $150 in bonus bets if your first bet wins. Open the FanDuel app today or visit fanul.com to get started. So, I’m just going to run through a bunch of different names and players here because again, you’ll just see hear these names and be like, really, Buddy Heal? Like, yeah, we used him for about a week at the start of the season and then he was bad and and that’s true. He he was he was 260th in my per game numbers. He was 105th in Yahoo’s numbers. 105th for a guy averaging 11 points and three rebounds and one and a half assists. Like I know he played all 82 games, but having Buddy He on your fantasy team, starting him every week, starting him every day, guess what it would have led you to do? And this is just going to be a repetitive thing because I want this this point brought home. You will lose. You could have Buddy Hill, Malik Beasley, and and Harrison Barnes on your team. Great. That’s your your your rocks, your six, seven, and eight draft picks. According to this, there would have been a great result. You would have got cooked every week. It doesn’t matter that they were available to play. It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t lead to success in fantasy. And that is why again if you know if you look at this guy of course Josh I know he he’s ranked this high because he played 82 games. True it is that that is that is why that is why Buddy Healed is ranked that high. If you look at his n standard nat per game numbers he was 199th. So again not particularly good but that’s not how it gets displayed. That’s not how it gets talked about. It’s about understanding the traps of this and avoiding them. Obi-Wan. Now, Obie might do more this season. At the time of me recording this, I have no idea what the Pacers are doing at center. Now, I Obi Toppin’s not a center. He’s not a particularly good player defensively at all, but they might be forced to just play Tophen and Sakum a lot. Again, I but I don’t know. I’m not going to get into the details of that. What I do know is that Tophen was barely a top 250 guy last season because again he was a reserve who doesn’t do much, but he was the 107th ranked player. He averaged 10 with four rebounds, one and a half threes steals and blocks and assists. They added up to 2.6. Cool. But he was there. He played. Doesn’t matter. And again, you can discard that and say, “Well, I know that he’s only 107th because he played every game.” If you have to just discard everyone and you have to use nuance and context behind why someone might be 80 spots higher than they need to be or 100 spots higher, then the list is useless. The list is useless. I’m not saying that my list is perfect or that my system is perfect. I’m always trying to fix and adjust. Although I’m very happy with the way that Durant 2.0 came out. But if you have to make caveats and mental adjustments on every player, then there is no point for it to exist and for these rankings to be prominent. None whatsoever. Ty Jones was great last season, wasn’t he? Yeah. Uh I ranked him 197th. He ended up ranked 76. So he’s been the best player that we’ve spoken about so far. 76 is again just the seventh guy on your roster. A guy you’d pick in round six, round seven, would you? No, you could. You wouldn’t. 10 two and five. Like what is good about this? Now he goes to Orlando again. This will get Orlando this season. He’ll be the backup there. He won’t play those 27 minutes a night. He’ll still be ranked really highly in NAT numbers and he if he plays a lot of games, he’ll appear to be good again, but he won’t be. And you don’t want to get duped into this. These are things that I I don’t think that a lot of you will fall into the trap. But if you are a new person playing fantasy and you’re joining in, you will see the rankings that get displayed on Yahoo. You will see last season ranked and it will just say this because they often not overview your page but they often default to the nine cat totals from the year before and you’ll see well Ty Jones the 75th. Yeah, people talk about him all the time how he’s such a valuable player, right? You might think that that’s worth doing and it’s not. What about this guy? Do you believe can you can you believe that Julian Champi San Antonio Spurs Julian Champi was a top 100 ncat totals player last season? Can you believe that? Like the argument might be made and a lot of traditional rankings are skewed towards the roto format which is again a format that I think more people should play but they don’t. It’s like a five percentage 5% of the people play that format. You might say well yeah being available in roto is super important and you do count those stats all season. Like, yeah, sort of. But how often was Julian Champany going to be one of your best 10 guys that you’re just plugging in to accumulate his numbers every day? Like, never. So, even in roto formats where you’re counting stats for the entire season, these numbers aren’t aren’t useful. He was 212th on a per game basis, he averaged under 10 points with like nothing. It’s I’m just going to keep dropping names because again, these will be highlighted in top 120 lists. Derek Jones Jr. or he’s just actually called Derek Jones now. What? He was 118th in like our totals. I had him 228th. What on earth did Derek Jones do to make us think that that is a draftable and startable player or that those numbers would suggest is that? What on what possibly would give us that? For example, I’m going to give you this like like Giannis for example, like which we know is always one of those ones because of the negativity of the free throws that I talked about was a 1 in 10 billion. What was it? One in 10 billion chance of happening. Um he’s ranked 55th per game. Giannis, which of course, you know, is nonsense and you would never consider him there. And it’s again one of the flaws. You’re like, I’m not letting Giannis fall into the 50s to draft him. It’s not going to be a thing that we do. Giannis on a totals ranking was 60th. Again, pointless. So, we’re talking about Giannis being 15 spots different to Tyus Jones last season. It’s it’s it’s comedy. It’s it’s it’s comedic. Aaron Wiggins had some moments. He had a couple of 40 point games last season. He did that. He had a couple of really good games. Top 100 player though. No, of course not. He was 26th in my per game numbers. 107 spot differential between Durant and Yahoo. Total nine cats. He’s a good scorer. He’s an efficient shooter. But like again, honestly, who cares? These numbers are absolutely useless. Like they they provide nothing. Let’s keep going. How much do we love Dylan Brooks as a fantasy contributor? Brooks has some hot streaks. There’s no doubt about Dylan Brooks and those hot streaks. And now he’s on Phoenix and he’ll have opportunities and get minutes in Phoenix again. Although maybe with this big seven team trade they’re discussing, maybe something changes. I don’t know. I doubt it. Dylan Brooks was 29th last season. He averaged 14 points. He hit two and a half threes. Two and a half three is a good number. That’s it. You’ll also notice that all these players that we’re talking about so far, Beasley, Barnes, He toppen, Jones, Champi, Derek Jones, there was Ty Jones, Dererick Jones, Aaron Wiggins, Dylan Brooks, all of them hit a lot of threes and all of them have low turnovers. Ty Stone is the only one who actually gets assists, but all of them are are very good three-point volume and low turnovers. And then the category that you find on the waiver wire everywhere is threes. You can stream threes from so many players. And the value of these guys is in threes. Again, showing that those numbers don’t don’t give you any value whatsoever. Just nothing. Guess who the next guy is? Wow. What does he do? Yeah, Contavius Cwell Pope. Guess what he does? He hits threes and he doesn’t turn it over. KCP was a disaster last season. 189th per game. But in Yahoo totals, he was 93rd. 93rd. That’s not a draftable. That’s not just a draftable player. That’s not just like a roster player. That’s a starter. Like there’s your ninth best player for what? 1.3 steals, guys. The patterns are easy here. But though, I want to highlight a bunch of these names, all of the biggest discrepancies, because they will get pumped into certain spots. And if you aren’t a discerning um admirer or evaluator of fantasy value, it is easy to get trapped. It is easy. It’ll happen all the time because last year’s totals rankings then get turned into lazy lists by certain certain sites, automated processes that make them look way. It happens every year. Yahoo puts out their first ranking and someone who played 20 games but was like a top 30 per game guy will be ranked in the 400s cuz they forgot that they just auto use the nine cat totals from last season. That guy was well down. Wonder who that guy will be this season. Let me have a think about that. A couple of names who who it could be, although not these ones don’t fall necessarily into that that grouping that it usually is, but someone like Herb Jones or Brandon Ingram who are ranked in the 330s for totals um because they barely played. They they could be guys that slide a little bit. Cam Thomas, one of those guys. Um, who else? There’s no one that’s Jaden Ivy. He’s a good one actually. Jaden Ivy was ranked 312th. So, we’ll see. Like, could he be one of the guys that sort of slips through the gap? There’s always somebody who does that. Let’s go through a bunch of other names here. Before we get out of here, reminder, what we’re doing is looking at Yahoo total Nikat ranks, comparing them to my Durant ranks, and again trying to show why we need to be cautious of those numbers. The artist formerly known as Torian Prince, he’s back in Milwaukee. They’re going to be without Damian Lillard. And I don’t know if Prince is going to start or not. He probably he shouldn’t, but like he could. Will you be interested in drafting the artist formerly known as Torian Prince? I hope not. He was 28th in Durant and he was 114th in Yahoo Leagues last season, averaging eight points with under two threes, three and a half boards, and two assists. Like, what what are we doing? Like, I I’ll keep going. I’ve got a few more names we can talk about. Some of these ones are actually that I’m going to come up with are ranked pretty highly now. Someone like Keon Ellis is an interesting player cuz in Durant, he ranked 139th, right? That’s that’s usable. We used him a lot of the season. It was mainly when he started and then he off the bench it was his steals and blocks was specialy but when he started do you a little bit more but Yahoo ranked him 51st for what he did last season in 24 minutes he averaged eight points with 2.7 rebounds and 1.5 assists I love the point8 blocks I love the 1.5 steals but only hit 1.73 so realistically he gave you above average steals above average free throws and that’s it yet ranked 51st again we all know that Kon Ellis was was not useful all season. We all know that. We all know that there were times when he was. But under no circumstance would you consider Kon Ellis your fourth best player on a fan. Well, let’s say fourth he’d be 48. 51st he was. Cool. The next one. Now, Alice, I I don’t want to speculate too much on the Kings because I don’t know what they’ve done, but Dennis Schroeder is allegedly there. Malik Mark may not be. I I don’t know. But there’s no clear path at this point for him to to play big Mets. Now, we’re not going to get fooled by Brook Lopez this upcoming season because he’s now Zubat’s backup. But it would have been an interesting one cuz he ranked 19th last season. 19th. Brook Lopez ranked 19th in Ncat value on Yahoo. He averaged 13 and five. Okay. 1.7 threes with 1.8 assists. He did block 1.9 shots. I’ll give him credit for that. His percentages at 50.9 and 82.6 are pretty solid. I ranked him 106th on Durant and he was 111th in points leagues and that’s again it’s a great example if you ask sticking around playing in points league you know that Brook Lopez was around 111th which I think is about the right spot that he was for category leagues he was not 19 he was not a top 20 player not remotely close to it now again I don’t think we need to be worried about being fooled by that because he’s a backup now we understand that there’ll be adjustments made but that is in no way a representation of what Lopez provided last season. Go Bad had some really good moments last season and at the end of the season he faded out of the rotation even though Movagna or not out of the rotation but out of any relevance even though Movagna had a torn ACL but Badad ranked 102nd. I had him 185th. He blocked 1.4 shots. That’s a pretty good number. He shot 61 from the field. That’s pretty good. The 6.6 rebounds is actually solid enough as well. He was he had some useful moments but he was not a mainstay on fantasy rosters. The last guy I want to look at in the stats in a little bit more detail is a guy that’s on a new team and he’s in an interesting spot, Old Milk, because Ty Jerome heads to Memphis. Jarant cannot stay healthy. They also still have Scotty Pippen. They have controll Pope. I don’t know what they’re doing with Cole Anthony. Allegedly, they were going to wave him, but at the time of recording this, July 4th, they haven’t. Now, Jerome in 20 minutes a game, he was really impressive. I ranked him 158. There were times where you could use him in fans, but like again, I don’t believe we’re talking about a player that you just had on your roster and said, “Yeah, I’m good. He’s my eighth best guy. Um, I’m ready to go.” He had 12 with two and a half rebounds and three and a half assists. He shot 52 from the field. It’s a pretty good number. He shot 87 from the line. That’s pretty good. But what? No, no, no. He was not a staple. And again, I’ll just reiterate this point. If you have to make adjustments to where a player is ranked based on a bunch of other factors that could easily be put into the rankings, then the ranking system is bad. Simple as that. If you have to make adjustments and every player mentally go, oh, he’s not here cuz the reason he’s there is minutes and turnovers and he’s not actually that useful. It’s it’s pointless. But it will still get shown. It will still get talked about. You will still get referenced when people are trying to trade things to you. I’ve got a few more names that I want to get to um here because I think these ones uh the the the gaps between Durant and the Yahoo Nikat totals for these next eight players are not as large, but these are all guys who are really good fantasy players, but they ranked inside the top 30 on Yahoo’s total numbers. Jarrett Allen Jarrett Allen, I had him 50 75th per game. His Yahoo totals 14th. I would say at times Jared Allen was a little bit disappointing last season. He’s fine but a bit disappointing. Christian Brown, I mis I misvaluated Christian Brown in the offseason and at the start of the season. I did not predict that he’d be that good of a shooter and I think I know why I did that and I would happily do it again for any other player. I misvaluated him. But I’m not misvaluating him when Yahoo’s ncat totals have him as the 26th best player last season. I him as 85th. He lost his starting spot to Russell Westbrook. Now, I don’t think he’s going to lose it to Bruce Brown this season, but like he’s like no one no one is considering Christian Brown as a round three guy, round four guy or round five guy, round six guy. So, what’s the point of that number? If it’s a Zubats ranked ninth on Yahoo’s totals last season, I had him 66th. He was a huge steal last season. You got him in the hundreds. He returned great value. Brook Lopez probably takes a little bit off his ceiling this season and he’s going to go I think in round three of a lot of draft two bats and I think you’re going to be wrong if you do that. Don’t know yet because I haven’t made the numbers but ninth. Come on man like the first round first round player. The Jedi Ojanobi he was awesome especially down the stretch he had some really strong numbers down the stretch I believe I had him Durant ranking at like 25th like really good but again he’s ranked 21st for the season. I had him 64th. I don’t think anyone looks at the totality of what Anobi did and considers that, yeah, that’s an easy second round guy just pushing on the edges. Him and Brook Lopez, pretty close. Well, they were pretty close, just not in round two. The next four guys, or the last four guys I want to talk about here, like Josh Hart was the 11th ranked player. Now, Josh Hart again was a huge surprise to me. He had wild swings and you saw I did the big shooting swings show not long ago talking about big changes in percentages and Hart was one of the biggest. I didn’t predict that he would do that and I got it wrong. I had him 51st over the course of the season, not 11th, not as a first round player. I also didn’t think that Dyson Daniels was a first- round player, but he ranked seventh. I ranked him 41st. Now, part of the appeal of of Josh Hart and Dyson Daniels last season was the fact that you got them incredibly late and they returned really good value. Targeting them again this year is going to be a gigantic mistake because it’s almost impossible for them to exceed what they do. And we talked about Dyson. He was one of the examples I gave before where that level of steals that he brought gave you was like a one one in 3.3 million occurrence according to bell curve normal distribution. And I know that three steals a game hasn’t been done very much in NBA history, but it’s not one in 3.3 million chances. That’s that’s just not a thing. Derek White was 50th I thought last season. He ranked 17th people again. Maybe Derek White has been traded by the time I’m doing this. I don’t know. But given what the Celtics are going to be like this season, people are going to be drafting Derek White very highly. He is going to go in round two of some fantasy drafts. I’ve got no question about that. And largely this it’s going to be well there’s going to be some of it based on that number. Some of it’s going to be based on other absences, but I think you’re going to be in for a disappointing time if you do that in round two. And the last one is of course my man Nikolic, who yeah, I thought shouldn’t be drafted inside the top 50. In the end, he draft he finished 42nd. These Nikat totals ranked him 12th. He was not a first round player. I think we’re all well aware of that. And the reason he even got to as high as he did was he shot like 46% from three and I think was third highest in the NBA on on floaters and fifth in mid-range shooting in the entire league, which are just not numbers that you should be banking on expecting to hold. So, I didn’t expect him to have this breakout shooting season. He did. He still I don’t think is a good player in terms of an impactful guy and he’s a terrible defender and I will still probably have him outside the top 50 for this upcoming season. He’s not the 12th best player. He wasn’t the 12th best player last season. I hope a few people have requested that I did this show like cuz I reference it a lot right about the way that these rankings are misleading. So, I wanted to show you the biggest ones that are misleading, the biggest gaps, the biggest ones that are going to like pop up and say, “Well, this guy’s should be drafted surely, or he should have been a guy that was on rosters all season.” And I wanted to highlight the differences understanding that again if you have to create narratives, exceptions, reasons for why somebody shouldn’t be somewhere and you’re doing that for every third player, just throw the whole list away. Because if all those things are incorrect, why do the ones that you think are correct, why why should they be correct? You can’t pick and choose a system if half of it is wrong or half of it just appears wrong like that. If you want more details on it, you can leave comments. I know people will disagree with me and say availability is the best availability and these totals are the most important thing. I know someone will say that and you will just never convince me otherwise. And that is okay. That is okay. I think that something like this explains quite a bit as to why indexing onto straight nine cat and totals is a horrific way to value a player. If you have to create carveouts for 50 guys out of the top 120, then it’s a bad system. And I didn’t even talk about the guys that were ranked down too low because of the way this system works, which I could have and could have gotten really interesting numbers out of it. In fact, what if I even even if I just do per game nine catat numbers and tell you about guys that are in weird spots, like it will be somewhat mind-blowing. Like, did you know that like Kate Cunningham was ranked behind Josh Hart for nine cat value last season? I mean, he very obviously wasn’t, but that’s what the nine cat per games will tell you. Do you know Jamal Murray ranked ahead of um Deon Booker? Yep. That’s the thing that happened. Did you know that? Let’s have a look. Jakob Purle, Jakapa Purle, you know, Toronto Raptors contract extension legend, ranked ahead of Trey Young and Giannis in nine cat per game last season. Well, now you do. Guys, hit the subscribe button. I’ll be back live in a few days. Thank you so much for listening everyone. If you hate the show, if you hated the idea of what I said, if you disagree with it, hey, drop it in the comments. But I hope that it was at least somewhat illuminating. We are done here. Thank you so much for listening everyone. Say [Music]

Yahoo’s default 9-category totals rankings are tanking NBA fantasy drafts. Josh Lloyd breaks down why Yahoo’s system is fundamentally flawed—rewarding games played over real impact—and shows how players like Harrison Barnes, Buddy Hield, and Malik Beasley end up criminally overrated.

Learn how the DURANT System flips the script by weighing categories and replacement value properly, giving you the edge Yahoo’s outdated totals can’t. Whether you play H2H or roto, stop falling for inflated rankings that ignore context. Josh shows the exact mistakes managers make and how to avoid them, ensuring your draft board isn’t a landmine.

Dominate your fantasy basketball league with smarter draft strategy that cuts through misleading ranks. Listen now to get the data-driven approach Yahoo’s rankings miss!

Follow and subscribe on all major podcast platforms: Be a double banger, watch the video, then listen to the audio
🎧 https://link.chtbl.com/LOFantasyBasketball?sid=YouTube

Check out Locked On NBA League-Wide for comprehensive NBA coverage, including team insights, fantasy tips, draft updates, WNBA news and more:
🎧 https://linktr.ee/LockedOnNBA

Get personalized shout-outs, messages and more on Cameo:
https://www.cameo.com/josh_doezl9tzyg25?qid=163210364

Improve your fantasy basketball team with the latest on waiver wire moves, trades, adds, drops, and other essential strategies. Take advantage of these resources:

Projections: https://basketballmonster.com/projections.aspx
NBA Lineups: https://basketballmonster.com/nbalineups.aspx
NBA News: https://basketballmonster.com/playernews.aspx
NBA Schedule Analyzer: https://basketballmonster.com/weeklyteamschedules.aspx
NBA Fantasy Basketball Team Analysis: https://basketballmonster.com/teamanalysis.aspx

Intro music by:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAPWJaPqxcWTAn-l8JjHCVg

Connect with us on other platforms:

Website: https://basketballmonster.com
Apple Podcasts: https://buff.ly/2xQx1tw
Spotify: https://buff.ly/2RVJ1RW
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/joshlloyd.bsky.social
Instagram: https://instagram.com/lockedonfantasybasketball

Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!
Monarch Money
Take control of your finances with Monarch Money. Use code LOCKEDONNBA at monarchmoney.com/lockedonnba for 50% off your first year

Gametime
Download the Gametime app, create an account, and use code LOCKEDONNBA for $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply. Download Gametime today. What time is it? Gametime.

FanDuel
Right now, new customers can get ONE HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS in BONUS BETS when your first FIVE DOLLAR BET WINS! Download the app or head to FANDUEL.COM to get started. Bet with FanDuel—Official Partner of the NBA.

FANDUEL DISCLAIMER: 21+ in select states. First online real money wager only. Bonus issued as nonwithdrawable free bets that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit FanDuel.com/RG (CO, IA, MD, MI, NJ, PA, IL, VA, WV), 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342 (AZ), 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN), 1-800-522-4700 (WY, KS) or visit ksgamblinghelp.com (KS), 1-877-770-STOP (LA), 1-877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY), TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN)

0:00 – Introduction
1:34 – Default rankings issues
4:07 – Yahoo ranking system problems
11:44 – Player ranking discrepancies
20:53 – More player examples
27:30 – High-ranked player surprises
30:33 – Conclusion