Dynasty Basketball Leagues for Beginners, Vol. 1: Philosophies, Basic Overviews, and Rookie Draft Tips
Looking to get into fantasy or dynasty basketball? Let's talk about some basic practices, principles, and methods to be successful early on.
After playing re-draft leagues for years, you start to get a little bored. You have NBA 2k MyLeague up, wishing you had other GMs to compete instead of the computer. You’re scrolling on the fantasy basketball subreddit when you see an opening for a dynasty league. Having never heard of a dynasty league, you inquire to learn more. You learn that it’s a fantasy league where your roster carries over from year to year, and the drafts that occur each season, are rookies only! Excitement races through you. Immediately you take the team, not paying attention to the league format, and excitedly look down your roster. It’s a mediocre team, but starting to get old. Thoughts of building a dynasty are racing through your mind. Knowing the way to acquire good talent is through the draft, you immediately put all your best players on the block. A few hours later you check your phone. You have an offer for one your best players, Nikola Jokic. The offer is Walker Kessler and Pick 4. You think back to your redraft leagues where Walker Kessler was the waiver pick up of the year and helped you win a title. Pick 4 has a lot of potential too. Lots of good players have been drafted at that position. After thinking about it for a little more, you decide really plunge on the rebuild, and decide to accept the trade. Immediately, the league chat is in shambles as everyone is complaining to the commissioner, asking this trade to be vetoed. Perplexed, you explain yourself. In the end, the trade still goes through and you’re sitting happy, getting ready to have a year of tanking.
Every year, many new managers entering dynasty leagues have a similar mentality. To try and rebuild a roster after blowing it up. Many have the idea of building a dynasty. What many fail to realize is that its easy to blow it up, but its harder to build it back up. Some people get lucky with top picks and are back out in 3-4 years, but for some it can take much longer. We are here to have fun after all, but answer yourself this question: Are you trying to collect players or are you trying to win?
Startups and how to build your roster
Have a plan of attack. What are you looking, and what timeline are you going to build around?
Know the value of your own players and not undervalue them
Build rosters with a sense with longevity and a multi-year window (if you intend on sticking around) or a short term window (if you’re trying to win now)
What not to do
Do NOT make trades just to make trades. You will get burned more often than not.
Do not trade your star player for a bunch of smaller pieces. It’s an easy way to lose value and very rarely do these trades ever work out.
Stick to your timeline and carefully assess your needs and outlook on a regular basis
Understanding your league
What type of league is it? Points or Categories? How many teams? How many roster spots? How many starters? Is there a way to stash players? How many draft picks? What type of players are on the waiver wire?
All of these things are important in having success in your league. In points leagues, players that tend to score points are more important than players like Alex Caruso who is more valuable in category leagues? How many roster spots is critical! In a dynasty league, you want more than 300 players rostered and honestly, it should be closer to 400 in cases. If your league has 150, then there’s no point in drafting the high floor guys. You swing for the fences every time. You’re taking high ceiling players like: Tidjane Salaun, Cody Williams, Ron Holland, Bilal Coulibaly, Noa Essengue, Jeremiah Fears instead of the high floor guys like: Nique Clifford, Tristan Da Silva, Walter Clayton, Jaime Jaquez, because best case scenario these guys are on the waiver wire anyway. You want to be rewarding people for good drafting skills and not rewarding good waiver moves and you do that by having a deep league. Enjoy having the Isaiah Joe’s, Sam Merrill’s, Trey Lyles of the world. Knowing what type of players are on the waiver wire will help inform your decisions on how to value the rotation players and stars. If Harrison Barnes is on the waiver wire, it means you really should only be valuing top 150-200 players in trades. Yes, Harrison is old but if I can stream in Harrison Barnes and its better than some high floor guys like Jaime Jaquez, then it further emphasizes you go for upside every time. If the best player on the waiver wire is Talen Horton-Tucker, then give more value to the good rotation players in the NBA.
There are leagues that value players over 28 years old as essentially a dead asset. If you are in one of those leagues and if you want to actually win, get a lot of those win now pieces for cheap, and go for it. Then save your picks and trade them for slightly younger pieces to help keep up the winning. Yes, its not as fun, but if you actually want to win and build a dynasty, this can be the easiest way to do it. There should be no reason that someone is trading Ivica Zubac for the opportunity to draft Kevin McCullar and the ability to worsen your first round pick.
How to use your draft picks
Talent > Roster fit
Keeping an eye on consensus and developing ADP can be advantageous to get a feel for pick value
Be careful when drafting players with an alluring fantasy skillset with a questionable ability to get on the court
Considering real-life implications is key; what role will this player play on their team? What is their path to minutes? What is their floor vs. ceiling? What skills (i.e. defense, 3PT shooting, etc.) that will keep them on the court?
If they get on the court, how useful is the player for fantasy? We can use an example of Ben Sheppard or Adem Bona. Sheppard is the better player in real life but he provides almost nothing for fantasy. Adem Bona has a ton of fantasy upside, but isn’t as impactful of a player (as of when we’re writing this). We should be going for Bona in basically all cases.
What is the value of a draft pick?
Draft pick value is based entirely on your league’s market, but regardless of the league, one thing is true: people love to draft rookies. Every year, you have a chance at drafting the next up-and-coming star if you get lucky. However, drafts are total crapshoots and there’s a wide range of outcomes based on the pick and your value coming back in trades.
Depending on where your draft picks are, some picks are like a new car: the second you use them, their value is already decreasing. For most players, values will fluctuate a lot over time.
Draft picks are the most liquid assets you can obtain in any dynasty league. Use that to your advantage if it means pivoting to players with proven and strong results. Conversely, aim to buy picks at good value to use for trades or building depth later.
Using picks means assessing value where it lies. Going away from ADP is not inherently bad, but keep that in mind when evaluating pick value vs. player value to avoid a bad reach that falls outside of ideal value.
Managers love shiny new toys. Every year, teams get excited about young players and will pay up to move up or buy into a spot. Assess value, field offers, and take advantage of the fun factor in drafting new players.
Navigating your league market
Every single league has its own market and way of valuing players. Oftentimes, the way you or I value certain players is going to be higher or lower than a leaguemate’s.
Here’s one example from a league I’m in. In a 30-team points league, I own LaMelo Ball. Ball is a very difficult player to place a true value on; depending on who you ask, when you ask, and how many games he’s played recently, Ball’s value is all over the place. For us, we still value Ball as a top-tier dynasty asset and dominates the boxscore when he is playing, but given his injury history, his availability leaves a lot to be desired, settling around the 15-20ish range. Following our championship, I spent some time fielding offers for Ball, expecting some strong offers. However, I quickly learned a majority of my league had very little interest in him or his cost. Top 50-60 ranged players and draft picks in the early 10s. Top 40 players straight up. A top 50 player and a top 100 player for Ball and a top 80 player. No interest in even the 3rd overall pick. However, in a 24-team categories league, he was traded in a package deal with a top 110-120 player and a 2026 first round pick for a top 30 player, a top 100 player, a top 140-150 player, and the 2025 4th overall pick (equivalent to top 75-80 value).
Some leagues value players differently than others. Doing your due diligence on your players is key to assess where you can find assets you’re higher/lower on, and understand that no two leagues are the same with valuing players. Most importantly, if you don’t feel you are receiving the value back you’re looking for, holding to your principles and valuations matters.
How Important is Depth?
Depending on your league size, format, and overall outlook, it’s important to build a team with enough depth to sustain the inevitable injuries that come with an 82-game regular season. However, regardless of your league sizes and settings, seeking out blue-chip assets is always going to be a key way to win. Winning trades in the aggregate that break a top 50 asset into a top 100, top 150 and a random draft pick may rarely work.
There are also people that don’t value depth at all and that’s the easiest way to lose your league in deeper leagues. It’s cheap talent that you can acquire that can give 50% of some stars in some cases. It’s not a lot, but it adds up and you can get them for a fraction of the cost sometimes. In shallower leagues, while depth is important, its not as valuable and the easy way to win is to consolidate for stars every time if someone can bite on it.
Drafting philosophies
When in doubt, consider draft capital. The spot where you drafted doesn’t mean everything, but when we don’t have the evidence to see exactly what a player can be in fantasy yet, consider how high or how low a player was drafted.
Draft in tiers. When looking at your picks and planning for who you want to take, make a list of the top players you would want to take. If it appears that the players you most want are not going to be available, consider a trade to avoid reaching.
Assessing player skillsets. There are important things to consider when analyzing players and their skills. Take a close look at their statistics in college or internationally. Learn what they’re good at, what they’re not good at, and where they stand in their team’s depth chart.
Be careful when you reach. Everyone reaches on talent from time to time. It just depends on what you see in the talent and how you view their path to minutes, their skillset, and all-around ability to deliver on the statistics you need to win.
If you plan on selling and tanking, how to do it and how not to do it
Do…
Put your good players on the market and look for someone who’s willing to give a serious offer
Know the players value and ask for what he’s worth
Don’t be afraid to take multiple deals to break everything down
Don’t be afraid to scour the waiver wire and find good sleepers
Recognize that if your process is good, it will eventually win out. Outliers happen every year, crazy stuff happens
Do pre-draft scouting, and not just a few weeks before and not before the NCAA tournament, this is throughout the season and do your best to watch the games or at least keep up with it and pay attention to people who know their stuff. However, having your own opinions and not just relying on others is important. It is a time investment but its more rewarding. Just be careful not to get too married to your pre-draft thoughts.
Don’t…
We recognize that having older players is tough and they won’t get the value of what they’re worth, do not sell them off for nothing. If it comes down to it, don’t be afraid to reach out to other people in order to get the right deal, and if that doesn’t work, it might honestly be worth just sticking it out and try to go all in for the next couple years until it the title window closes (if it hasn’t closed already) and be ready for a long road ahead. It does not benefit you at all to sell them low for basically anything, and you are making it harder for when you’re good again. There are people that do this, they sell low, they tank, and they aren’t good even five years later. They have good players but they don’t have a star, they don’t have a great direction, and those good players are starting to enter their prime and without a star, you’re stuck in purgatory. Managers that do this often time sell the caliber of teams that your knew fresh team aspires to be. If you get lucky, you can land a Wembanyama or a Cooper Flagg, but anything can happen to these types of players and there’s stars that can breakout at any point of the draft.
If you are tanking, and you do not do draft scouting pre-draft, you can be setting yourself up for failure. Whether that is at the time of the draft, or analyzing the prospect correctly and knowing when to get off the player or who to target for a buy-low. If you’re super excited to draft these rookies, you should get to know them in college or internationally.
Evaluating the consensus
Are we saying that the consensus is always right? No. Are we saying that you have to think like the consensus does? No. However, if you want to be successful in your dynasty leagues, you need to be able use consensus value to extract more value, whether you’re doing a sell high or a buy low. By not using consensus value, you can either overvalue someone to a high level and be seen as really hard to trade with, or you end up undervaluing someone and you’re at great risk of losing talent or value in a trade or draft pick. The Chicago Bulls have long been made fun of for their moves. We can even use the recent Lonzo Ball/Isaac Okoro swap. We also heard that the Grizzlies wanted Lonzo last trade deadline and were offering Marcus Smart and a first round pick for Lonzo Ball. The Bulls turned this down, which probably led to many people’s frustration when they traded Lonzo in a straight up swap with Isaac Okoro. League-wide, Lonzo Ball was perceived as a much better asset than Isaac Okoro. Even though Okoro can make some sense with Giddey, it’s still bad asset management.
It is very likely that there are many managers in fantasy that don’t really check the consensus, or use it to their advantage which leads to them to be easy targets for people.
Let’s use a hypothetical example of how we can properly evaluate the consensus: 16 Team League with 20 roster spots. Let’s say you have the #2 pick in your upcoming dynasty rookie draft and you are more interested long term in Jeremiah Fears than Dylan Harper. It’s not a consensus opinion at all, but there’s people out there that probably think that. The wrong move would be to select Jeremiah Fears at #2 even though he’s the best player available on your board. You understand that Dylan Harper is being perceived as a top 40-50 dynasty asset whereas Jeremiah Fears is somewhere in the 100-150 range for some people. Knowing this, you field offers and the team with the #7 pick, is offering you #7 and his unprotected first rounder the following season after barely missing the playoffs. You know, that’s likely not enough and you push back more, wanting 7, the 2026 first, and Matas Buzelis. He then takes you up on the offer and you move back to 7. The top 6 picks are the same top 6 in real life, just differing order. Fears is on the board at 7. You can easily take him here and while some may be lower on Fears, its a win for you to get the #2 ranked player on your board. You could even do more scouting and notice that the guy at #8 is a big Duke fan and needs a center. Knowing that he probably won’t take Fears, you move back a spot, get pick 24 later on, he takes Khaman Maluach at 7, leaving you Jeremiah Fears at 8. Even though he may have a very off-consensus opinion on Jeremiah Fears, he was still to end up with what he wanted and with an extra 2 draft picks and Matas Buzelis to move back.
Getting advice and analyzing rankings
In the past few years, the fantasy basketball community has grown substantially in player base and in content creation. This community is chock-full of well-educated and analytical minds rife with their own insight to share. Asking for advice can be incredibly helpful if you can’t decide.
There are so, so many great creators out there we want to share. For this first installment, here are a few great creators and resources in the fantasy/dynasty community whose content can help steer you in the right direction (with more to come later on):
Josh Lloyd, Locked On Fantasy Basketball/Basketball Monster
Matt Lawson, Fantasy Basketball International
Dan Besbris, Old Man Squad Sports Network
Noah Rubin, Young Man Squad Fantasy Basketball Podcast, Rotoworld
Robbin Marx, Bleav in Fantasy Basketball
Joseph Mamone, Hashtag Basketball
When studying different dynasty basketball rankings and content, be sure to consider the following:
Do not use rankings as scripture. In our community, rankings are made with purpose, careful analysis, and a sense of urgency in a rapidly changing sport. Opinions will vary from analyst to analyst, and not everyone will always agree that X is more valuable than Y even if Y scores more points. Zach might feel that Cooper Flagg is a top 7 dynasty asset and he would take him over Anthony Edwards, but not Cade Cunningham. Brian might disagree, and that Cooper Flagg is overrated and just outside the top 10 of dynasty drafts. There are many different ways to go about valuations and no one spot or rank makes any other opinion invalid.
Analysts are not always going to be right. Part of our job is to make educated predictions and guesses based on the evidence available to us, and that sometimes means our analysis is off, we missed on a player we liked pre-draft, or the breakout doesn’t come to fruition.
Numbers are arbitrary, and the spots are not always going to mean everything. It’s purely a rough guess based on performance, outlook, context, and a million other factors we intend to discuss more, and looking with different lenses as a contender, rebuilder, or somewhere in the middle is key to weigh values based on needs and wants.
We hope you enjoyed our first installment of Dynasty Basketball Leagues for Beginners! Be sure to follow us and watch out for future installments this summer and beyond to teach you about dynasty basketball.