2023-2024 Fantasy NBA Best Ball Diary (Sept. 26)

It’s officially NBA best ball season! Last week, my Top 200 ranks for both Underdog and DraftKings dropped for free on FTN Fantasy and, just like last season, they will remain free throughout the lead-up to opening night on October 24. Make sure you check back on that rankings list frequently, as I expect to make (at the very least) weekly updates.

In this weekly article, I will discuss any developing trends, ADP shifts and strategies that I’m using in my own drafts. I will cover both sites offering NBA best ball tournaments, and we’ll subsidize these articles with livestreams every Friday leading up to the NBA season. You can check out last week’s stream here, where we participated in a draft on both sites.

Draft season is the best season, so saddle up at Underdog Fantasy, and if you’re a first-time depositor you can get a 100% deposit match bonus up to $100 with promo code FTN!

September 26 Update

The past week has been the best example of “the calm before the storm.” NBA training camps open tomorrow for the teams participating in preseason games outside of North America, which is just Dallas and Minnesota this year. All other camps will open October 3 with the majority of teams holding their media day the day before. Once those media day clips start hitting your social media timelines, expect the buzz around the new season to begin a steady climb as we build toward opening night.

There will be certain news, taken in the correct context or not, that comes out of media day scrums that will surely alter how we’re looking at various situations around the league. So make sure you’ve got your notifications back on for NBA news. Or at the very least, keep your eyes on the NBA Discord channel here at FTN where we’ll be discussing all the happenings as we hear about them.

Last week we discussed the different tournament formats the two sites are offering this season, as well as the importance of the playoff schedules between the formats. Today, we’ll discuss the best roster-build practices on the two sites and take a look back at what builds have historically found their way to the final on Underdog.

Underdog Roster Building

NBA best ball drafts on Underdog are 16 rounds in length. Your starting lineup for each scoring period will consist of your two top scoring “guards” and “wings” along with your top scoring “big.” Then, the top overall scorer from the remaining players on your roster will fill your “flex” spot, for a total of six players contributing to your weekly score.

Over the last two seasons, the players lucky enough to snag Nikola Jokic or Joel Embiid have had an incredible advantage when it comes to advancing their team all the way to the final. In 2021, the final round on Underdog had 58 teams. Fifty of them had one of those two centers, including the top-21 finishing teams. Last season, the field for the final was 186 teams. There were still a lot of Jokic and Embiid teams that made it into the field. For example, all four teams that I advanced to the final round had Jokic. But Big Honey sat out the majority of the games during the final round as the Nuggets coasted to the top seed and rested for their eventual NBA championship run. The stud “big” you wanted last year was Domantas Sabonis, who was present on the top-seven finishing rosters and 17 of the top 20.

As we’ve discussed, we aren’t as focused on the scheduling for the playoff rounds with the changes to the prize structure on Underdog. But that doesn’t mean we still don’t want to prioritize the “bigs.” Grabbing the elite-tier players from that position has consistently been the key to success in Underdog’s NBA best ball tournaments. So who is in that tier this season? Jokic and Embiid (ADP of 4.5) obviously remain and are first and third overall, respectively, in my ranks, with just Giannis Antetokounmpo in between them. I think there is a slight tier break between those two and the next pair of Anthony Davis (ADP of 12.2) and Domantas Sabonis (ADP of 8.5). I have those two ranked back-to-back at eight and nine, respectively, and they are clear priorities in the latter half of the first round for me. If I’m able to roster one of those four, I’m completely fine with adding just one more “big” to your roster and loading up the rest of the spots with guards and wings.

If I don’t snag one of those guys, then I’m drafting three bigs at a minimum. You can go “zero big” (think “zero RB strategy” from NFL) and really stack up your guards and wings before picking up four bigs from Round 8 and beyond. “Zero big” is not a strategy that I employ often in my NBA drafts, but it is viable.

So what about the other two positions? If I don’t get to grab one of those top-tier “bigs,” then I want to prioritize the “wing” position early in Underdog drafts. One of the largest differences between the two sites is how they classify their wing/forward and big/center positions and the “tweener” players who are eligible for them, such as Karl-Anthony Towns, Victor Wembanyama and Jaren Jackson. Underdog has a larger portion of those players as “bigs,” creating a lack of elite “wing” options to choose from. You’ll see players like Kevin Durant (ADP of 10.7, rank of 7), Zion Williamson (ADP of 28.7, rank of 23), Kawhi Leonard (ADP of 43.9, rank of 31) and Paul George (ADP of 38.8, rank of 35) higher in my ranks than the field is considering them.

Unsurprisingly, the three most common builds to make the Underdog NBA best ball final rounds the last two seasons have been (listing guard-forward-big)

6-6-4
7-6-3
6-7-3

You may be wondering where the 2-big roster build is if I hyped it up earlier. It’s quite uncommon in my experience for the average drafter to feel satisfied leaving the draft room with just two bigs. But it can absolutely work. Last season, two of the top-15 finishers in the final round on Underdog rostered just two bigs, with one team pairing Sabonis with Embiid and the other Sabonis with Bam Adebayo. It’s a risk, but one I’m more than willing to take if I can grab a strong second option on top of drafting one of the top four bigs in the ranks.

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DraftKings Roster Building

As I mentioned above, DraftKings differs in two major ways. First, our DraftKings best ball lineups will start an extra player during each scoring period. Like Underdog, your top two guards and forwards will count toward your total along with your best center score. But on DK, you’ll have two “flex” scorers compared to just the one “utility” spot on UD.

The second is the positional eligibility between the forward and center positions. The options at center on DraftKings are scarce compared to the big position on Underdog, and it’s going to be the reason for the majority of differences you see in the two sets of ADPs as well as my ranks. You’ll notice in my DraftKings ranks that Joel Embiid is second overall and the rest of the center-eligible players pick up a hefty premium in the ranks when you compare the two sites. Similar to Underdog, if I grab one of the top-tier centers (just Jokic and Embiid on DK), then I’m fine to end my draft with two total centers. Otherwise, I want to end with three, and with the way the field is catching onto the scarcity of the position, I’m making sure to grab at least two of them in the first seven rounds.

I also talked about how I prioritize wings over guards on Underdog in the first few rounds of my drafts. I’m taking the opposite approach on DraftKings. With DK taking so many players who are “bigs” on Underdog and making them forwards on their site, there’s much more depth at the position. In turn, guards become scarcer and hotter commodities in the first few rounds of drafts.

Unfortunately, I did not draft NBA best ball teams on DraftKings last season, so I do not have access to the historical data on how rosters that made the final round were constructed. The $100k up top has, unsurprisingly, successfully baited me this year. To this point of draft season, most of my rosters are ending up as 7-6-3 or 6-7-3 builds, with the exception of when I luck out and am able to draft Jokic or Embiid. Those rosters have all finished the draft with just two total bigs.

My Top 10 Most Drafted Players On Underdog (Sept. 26)

With each strategy article, I will give an update on who my top-10 exposures are on both sites. On DraftKings, I haven’t figured out how to view my best ball exposures on the website quite yet (if you know, holler at me), but we can view them on the mobile app. Here’s where things stand for me on both platforms.

Underdog

DraftKings

Next Week

We’ll check in on all of the news, rumors and updates that come from NBA Media Days happening on Monday. I’ll also discuss any changes in my rankings that come from any further news or player movement we see over the next week. I expect my ownership to shift dramatically on DraftKings as I’m working to catch up to the number of drafts I’ve completed there compared to Underdog.

As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter (X) @KawhisenbergDFS or in the FTN Discord channel with questions about best ball, and make sure to stop by the livestream this Friday at 1 p.m. ET!