Pricing the board
26-27 Auction
Values
Points prices what a player produces in fantasy points.
Cats prices how far he moves each of the nine categories against everyone else who gets rostered.
Read whichever your league scores. They disagree about plenty of players and they are meant to.
Your league
The same player is worth more in a 20 team league than a 10 team one. There is more money chasing him, and the man you would settle for instead is a good deal worse.
Change any of these and the whole board reprices for it.
About auction values
Fantasy basketball auction values for 2026-27
An auction draft is a different problem from a snake draft. Nobody is stuck with a slot, everybody has the same money, and the whole board is available to anyone willing to pay for it. What you need is not a ranking but a price, and a price only means something once you know how many teams are bidding, how many spots they each have to fill and how much they have to spend. Most auction cheat sheets are printed for a standard league and leave you to do that adjustment in your head. This one is built from the settings you type in.
Points leagues and category leagues get their own board, because they are genuinely different questions and one set of dollar values cannot answer both. Once you have your prices, Draft Hacker will run the draft with you and Roast My Draft will tell you afterwards how everyone did. If you have not sorted out who picks where yet, The Fastbreak will draw the order.
How are fantasy basketball auction values calculated?
Start with the last player who gets rostered in your league, which is your number of teams times your roster spots. In a 12 team league with 13 spots that is the 156th best player, and you can have him for a dollar. Everyone above him is worth what they give you over and above what he already would, and nothing for the part he covers. Then take all the money in the room, hold a dollar back for every roster spot that has to be filled, and share out what is left in proportion to how far above him each player sits.
Why do the values change when I change the league size?
Because the player you would settle for changes. In a 10 team league the last man rostered is the 130th best. In a 20 team league he is the 260th, who is a good deal worse, so the gap between him and a star grows. There is also twice as much money in the room and twice as many managers who each have to go home with a full roster. All of that pushes the top of the board up, even though nothing about the player has changed.
Do the auction values add up to my league's budget?
Yes, to the dollar. Add up every price on the board and you get your number of teams times your budget back. That is worth checking, and it is the difference between an auction value and a ranking with a dollar sign stuck in front of it. The whole dollar figures are shared out instead of being rounded one at a time, so those add up too.
Should I use the points values or the category values?
Whichever your league scores. The points board prices what a player produces in fantasy points. The category board prices how far he moves each of the nine categories against everyone else who gets rostered. They disagree about plenty of players and they are meant to, because a high scorer who shoots badly from the free throw line helps you in one format and hurts you in the other.
What are the ESPN and Yahoo columns?
They are what people actually paid. Both platforms publish the average price a player went for across auction drafts run on their site, and we print that beside our own number. Neither one is priced for your league, because each is an average over that platform's own default settings, so read the gap between them and our price as a guide to what a room will pay for someone, not as a verdict on how good he is.
Is there a minimum bid?
A dollar. You cannot buy a roster spot for nothing, so a manager filling 13 spots has 13 dollars they will never get to spend on anybody good. Holding that money back before sharing out the rest is what makes the board add up. Some auction tools floor at zero instead and print values below a dollar, which makes the top of their board look dearer than ours by roughly what those spots cost.
Are the auction values free?
The top of the board is free to anyone, with no account and nothing to install. A free account opens the rest of it for your league's shape. It sits alongside everything else here, including the fantasy basketball rankings, the weekly schedule and the draft assistant.