Power Rankings

How it is worked out

Every team ranked three ways - by the categories it should win against the rest of your league, by the matchups it should win by taking a majority of them, and by its roto points - with its chance in every category and how its matchup against you is expected to end. Pick another team's circle to see the league from its side.

In an ESPN head-to-head category league it opens on your league's own schedule: every team ranked by the record it is forecast to finish the regular season with — its record so far, plus every week left against the opponent the schedule gives it, the week under way from its live score — with its chance of making the playoffs, from 2,000 simulated rests of the regular season. Opponents switches to every team against every other.

Every night left in the season, each team starts its best lineup from the players whose NBA team plays, as a daily-lineup league does, and each game counts at the player's chance to play it - our injury model's where it has one, otherwise the injury sources' return dates. How many of his team's games he plays in all comes from our season-games model: the injury report sets which games he misses, and every other game is scaled so his games add up to that total. Each player's rate is his projection, his numbers so far, or a blend: the projection moved toward his season so far by the share of such a start that usually lasts. Every week ahead is forecast on its own, with two kinds of spread: each night's ups and downs, and how unsure each player's rate still is, which does not average out. A category's chance is the gap between two teams against that spread, so a narrow lead counts for little; a matchup's chance is simulated, because categories move together. In a roto league the same is measured over the rest of the season.

How many games each player plays is not one number either: the rest of the season is played out 100 times, each time with every player's share of his team's games drawn from our season-games model's chances, because a player is healthy for most of a season or loses a long stretch, and that moves every category of his team at once. A player whose season goes badly misses more games in every week of it, in every category at once, and the bench takes his place where it can. Every chance and point on the table is the average over those seasons, and the range under the ranking measure is where four in five of them end.