How DraftKick Comes Up with Player Values

Contents

You're reading the Guide to DraftKick, which explains everything about how to use DraftKick to win your leagues.

1. Ranking and valuation methodology (this page)
2. DraftKick Views
   • Players
   • Rosters
   • Board
   • Standings
3. Settings

Start with projections

All of DraftKick's player rankings are built off of freely available, third-party player projections.

You can customize which sources are used and how much to weight each source in the Settings.

By default, DraftKick uses a composite of multiple projections, which weeds out outliers for a more accurate projection.

For rotisserie and H2H categories, use z-scores

This doesn't apply to points leagues (including every fantasy football league), just to those certain baseball and basketball leagues where each category is counted equally.

For these leagues, DraftKick uses z-scores to put each of the categories on the same scale. (It also allows you to put your thumb on the scale to push up or down any category, see "Category Weights" in the Settings.)

Determine value over replacement

One of the key principles of fantasy valuation is value over replacement player (VORP). In football, you'll see this referred to as value-based drafting (VBD).

I've gone into the details elsewhere, so I'll spare you here. But the basic idea is that some positions will score more than others, and it's not a player's total points that matter, but how many points a player scores above what is freely available on the waiver wire.

For points leagues, DraftKick finds a player's points compared to the worst player at their position.

For rotisserie and H2H categories, it's comparing a player's total z-scores to the worst player at their position.

DraftKick also let's you tweak the replacement levels so that they aren't exactly at the worst player drafted. There are a couple of reasons why you might do this:

1. In football especially, you can expect that several of your bench RB and WR end up as worth starting. This pushes the replacement level deeper than just the worst starter, into the bench level.

2. A pressure in the opposite direction develops as the teams in your league disagree about player rankings. If someone drafts your 14th ranked player because they have them ranked 7th, that leaves one extra starting-caliber player available.

DraftKick defaults to a custom set of replacement levels for football, based on my own experience in drafts. It also defaults to a slightly lower replacement level for catchers in baseball. You can tweak the replacement levels in the Settings.