The projections.

This is the strangest board we've ever built, because half the league's usage just changed hands. Giannis is in Miami, Ja is in Portland, and Philadelphia spent the summer collecting other teams' alphas — Jaylen Brown in early July, then LeBron James, who picked the Sixers on July 24 for the last free-agent decision of his career. The Kawhi-to-Toronto deal, meanwhile, is frozen mid-air while the league investigates the Clippers, so we rank him in LA until the ink is real. When a 30-minute anchor leaves town, his shots don't vanish, they get absorbed. We studied a decade of departures to learn who actually inherits them (mostly the modest-usage guys already in the building, and almost never as threes), and priced that in. It's why names like Austin Reaves, Payton Pritchard and Neemias Queta sit higher here than on other boards — measured lifts from real history, not narrative leaps.

It's also the year of the comeback — Tatum, Haliburton, Kyrie, Dame — and they're why our board shows two numbers. The rank is per-game: what a player is on the nights he plays. Draft value bakes in the games we expect him to play. Tatum can be a top-12 talent and a round-3 pick at the same time; the gap between his two numbers is the decision. Our advice: set your draft order by draft value, then judge trades and weekly matchups by the per-game line — that's what you're actually rostering in a given week.

Here's the conviction underneath both: once the shooting math is settled, fantasy leagues are won and lost on games played — and last season's games column is a bad prophet. So we read every injury-shortened season the way an analyst would, not the way a spreadsheet would. One clean surgery on a durable body mostly comes back (Sabonis, Jalen Williams). A tanking team's late-season shutdown was a front-office decision, not a diagnosis — those games return with a new context (Giannis). A recurring calf, a 38-year-old knee, a cartilage file — those don't, and we hold the line even when the talent argues (Curry capped at 50, Paul George left cold). When our games number disagrees with the market's memory, the reasoning is in that player's view line — read it before you disagree back.

The arrival side is where we disagree with the room most. When a star lands on a full roster, the instinct is to fade everyone already there — our own decade-long census says that's mostly wrong. Minutes at the top of a rotation are sticky; the men who actually pay are the fringe players who only had a rotation spot because someone was hurt. So on Philadelphia we cut LeBron to 30 minutes and shaved Maxey a shade, but we did not touch Embiid at all (his minutes are capped by a training staff, not by competition), and the real compression landed on the bench nobody drafts.

Two honest notes. The top of the board is stable and a little boring — Jokić, Wemby, SGA — because that's what the math says; we won't manufacture a hot take where there isn't one. The edge on this board lives in rounds 3 through 9, where role changes and availability are mispriced. And it's late July: rosters are still moving, a few veterans are unsigned (DeRozan, Kuminga and Beal among them — we hold them off the board rather than guess), and this page will keep updating as the news lands. Numbers first, always — but the numbers here have been argued with, player by player. That's the product.