Typically a fantasy basketball points league has weekly matchups where you set your lineups, and points accumulate from all of your starters each day.  By the end of the week, you have your total.

My new setup runs with a slightly different idea, whereas instead of adding up multiple games from each of your starters, it only uses one.  However, the best part is that the one game you use is entirely up to YOU.  You have full control over your final score at the end of the week, as it’s determined by the decisions you made over the seven-day period.

Let’s start at the beginning:  You set a daily lineup.

On Monday you set your starters for that night’s slate of games.  Each one of those starters is gonna get you a point total that night.

This is where it gets interesting: 

Tuesday morning, you look over how your starters did the night before.  Now you have a decision to make.  You get to pick and choose which, if any, of those scores are good enough to “lock in” to your team’s point total for the week.  If none of them did very well, you can throw them all out.  If someone did extremely well on Monday, you can lock that score in for one of your final starting spots.

If you do decide to lock in any player’s score, you no longer start that player for the rest of the week. 

Think Yahtzee, where you have dice you choose to set aside (or lock in), but in this case you have player games where you will pick out which high scores to use until you have filled all your starting slots.

Example:  You own Anthony Davis.  Davis plays really well Monday night.  However, Davis also has three more games to play over the course of the week.  Since you can only lock in ONE score for Davis, you have to decide whether or not his Monday score will be his best game that week or if he could potentially play better the next game.  If you want to take a gamble, you can throw away his Monday score and hope he gets you an even better score next time.  It’s all up to you.

If you do choose to lock him in, Davis is no longer eligible to get you more points that week so you would just keep him on your bench.  And since your team roster is made up of more players than starting spots, you can still continue to fill up all of your starting lineup with other players the next day.

So if you play with 10 starting spots, that means you will be locking in exactly 10 player scores by the end of the week. 

You may end up locking in all 10 after just a couple days, or conversely you may end up not having any scores locked in for several days.  Again, those choices are all up to you and how you feel your roster is performing that week.  If by Sunday, you still have starting spots to lock in, it will then simply take the highest remaining ones from Sunday’s games.

Positional limits would still apply though. 

Depending on your setup, you could have all of your starting guard spots used up, or you could have only one spot remaining and it HAS to be a Center.  This could really affect how your final score ends up looking if your only Center you have left to play on Sunday is your worst one, so it’s usually wise to look ahead at your players’ remaining games and to lock in any flex spots last.

Over the past year, I’ve performed several test runs with this setup and I’ve found it to be quite enjoyable. 

I’ve even gone so far as to adjust my settings to turn it into a more realistic NBA experience where your final score results actually resemble NBA-like final scores (roughly in the low 100’s).  This usually works with a starting lineup of six (2G, 2F, 1C, 1Flx) and using Hollinger Game Score for the points system, but it also depends on the number of teams in the league as well. See my earlier write up regarding even more NBA-like visuals: Fantasy Basketball’s Newest Way To Further Resemble The Real NBA | The Real Sim Shany

Game Peak Mode is a unique alternative to the typical fantasy points league with the following benefits:

1. It negates the imbalance of games played in a given week between opponents, as they now both will use the exact same amount of games to determine their final score.
2. It appeals to the hardcore as it significantly increases owner involvement and activity, requiring decision-making on a literal daily basis.
3. It adds another degree of strategy, as your decisions could also be based on how your current opponent is doing throughout the week.  By observing what scores they have locked in already, you may or may not decide to take some higher risk gambles on future games, OR it could entice you to take a more conservative approach in locking some safer scores.

The only downside with this setup:

Unfortunately, no league sites actually offer this as an automated setting yet.  However, in my test runs using Fantrax, I’ve been able to handle it manually, as commissioners can go in and adjust lineups for all teams after each day.  So it was fully functional but would require a bit more daily work for any commish.  Communicating which players each owner wants locked in would also need to be manually done in some way right now.

That’s all there is to it really.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I plan on establishing an official Game Peak Mode league for next season, and I invite all of you to consider giving it a try as well!