Three seasons. We now have three full fantasy hoops seasons under our belt using the Game Peak Mode scoring system. After our first season, I wrote about our Observations and explained in detail how we played it, and went over some upcoming changes we were thinking of making.

Well, after two more years I think we’ve got this pretty “LOCKED IN” so I wanted to formally lay out all the rules and settings for anyone who might want to start their own league in this format. However, if you are the one planning on being the Commish, I will warn that a lot of the work falls on you. The rest of the league pretty much has it made though.

In order to save you the time in just reading our rather lengthy Constitution, I will cut this down to mostly bullet points, with a bit of narrative explanation when necessary. These rules are what work for us, feel free to adjust as you see fit.

The Most Basic Settings

• Use Fantrax as the host – it’s very, very good
• League fees can vary – we also use Fantrax Treasurer to hold all the money
• When choosing Scoring System, go with Head-to-Head Points
• Number of teams is up to you, but use at least 10
• 14 active roster spots (8 starting spots, set bench spots to NO MAX), and 3-4 IR spots
• For positions, go with Guards-Forwards-Centers
• Slow, snake draft – 14 rounds; start off with randomized draft order
• For points calculation – use Game Score formula
• 18-week regular season schedule
• Two simultaneous matchups per week, this gives you 36 games

Scoring

So probably the most complicated part about this league is how do you actually score? Your players will perform throughout the week and it’s your job to decide when to actually keep their performance and lock it in to your weekly score, or when to toss it out in hopes of a better game from him next time.

If you have Jayson Tatum on your team and his first game of the week is a monster performance, you could lock that in to count as points for your team. And since you can only use one game per player, you would have to ignore the rest of Tatum’s games that week. So, if he does even better in the second game, that’s just too bad. You made the call already.

Our league allows a total of 8 locked-in scores per team per week (2 Guards, 2 Forwards, 1 Center, and 3 Flex/Utility). That means 8 of your 14 players will be used exactly once, and 6 of your players won’t be used at all. We’ve eliminated the need to even set starting lineups at this point and focus strictly on your decision-making throughout the week. The only roster management required is to move guys in and out of IR. Your final score on Sunday night ends up being a reflection of the types of gambles you made over the past 7 days.

For our fantasy points calculation, we use and highly recommend the Game Score formula, which is a simplified version of PER, and doesn’t account for pace. What it does take into account is efficiency. If your boy Tatum drops 35 points in a win on Monday night, but it took him 30 shots to get there and he missed half his free throws, that’s going to hurt his fantasy output for that game.

As far as how to lock in a player, use the Fantrax Chat channels. It’s simple and clean, and all it takes is the owner to type “Lock Tatum” for the Commish to see. Our daily lock deadline is set at the scheduled tip off of the first game of the next day. Once that deadline hits, the Commish can go into each roster from the day before and use Commissioner Override to “bench” all non-locked players and “start” any players whose score was just locked in.

Now your Scoreboard page shows an accurate and up-to-date matchup score. It also shows the current total locks for each team, indicating how many each team has left to lock in.

Furthermore, if a team does not want to lock in any players from the night before, no communication in the Chat channel is necessary. Commish just assumes no locks for that team that day if there is no message from them in the channel.

Other Rules

• No dropping players who are currently locked in for the week
• Maximum player adds per week can vary, we use 4
• Waivers/FA pickups can be set to your preference
• Trading is allowed up until the trade deadline – if a locked-in player is traded, he cannot be used by the new owner until the next week begins
• For our 10-team leagues, the top 4 make the Playoffs and bottom 6 compete in a Consolation bracket for draft order

That last one is a fantastic new addition this past year. Shown below, our consolation bracket is set up to allow ANY of the 6 teams to earn the top overall pick, while still guaranteeing that the two worst teams end up with top-3 picks.

One helpful hint: in a 10-team setup, the majority of locked-in scores end up being at least 20 fantasy points. Here’s our end-of-year player rankings from 2023-24 to give an idea of how often certain players score big each week.

That should be enough rules and settings to get you started properly. Our league introduced in-season Cup tourneys, keepers, and a buy-in amount of $65 per team. Oh, and 40 teams. But many of these details can be found over on our Game Peak City page!

Seriously, give this format a try if you have the time. It’s been a blast for us.