Underdog’s format is a hybrid of DFS and snake drafts. Drafts are six rounds (snake style) and conducted in leagues of six. Scoring is points based, and there are no positional requirements.
Some strategy thoughts:
1. These are often large-field tournaments with 10% of the prize pool going to first place. We should be aggressively drafting for a first-place finish mentality.
2. We want to consider at least one contrarian play. Since the drafts are only 36 picks deep, players ranked deeper often won’t be drafted in many leagues. If they go off, and no one else even has them, it’s a massive leg up on the field.
As you are drafting, there is substantial value to taking players that are drafted on fewer teams. Because these drafts are not that deep, you usually do not need to scroll down too far to still find quality, high upside options. Any ADP higher than 35 will get you some leverage, above 35.5 and you’re getting quite unique.
3. There is also a benefit to creating “different combinations” of players, since most users will follow ADP when drafting, many combinations of players will be the same. One potential strategy is straying a few picks past ADP to pair unique combinations (i.e., players with an ADP of 9 & 10 at the 1/2 turn) when players project similarly to those that are the highest ADP option remaining. In general, it’s ok to give up 1-2 projected points for uniqueness in these fields.
4. It is important to understand the implications of injuries when drafting in the NBA. Always reference the NBA Injury Report when drafting. ETR has a threshold of believing a player must be 75% or more likely to miss the game in order to remove them from projections. This will include all players listed doubtful or out and then players we feel hit our internal threshold that may be listed questionable. Trying to read the tea leaves on injury guesses is a valuable part of playing the Underdog draft game. We encourage people to watch our injury analysis show for our insights.
You should also be familiar with Underdog’s Swap rules that state in the event a drafted player is ruled out ahead of a game’s start and does not play, that player will be swapped to a player who was not selected in your Battle Royale draft, so long as there is a game on your Battle Royale’s slate that has not started yet. This is often an opportunity (through adjusting your rankings) to swap in a low-drafted player with a higher than initially expected projection. Consider that the later the game is played, the fewer the swap options you will have available.
5. If you don’t have an Underdog Fantasy account yet, use Promo Code ETR for a matching deposit bonus up to $125.
6. These rankings will go live at 11am ET daily. They will continuously update after that, through lock.
Our rankings for 2024 are based on the following inputs:
– Half base projection and half ceiling projection
– Projections update automatically when ETR updates DFS projections
– Projections will “show” here before they go live on site for DFS projections, when this is the case it represents the “first run” of projections from the minutes team the night before. These may often have status changes on the injury report that haven’t yet been updated by the morning team. Consider these first AM runs very fragile to later day news.
The below rankings can be directly uploaded to Underdog via the CSV download button below. Head to the corresponding tournament on the Underdog Rankings tab and click the CSV upload/download button at the bottom to get going.
