Basketball Monster, Hashtag Basketball, RotoBaller and Old Man Squad, compared

Mostly on price. The league tools the other sites keep behind a subscription (syncing your league, ranking free agents for your roster, projecting this week's matchup, running your draft) are free here, and there's no premium tier waiting behind them.

Our in-season projections follow minutes. A player's playing time is his preseason projection blended with every game he has played, with the last two weeks counting double. We changed it after the old formula still had Nikola Vučević at 31 fantasy points a game after two four-minute games for his new team, and told one of us to drop a player who was beating his projection.

Private ESPN leagues work. ESPN won't let an outside server read a private league, so you get a bookmark to click while you're on ESPN. It reads the league in your own browser and hands it to us, and your ESPN login never leaves ESPN.

For a synced league, the matchup card shows the score so far, the games each side has left, and either a projected final or a call on each category. It also compares the lineup you've set with your whole roster, so you can see how many points are sitting on your bench.

The Draft Room runs snake, linear, third-round reversal, auction and keeper drafts. You can mock against computer teams, add players the projections don't know about, and turn the finished draft into a league that keeps its scoring rules all season. Points leagues that count minutes or games started, which ESPN allows, are scored properly.

Every NBA player and team has a page of its own, with game logs, how a team does with and without a given player, who was in the rotation game by game, and a separate playoffs view. If you'd rather ask than click, Ask AI answers questions like "who has the most steals over the last two weeks?" from the same numbers and links you to the page they came from.

Basketball Monster has been doing this since 2002. Its rankings go back to 2003-04 over any date range you pick, Josh Lloyd's projections update several times a day, and its draft tracker follows live drafts on Yahoo, ESPN, Fantrax, CBS, Sleeper and Ottoneu. For deep roto leagues with games limits it is hard to beat.

Hashtag Basketball is the cheapest paid option by a distance at $2.50 a month, and much of the site is free anyway. Its schedule and streaming grids are better than anything we have, and it takes dynasty seriously, with rankings, a keeper tool and a dynasty trade calculator.

RotoBaller is a newsroom with tools attached: writers, player news, DFS lineup optimizers and props tools, and one subscription can also cover football, baseball and hockey. If you play daily fantasy, look there. We don't do DFS at all.

Old Man Squad is a daily podcast. Dan Besbris and his co-hosts talk through the league every day for free, and there's a rankings sheet and a Discord to go with it. It goes well with any of the tools here, ours included.

As for us: we don't sync Yahoo or CBS leagues yet (you can paste a Yahoo roster into Squad Builder by hand). The Draft Room doesn't connect to a live draft, so you enter the picks yourself. There are no dynasty rankings and nobody here writes columns. And we're new, which gives Basketball Monster a 24-year head start.