With Tuesday night (Oct. 16) the official tip-off to the 2018-19 NBA season, I decided to revolve my latest daily fantasy sports review around basketball.
So, I logged onto FantasyDraft.com, registered with a username, password, address and put a credit card on file — the standard basics. The whole registration took less than a minute. Nice and easy. I deposited the bare minimum of $10 because I’m not a betting man and this is for the sole purposes of reviewing this site. Nothing more. And boom … $10 popped up in my account. Again, quick and seamless.
To give FantasyDraft a whirl right now, click here to play.
Upon first glance, FantasyDraft and its big board of sports options — ranging from the NFL to MLB, PGA, NBA and NHL — struck me as being very plain looking, with its white, blue and light gray tones that did more to lull than excite.
But I clicked NBA and browsed through all the different contests, until I honed in on a winner-takes-all contest with a prize of $1,000 and an entry fee of $1.
I joined and was immediately tasked with picking out a starting lineup based on Tuesday nights games: The Philadelphia 76ers against the Boston Celtics and the Oklahoma City Thunder against the Golden State Warriors in the nightcap.
Players are assigned an average fantasy value of $12,500 and you have $100,000 in salary cap to fill out your roster, which needs to consist of three guards, three forwards/centers and two bench players of any position.
I went with two-time NBA MVP Steph Curry, Ben Simmons and Kyrie Irving for my guards and Al Horford, Jaylen Brown and Gordon Hayward for my forwards. My bench players were Jayson Tatum and Quinn Cook. Now, originally, I wanted Kevin Durant in one of my forward spots, but his value was just too high and I was over my cap, so I spent less and got more value with Horford, Brown, Hayward and Tatum.
Take a look at my final team and the daily fantasy values assigned to them.
From there, I made sure my lineup status was valid, which it was, as I checked off all the necessary criteria.
Then, I hit play and “confirm entry” and I was done … just like that.
And in case you’re wondering, this is the scoring system for my lineup Tuesday night.
Very easy and fun. I’d recommend daily fantasy players looking for another option to give this site a try. There is obviously less traffic here than at DraftKings or FanDuel, so you might find winning easier at FantasyDraft. Less competition is a good thing.
Overall
4 out of 5 stars
