First of all – I’m going to assume you know what a Fantasy NBA league. If you don’t then don’t worry – I’m going to describe that a little bit further down the page in the “Additional Questions” section.

However for now, let’s talk about one of my favourite things to do during the NBA season – Daily Fantasy NBA.

Here’s how it works: daily fantasy NBA is just like actual fantasy NBA, except it takes place over one day. It doesn’t go for a week, for a month, or a season. It goes for just that one day.

Two sites that carry daily fantasy NBA are FanDuel and DraftKings.

So you will go to one of those sites(for this example let’s use FanDuel), and there will be a list of “tournaments” you can enter. Think of it as similar to a poker tournament. For example, they might have the “$10k Thursday NBA Slam”. In that particular tournament, it has a guaranteed prize pool of $10,000. It accepts up to 446 entrants.

You would join that, and your team will have a salary cap – let’s say $60,000. So you need to spend that $60,000 on two point guards, two shooting guards, two small forwards, two power forwards, and two centers.

Each player is worth a certain amount that will be taken off the salary cap. For example – Kevin Durant is $11,400, Blake Griffin is $9,800, Marc Gasol is $8,100 and so on.

So you have to pick the players for that night, without going over the salary cap. You can ONLY pick players from the games being played that day/night.

The points distribution can differ depending on the tournament or the site, but at FanDuel it’s usually the same for NBA. There is no difference based on position or anything like that.

This is how your players earn points:

Point = 1pt
Rebound = 1.2pts
Assists = 1.5pts
Block = 2pts
Steal = 2pts
Turnover = -1pt

So you will pick your players, and battle against other people. This example of a tournament is one of the bigger ones – the prize distribution is based on amount of potential entrants. So for this tournament with a cap of 446 people, the Top 50 people are paid. 1st is paid $2,000, 2nd $1200, 7th $250, 16th-20th $125 as some examples.

Once the final game is over – they pay out. So you don’t keep your team or have to worry about future injuries or anything like that – once the night is over, you’re done with that set of players and you move onto the next day.

So that’s how daily fantasy NBA works. You can do it during the regular season and the playoffs. Also there’s no draft or anything like that – you pick ANYONE that you want from the pool of players.

There are a LOT of sites cropping up offering daily fantasy NBA. But the two must trustworthy ones, and the ones with the most guaranteed prize money are DraftKings and FanDuel. I would stick with those two.

Additional Daily Fantasy NBA Questions:

What Is Fantasy NBA / Basketball?

Essentially, you are the “coach”. You get to pick your own team of players. In a traditional year-long league each player can usually only be picked once. So only the person who drafts early will have LeBron James for example. In Daily Fantasy NBA, it doesn’t matter if 1,000 other people picked Blake Griffin – you will be able to as well.

Related Questions: