REVEALED: 9-Cat Rankings MISLEAD Most Fantasy Owners

In this episode of the Locked On Fantasy Basketball Podcast, host Josh Lloyd delivers a passionate critique of the widely used nine-category (9-cat) total rankings in fantasy basketball, particularly those defaulting from platforms like Yahoo. He argues that these rankings—based on Z-scores and normalized distributions—are fundamentally flawed because NBA statistics don't follow a normal (bell-curve) distribution but instead exhibit a right-tailed skew, which distorts outlier evaluations. Players like Giannis Antetokounmpo, whose free-throw percentages are consistently poor, are unfairly penalized in these rankings, making them appear worse than they are. Lloyd introduces his own dynamic, unbiased ranking system—Durant—which uses per-game metrics, the Yo-Johnson transformation to normalize data, and weighted variance adjustments to better reflect real-world fantasy value, especially in head-to-head leagues. He highlights numerous players inflated by 9-cat totals—such as Jaylen Hoof, Julian Champagne, Kaysen Wallace, Colin Gillespie, Donovan Clingham, Mikael Bridges, and Kal-El Ware—whose high rankings mislead owners into overvaluing low-volume, inconsistent performers. The episode serves as a strong warning to fantasy managers: don’t trust default rankings without understanding their methodology, context, and limitations.