fBasketballBlog

Ranking players is an essential step in preparing for your fantasy basketball drafts. There are tons of ways to do this, some easy and quick, others more involved and time-consuming.

Bynum at #8? I wouldn't touch that either. (Flickr/Keith Allison)

If you’re up for a different way to rank players for your drafts, take a look at John Hollinger’s projected player rankings based on his Player Efficiency Rating (PER) at ESPN.

This is not meant for fantasy purposes, so you probably shouldn’t take his exact rankings and use them for your fantasy drafts, but at the very least it might tickle your mindgrapes and get you thinking about other ways to look at players.

According to Hollinger’s projections, here are the top 15 players of the 2009-10 season:

1. Chris Paul
2. Dwyane Wade
3. LeBron James
4. Dwight Howard
5. Kevin Durant
6. Al Jefferson
7. Dirk Nowitzki
8. Andrew Bynum
9. Chris Bosh
10. Kobe Bryant
11. Brandon Roy
12. Tim Duncan
13. Tony Parker
14. Manu Ginobili
15. Pau Gasol

Clearly, if you pick Andrew Bynum at #8 you’re borderline nuts. But the rest of the list is at least somewhat defensible from a fantasy perspective.

Peruse Hollinger’s rankings if you want to have some of your assumptions about certain players’ values challenged. Again, this is just something to stimulate some thinking about your fantasy drafts.

Let us know how helpful you think these PER rankings are to your fantasy strategies.