Double-double bonuses favor Josh Giddey and the rebounding centers

Some points leagues pay a bonus for a double-double or a triple-double, and the bonus rewards a particular kind of player: one whose production is spread across two or three counting stats rather than concentrated in scoring. A guard who scores 26 a night with five rebounds and five assists almost never reaches double digits in a second category, while a center who scores 12 with 11 rebounds does it most nights. A bonus of two or three points a double-double is worth a point a game or more to the right player, which is enough to move him half a round.

A season-average projection does not say how many double-doubles a player will post, so we estimate it. Our model treats each stat as varying from night to night around its average, with a shared factor so that a big scoring night tends to come with big rebounding and assist nights too, and calculates how often a player reaches ten in two or three stats. Fitted to last season's real double-double and triple-double counts across 425 players, the estimates correlated at 0.98 with the actual double-doubles and 0.97 with the triple-doubles. Here we reran our points board under ESPN's default scoring with two points added for a double-double and four for a triple-double, so a triple-double night, which is also a double-double, pays six.

Every player in this story is on the fantasy basketball rankings and the 2026-27 projections, and the NBA depth charts show where each one stands in his team’s rotation tonight.