The Sixers start five scorers, and Jaylen Brown pays for it

Philadelphia goes into the season with Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe, Jaylen Brown, LeBron James and Joel Embiid as its starting five, and on last season's numbers those five averaged 121 points a game between them, which is more than most NBA teams score in total. There is only one ball, so somebody has to give up shots, and the fantasy question is who. Our projections answer it at 108 points for the five, and they take most of the difference from the player whose price in drafts has moved the least.

The method is simple to describe. The services that feed our projections already allocate shots inside each team, and our nightly model then adjusts for the depth chart and every injury the news has reported. We put each starter's projected line next to his 2025-26 line and next to where the analysts on our panel rank him, and the pattern that comes out is that Brown is priced like the Boston version of himself while the four players around him are priced roughly where we have them.