Sleeper's Lock-In format makes Embiid, Kyrie and George better picks

In a Lock-In league a player's week is worth the one game you choose to lock, not the sum of every game he plays, and that changes what a missed game costs. On a daily points board a player who sits a quarter of his team's games loses a quarter of his value, because every one of those nights was a night his slot could have scored. Under Lock-In he only loses a week when he plays none of its games, and a player who sits the second night of a back-to-back still has two or three chances that week to post the score you keep. The draft board should therefore lean toward the talented players with uncertain availability and away from the healthy players whose only edge is that they play every night.

We measured how much of a week's value a player keeps by replaying the 2025-26 season under the Lock-In rule for 319 rotation players who spent the year on one team. The share of value a player keeps follows his share of games played, raised by a curve: a player who plays 70% of his team's games keeps about 80% of his Lock-In value, where on a daily board he keeps 70%. That curve held for stars and role players alike and held out of sample, and it is what our Sleeper board now uses whenever a synced league is a Sleeper league. Below are the players it moves most, all under Sleeper's default scoring.

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.