26/27 Week 3 Schedule Analysis and Streaming Guide
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Week 3’s schedule is an absolute mess thanks to the NBA not scheduling any games on Tuesday. The league is taking the night off because Tuesday is the midterm elections in the United States. Week 3 has a zero-game day and two days when your entire roster is likely to be active. This is another week where luck is going to play a larger role than usual. You won’t be able to stream until at least Thursday.
Use the first half of the week to give your low-end players with solid upside, who are struggling at the moment, more time. We need to be careful with our drops this early in the season. While some players are clearly in trouble, we don’t want to overreact to a five-game sample. At this point in the season, blowouts, poor shooting nights, and foul trouble can make a player’s outlook look much worse than it actually is. When trying to figure out how one of your players is doing, don’t just look at their per-game averages. Look at their per-minute numbers as well. They will give you a better idea of whether your player is actually badly underperforming or if the slow start is due to blowouts, foul trouble, or poor shooting that won’t stick. The Regression Dashboard is a useful tool for figuring out where each of your players is actually at. The tool shows you how each of your players is performing compared to last season across a variety of rate statistics. If a player is badly outperforming or underperforming last season’s per-minute numbers, their current numbers are unlikely to stick.
To give you an idea of how noisy the early-season rankings can be, here are some notable nine-category rankings from the first 10 days of the 2025-2026 season. I have also included the player’s final nine-category per-game ranking for reference.
LaMelo Ball – 13 (Final Ranking: 43)
Aaron Gordon – 23 (Final Ranking: 121)
Jrue Holiday – 30 (Final Ranking: 104)
Jerami Grant – 39 (Final Ranking: 144)
Donovan Mitchell – 62 (Final Ranking: 7)
Anthony Edwards – 68 (Final Ranking: 12)
Karl-Anthony Towns – 81 (Final Ranking: 24)
Trey Murphy – 129 (Final Ranking: 11)
Note: Murphy had a usage rate of 17.5% at this point in the season last year. Murphy’s current usage rate is 17.7%.
Cooper Flagg – 136 (Final Ranking: 39)
Kel’el Ware – 155 (Final Ranking: 60)
Rudy Gobert – 174 (Final Ranking: 96)
Dyson Daniels – 180 (Final Ranking: 44)
Amen Thompson – 202 (Final Ranking: 30)
A lot will change over the next few weeks. Each player’s numbers over the first 10 days of the season are a somewhat useful data point, but those numbers can also be extremely misleading and can cause fantasy managers to make season-ruining mistakes.
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