I put this first because playing in a non-active roto league is basically guaranteed to put you off the format, and that’s a real shame. Yes, guys who abandon their teams in H2H suck - they gift people weekly wins and there are no bragging rights in beating the guy who started four injured players. But by the time the playoffs roll around, you’re generally going up against other active owners, and the slackers have no way to affect the outcome.

In roto, because totals are cumulative across the entire season, non-active owners can massively skew the results by plummeting to the bottom of categories their teams should be good in just because they don’t make starts (think the guy with Chris Paul getting a 2 in assists).

I’ve spent quite a few nights swearing at people for handing points to the guy making a run at me because they just wouldn’t keep up in starts. This is another area where the lack of 1 on 1 matchups hurts - it’s easy for less invested people to realize they have no shot whatsoever at winning and, lacking “well at least I ruined your playoff hopes in our matchup” as an incentive, give up on the league altogether. But you’re reading this on a fantasy basketball website, so hopefully you have enough buddies who care that this won’t be a problem.

And if you DO have an active league, the end of the season can become an absolute nail biter as you care desperately what four or five teams are doing - not just people close to you. I spent much of my last basketball season deeply invested in a blocks competition between three teams 100+ blocks behind me.

I recommend 8-cat over 9-cat - because the league is decided by cumulative point totals, there’s no need for a tiebreaking 9th category for the purpose of H2H matchups. And let’s face it - turnovers suck as a category. They’re a tax on ball handlers, and they’re particularly awful for roto because they punish you for actually making your starts - anyone who gives up on the league will suddenly shoot to the top of the turnovers leaderboard because, hey, they aren’t making starts anymore.

This is not behavior you want to reward. Still, up to you.

Honestly, there’s nothing particularly complicated here - set the standard 82 game limit for each position, decide how many bench spots you want, figure out how you want to do waivers (I like FA auction, but you can just do daily waivers easily enough). Most of the settings aren’t any different from your H2H league.

I do recommend adding an injury spot or two - over the course of an 82 game season, everyone’s going to need it, and too many injuries at once can put you in too big a starts hole to climb out of otherwise.

Which brings us to our next section.

Pace yourself! If you’re coming from H2H, where the number of starts can easily swing a matchup, it can be tremendously tempting to just rotate all your guys in whenever they have a game. This is a mistake - one I’ve seen sink some very good roto teams.

The easiest way to illustrate this: would you prefer 60 games of Russell Westbrook and 22 games of George Hill, or 82 games of Russ? That’s not a particularly hard question, right? Well, if you mismanage your starts, you’ll end up with the first one. You have 82 games per playable roster spot, and when those 82 games are used up - no matter who uses them - you’re locked out. No more guy in the PG slot for you.

Now, if everyone in the league played 82 games, this would be easy - set your roster and be done with it. Unfortunately, they don’t - guys get hurt, Timmy gets a DNP(Old) from Pop, contenders rest their stars down the stretch, and “general soreness” takes out a whole lot of people the last week of the season. H2H does its best to avoid all of this stuff by scheduling the playoffs a few weeks beforehand, but in roto your season isn’t over until the final day, so you’d better be ready for all of these scenarios.

If you have an injury risk, or someone who’s likely to miss a few games to prepare for the playoffs near the end of the season, it usually pays to be a couple of starts ahead of pace so you aren’t caught without a starter the last few days of the season. Don’t get too far ahead, though, and consider not getting ahead at all if you’re riding someone who might play the whole season (for example, a young guy on a rebuilding team who’s likely to get all the minutes they can handle down the stretch).

Keeping a spreadsheet is actually helpful here, since the pace calculators aren’t always accurate and you’re otherwise stuck manually comparing the number of games you have left for the roster spot to the number of games remaining for that player’s team.

Try to keep the same players in the same slots as much as you can to make this easier. If you suddenly switch out Boogie for Aldridge at PF, and the Spurs have played 2 more games than the Kings, you’re now on pace to miss 2 games (probably more, actually, because Pop). If someone misses time with an injury, try to fill their roster spot with someone else for each game they miss to avoid throwing off the pace. If you can, do this from one of your util slots - if you’re playing a standard ESPN line-up, you have 3, and it’s easy to catch up there since anyone can be started in one.

If you have util slots, you want to pace things a little differently, because you can get a couple extra starts out of them. Roto starts aren’t counted at 82 per specific util slot - they are counted as 82*X starts for all of your X util slots combined. So if you have 3 slots, you have 246 starts to play with.

The nice thing is that you can go over this limit as long as all extra starts are made on the day you go over. So let’s say you’ve made 245 util starts by the second to last day of the season. You’re now free to start 3 guys on the last day and make 248 starts in total. Sure, it may not seem like much over the course of a whole season, but a few extra rebounds or points could actually make or break your season. Don’t discount it.

Trading in roto isn’t too different from trading in H2H. Category swaps are still a great thing to target - you need blocks, and your friend needs threes? Maybe you guys can work something out. The difference is you’re more likely to be shoring up your weak spots in roto, not make your strong categories stronger. Once again, you get the same number of roto points if you win a category by 30 or 130 - if you’re blowing away the field in blocks, ship one of those guys for something else you need.

However, there’s one type of trade you should be particularly aiming for if you can: the 2 for 1 or 3 for 1, if you can acquire a superstar.

Remember, you have limited starts - so you’re not trading the production of 3 guys for 1, you’re trading the production of 3 guys for the production of the superstar plus the 2 guys you bring off your bench to plug the holes in the line-up. The drop-off in per-game value from the very best players in fantasy basketball to the tier below tends to be enormous, and chances are your 3 for 1 will bring you better overall value from your roster spots even if you lose a little from spots 2 and 3.

Note that this also depends on the size of your league - the smaller the league, the better this type of trade is because of the kind of player you’re likely to bring in to fill the empty spots. If you’re in a 16 man league and trading three starters for a star and a couple guys who play 15 minutes a game, that’s probably not worth it.

And that brings us to the single most important management element in roto: the waiver wire.

Ah, the waiver wire. I love the waiver wire. Want to know if you’re a great roto manager or merely a good one? Tell me what you did on the wire. I won a league I should have lost last year because of the wire, and if I’d been managing his team instead, I’m pretty sure I’d have won that too.

Early season, you’re doing what everyone in fantasy basketball is doing: looking for the breakout stars. You don’t always get someone like Draymond Green or Hassan Whiteside, but you can damn well give yourself a shot at it. Remember what I said about making sure you have a player you’re willing to drop on your roster? Yeah, you don’t want to be the guy who tries to pick someone up a day late. No, you’re not always going to be right, but it’s better to pull the trigger too early. After all, if you’re wrong, you can always drop the guy you just picked up.

Do your usual homework - is there real talent here? Are you seeing a possible breakout? Is this a temporary thing while the starter is nursing a bruised knee, or is your guy here to stay? Is he getting minutes for the Sixers, in which case most of this is irrelevant and complete assholes like Spencer Hawes can become temporary stars?

Hopefully you’ll get a starter or two this way. But that’s not the fun part. The fun part comes in the second half of the season.

Somewhere in the second half of the season, your league’s settled down a bit. The contenders know who they are, teams have started to separate themselves, and most people have a pretty good sense of where they’ll finish in most categories. Here’s where you can make your move.

Are you pretty locked into a position in one of the categories? Way up in blocks? Stuck in third in points? Excellent. It’s time to find some one-category studs and run people down.

In most leagues, the wire at this point will be full of people who are only good at a couple of things. Think Ed Davis, getting you 8-10 rebounds and 1-2 blocks in 20 minutes a game. Or Anthony Morrow, averaging 3 threes a game in March and April while doing basically nothing else. Normally, you wouldn’t waste a roster spot on these guys - but now’s your chance.

If you’re not in danger of losing ground in a category, you should be able to afford a couple of roster spots that contribute absolutely nothing to it (or even hurt it a little - if your FT% lead is dominant enough, you can run a guy who goes 2 for 4 from the line for a bit). And this allows you to come out of absolute nowhere in some categories, especially threes. I’ve seen a guy make up a deficit of more than 100 threes in less than a month - if you start playing a couple assholes who do nothing but hit three point shots, it’s astonishing how fast they pile up. There are ALWAYS three point assholes on the waiver wire late in the season.

You can also use this to lock in a tight race. Someone is right behind you in rebounds but you’re 300 up in points? Well, how about you start playing Omer Asik - so what if he doesn’t score? The closer to the end of the season you get, the more your fantasy fortunes get narrowed down to a specific few categories and the more aggressive you should get about ignoring everything else. Last season, for example, I actually benched Boogie for a couple of his April games - the ones where he averaged 25/18/9/1.7/3.3.

Why? Well, for some reason he decided to shoot sub-50% from the line despite being around 80% most of the year. Locked in a tight battle there, I simply couldn’t afford the risk, not with my finish in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks all basically assured. Boogie could drop 30/20/10 and it wouldn’t matter to me if he missed five freebies.

Be smart, and pay attention to what the other owners are doing. Is there a guy 120 rebounds up on you who have stopped paying attention to his roster? You might be able to catch up to him even if he looks out of reach on the surface. Similarly, if you notice somebody making countermoves, or you lose a key player, don’t be afraid to drop it and try something else - I thought I’d be able to steal the top spot in assists last year, but Rubio went down again and the other guy grabbed some waiver insurance (plus Chris Paul decided to play 82 for him). So I gave up and went for a FG% point instead.

Also, if you need to make up starts, don’t be afraid to churn through players to grab guys on days when there are only a couple of games just because they’re the only ones playing.

If you play the wire right, I guarantee you can steal yourself at least a few roto points that you wouldn’t have sniffed otherwise. And that can make all the difference.