It’s a fairly user friendly program and I really thought there would be more to the program, though for 10 bucks I am now happy I took the plunge however I was a bit unsatisfied with it in the beginning.

If your a Novice at Excel and want to get the rankings projected from your own player AVG’s this may just be the program for you as well.

But still, would like to give props to Patrick and Nels for actually thinking about their readers and then taking the effort to come up with this discount. That’s much appreciated boys.

Having said that after quick read of their website it sounds like what they can offer me is pretty close to what I have already come up with in Excel using the mean and standard deviations for each cat. (Actually rather than the %’s categories my league uses I choose to go with the EFF%’s that I was put onto by the good people of GMTR)

Now I’m sure what they have is probably much more polished and visually appealing that my spreadsheet but becuase I only play in 1 (hyper competitive) league the ability to customise for different league settings means very little to me.

So if anyone goes ahead and buys the guide in the next few days I’d love to hear some more about what it can / cannot do.

Which leads me to the general observation. If you’re looking for the quick and dirty stats, player ranks and trends, then its difficult to impossible to beat basketballmonster. It’s the best at what it does.

If you’re a stats geek who likes playing around with numbers and seeing what happens, then this spreadsheet is something you might be interested in.

I can understand why most people fall into the first category, but the geek in me can’t help but be attracted to the second. Not that statistics arouses me.

What is different about the spreadsheet is the way the output is organized and the way the ratings are calculated. Kind of looks like a cheat sheet would, with rankings by different positions and overall. I could see bringing something like that to a draft would be more user friendly than the giant list of players that BM spits out. And players are ranked within position, so you can easily tell how much better Chris Paul was than the next best point guard and so on. Of course, you can take the time to run and organize the BM output like that if you wanted to, but time is money, right?

That being said, if you currently use basketballmonster and are happy with what it provides, then I’d probably tell you to stick with it. It’s tough to beat free.

As for me, honestly, I’m the “take it for free or not at all” type as well. I have about 10 books on my shelf right now waiting to be read and I paid for none of them (okay, I paid ~$2 to send other books to other people, but my new books from other people are in much better condition than the old books I sent to other people). That’s part of the reason I run this site and never ask for any money. There’s ads, yes, but if you don’t want to click on them, you certainly don’t have to. Of course, if you want to, I won’t object.