Ranking methodology
How Full Court Order works
Full Court Order is designed to turn a broad published player pool into your own ordered list through direct player choices. The published lists provide context and a useful starting point; they do not decide your final result.
Published by Full Court Order · Updated October 1, 2026
The starting Consensus Top 100
The consensus uses four verified published boards: The Ringer’s final 2025–26 NBA Top 100, the r/NBA Top 100 snapshot posted after more than 100,000 votes, ESPN NBA Rank 2026, and HoopsHype’s 2026–27 Top 100. Each source receives equal weight.
For each player, the app averages that player’s ordinal position across the four source lists, then sorts the field by the resulting average. Identical source orders are de-duplicated so one opinion cannot accidentally count twice.
When a player appears on one source but not another, the missing source contributes rank 101—one position below a complete Top 100. This keeps broad agreement valuable without allowing a single unusual inclusion to dominate the combined order. Ties are resolved by number of appearances, then the original canonical order used by the app.
Your ranking
The consensus initializes the candidate order. From there, the ranking session presents head-to-head choices and updates your personal ordering based on those decisions. The Top 10 field includes every unique player who appears in the Top 15 of any consensus-eligible source, ordered by the combined consensus. The Top 25, Top 50, and Top 100 modes use broader candidate fields so players can move into or out of the final published cutoff.
How a choice changes the order
Every candidate begins with a rating derived from seed position. After a matchup, the winner gains rating and the loser gives up rating; the size of the change depends on how surprising the choice was. A lower-seeded player beating a favorite moves more than a favorite confirming the expected result. The app also preserves direct undefeated preferences so repeated head-to-head choices are not erased by a small rating difference elsewhere in the list.
Session depth and completion
Quick, Standard, and Deep target approximately three, five, or ten matchups per candidate. Matchups are selected to give uncovered players a turn and to concentrate decisions around nearby ratings and the final-list boundary. The session ends when the selected coverage target is met; it does not add an undisclosed extra verification round afterward.
Comparisons
The comparison workspace keeps the Consensus Top 100 and every published source separate. You can compare your result against The Ringer, r/NBA, ESPN, HoopsHype, or NBA 2K27—or compare those lists directly against one another. NBA 2K27 remains comparison-only and does not affect the editorial consensus.
Name matching
Published sources sometimes use different forms of a player’s name. The beta preserves the source wording while mapping known aliases internally—for example, “Norman Powell” and “Norm Powell”—so the comparison does not treat one player as two people.
Sources
The Ringer NBA Top 100 · r/NBA 100k-vote snapshot · ESPN NBA Rank 2026 · HoopsHype Top 100 2026–27 · NBA 2K27 Top 100 Ratings
This is an independent ranking tool and is not affiliated with the NBA, ESPN, HoopsHype, The Ringer, Reddit, NBA 2K, or the individual players shown in the app.