Punting free throws: six of the top ten stay put, and Giannis jumps 46 places

Rudy Gobert ranks 79th of 150 in a nine-category pool. Remove free throws from the scoring and he ranks 17th. Giannis Antetokounmpo goes from 53rd to 7th. Those are the two largest jumps among players who end up in the top 40, and both come from one number: free throw impact.

This column is about punting, which means deliberately giving up one category and building a roster around the other eight. Format: nine-category head-to-head, where you win a week by taking five of nine categories. Punt free throws and you need five of the remaining eight.

Pool: the same 150 players as in the nine-cat top 50 and the column on blocks, taken from 467 NBA players with a 2025-26 season row (a player traded during the season counts both of his teams), keeping the 247 with at least 30 games and 20 minutes a night, then the top 150 by nine-category value. Every figure is a 2025-26 per-game average at that player's own minutes. Nothing here is a projection of 2026-27.

How the punt ranking is built

Each player has a z-score in each category, which measures how many standard deviations he sits from the pool average. For free throws the score is volume weighted: it is his free throws attempted times the gap between his shooting percentage and the pool's 80.0%. A player who shoots 90% on two attempts a game barely moves your team number. A player who shoots 52.6% on four attempts a game moves it a lot. Gobert's raw figure is -1.10 made free throws a game against an average shooter at the same volume.

To build the punt ranking I subtracted each player's free throw z-score from his nine-category total and re-ranked the 150. I did not rebuild the pool without free throws, so a player just outside the 150 could rank differently in a true punt draft. Read the ranks as a good guide to direction and size, not as exact draft positions.

What barely changes

The top of the board holds. Six of the ten best players in the nine-category ranking are still in the top ten with free throws removed: Nikola Jokic, Victor Wembanyama, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Tyrese Maxey, Kawhi Leonard and Luka Doncic. Fourteen of the top 20 hold, and 43 of the top 50. Punting does not reshuffle the whole draft. It moves a group of players at the edges.

Who rises

Player	Nine-cat rank	Punt-FT rank	FT%	FTA per game	Minutes	Games
Rudy Gobert	79	17	52.6%	4.0	31.3	76
Giannis Antetokounmpo	53	7	65.0%	9.9	28.9	36
Ausar Thompson	77	39	57.1%	2.6	26.0	73
Evan Mobley	45	10	60.6%	4.6	31.9	65
Jarrett Allen	58	32	70.9%	4.7	27.1	56
Alperen Sengun	39	18	69.1%	5.2	33.3	72
LeBron James	44	28	73.7%	5.3	33.2	60
Alex Sarr	43	29	69.2%	3.0	27.2	48

Seven players sit inside the punt top 50 but outside the nine-category top 50: Gobert, Antetokounmpo, Allen and Thompson from the table, plus Neemias Queta (57th to 41st), Pascal Siakam (94th to 42nd) and Josh Giddey (61st to 49th).

Antetokounmpo is the case to be careful with. His free throw score is the worst in the pool at -4.70, because he attempted 9.9 a game and made 65.0%. That is why he rises furthest. He also played 36 games, so his per-game line is a small slice of a season. A punt build makes his free throws free, but it does not make his availability free.

Who falls

Player	Nine-cat rank	Punt-FT rank	FT%	FTA per game	Minutes	Games
James Harden	21	47	88.4%	7.5	34.8	70
Austin Reaves	26	52	87.1%	7.3	34.5	51
Nickeil Alexander-Walker	24	48	90.2%	3.9	33.4	78
Joel Embiid	20	37	85.4%	8.8	31.6	38
Jimmy Butler III	22	38	86.4%	7.6	31.1	38
Derrick White	25	40	90.2%	2.6	34.1	77

Seven players in the nine-category top 50 fall out of the punt top 50: Reaves, Keyonte George (36th to 85th), Desmond Bane (38th to 72nd), LaMelo Ball (40th to 54th), Tyler Herro (46th to 76th), Jalen Brunson (48th to 66th) and Jalen Suggs (49th to 59th). If you plan to punt, these are the players whose draft price is highest relative to what they give you.

The minutes assumption

A free throw hit is a per-minute rate multiplied by a guess about minutes. Take a made-up center who attempts 0.14 free throws a minute and shoots 55%. Against the pool's 80.0% that is a gap of about 0.25 per attempt.

• At 26 minutes a game: 3.64 attempts, about -0.91 made free throws relative to an average shooter.
• At 30 minutes: 4.2 attempts, about -1.05.
• At 34 minutes: 4.76 attempts, about -1.19.

Eight minutes of playing time moves the cost by about 0.28 made free throws a night. If you are punting, that cost is one you have already agreed to pay, so a minutes bump for this player is close to pure gain in the other eight categories. If you are not punting, the same bump makes him worse. The minutes guess matters most for exactly the players in the table above, and where a coach's rotation is unknown, treat the 30-minute line as a middle case and the other two as the range.

What to do with it

1. Decide before the draft, not at pick 40. The punt ranking only helps if you are willing to take the risers at their new ranks, and that means passing on some of the fallers.
2. Check the other eight categories before you commit. In each of rebounds, blocks and field goal impact, seven of the eight risers in the table above are above the pool average, and none of the eight is above average in threes. A punt build therefore has to find its threes elsewhere, so pair these players with guards and wings who supply them.
3. Do not punt on the strength of one player. One star with a bad free throw line is a player you accept. A whole punt build is a plan.
4. Treat games played as a cost. Antetokounmpo, Embiid and Butler all played 38 games or fewer last season, and a punt build only pays off in the weeks they are in the lineup.

This column uses last season's averages and has no projection for 2026-27 minutes. Where a rotation changes in camp, the arithmetic above shows how far the answer moves.