🏀 How do FAAB and waivers work?

Learn the details of FAAB in fantasy basketball

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Written by Sleeper HQ
Updated over a week ago

FAAB Bidding allows for leagues to execute waivers based on a bidding system throughout the season rather than assigning each team a waiver ranking from one waiver claim period to the next.

FAAB includes a blind bidding process to select players off waivers each week. Claims will execute based on a value-ranked order, meaning the player with the highest bid will go for 'auction' first. Then to the 2nd highest player, and so on and so forth.

Budget:

When selecting FAAB, a budget for the season will need to be determined. The most common value is $100.


FAAB Bid:

The process for making a Waiver claim using FAAB is the same as any other waiver. Identify the player on waivers you'd like to add, and if necessary, select a player to drop.

The difference will be the value you can choose to input for the player. A value of $0 is acceptable and will be won if no other bids are made on the player, or if the only other bids are also of $0, with a lower Waiver Rank for the week.

In order for your league to use FAAB on claims, you'll need to make sure that you have a waiver period enabled. Your commissioners will have to turn on Custom Daily Waivers and set the desired day to waivers, or the After Drop Waivers.

Some believe this is a unique and possibly fairer method of determining waivers week to week, as Teams' needs are not always determined by their early or late waiver ranks.

When using Rolling Waivers, there is always some inherent risk involved in making waiver claims when doing so can be detrimental to your future rank for future claims. And in some cases when using Reverse Standing Waivers, is how some better teams take the risk in taking while acquiring top demanded players each week from free agency.


Offseason waivers

You can continue using waivers throughout the offseason by enabling Custom Daily Waivers. Renew your league for the upcoming year and you'll have the ability to make adds and drops just as you would during the season.

You can still have waiver periods, or you can disable moves completely and lock users from making moves. All of those options are available in your general league settings.


Adjusting FAAB or Waiver Wire Priority

As commissioner, you can adjust any team's FAAB budget or waiver priority at any time, but it is only possible on the mobile app.

The FAAB amounts do not roll over automatically from season to season and it will never reset. The commish has to manually set that as needed.

You can go to your league settings and tap on the commish tab and select the option for "Edit Waiver".

You can adjust those at any time as needed. Keep in mind that the FAAB budget you create at the beginning serves as a maximum. So if you try to manually adjust a team's FAAB and it goes over your initial limit, it will revert.

You'll have to increase that max and then adjust the team's amount. You can increase the maximum in your general settings shown in the photo below:

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