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Daily fantasy sports statistics: how accurate are DFS projections?
Every night StatWarrior grades the projections it published before lock against the leagues' official box scores. These are the numbers from 38,194 graded player results: how predictable each sport is, how far a typical projection misses, and how often players bust or boom.
Key DFS statistics
Figures as of , covering the previous 30 days. This page is rebuilt from the live scorecard on every site update.
- 38,194 individual player projections across 515 DraftKings and FanDuel slates were graded against official box scores in the 30 days to November 11, 2026.
- NBA is the most predictable major DFS sport: projected and actual fantasy points correlate at 0.77, against 0.41 for NHL, the least predictable.
- The average NBA projection misses by 7.7 fantasy points on DraftKings and 8.0 on FanDuel.
- The average NHL projection misses by 5.0 fantasy points on DraftKings and 6.0 on FanDuel.
- The average NFL projection misses by 4.8 fantasy points on DraftKings and 4.2 on FanDuel.
- Players finish under their 10th-percentile floor 22% of the time and over their 90th-percentile ceiling 13% of the time: busts are about 1.7× as common as booms, largely because a floor miss includes players who never took the field.
- On NBA slates the most expensive 15% of players score about 9% less than projected relative to the slate, while mid-priced players score about 8% more.
- The best of 20 pre-lock simulated lineups reaches 89% of the perfect-hindsight lineup's score in NBA and 77% in NHL.
| Sport · site | Days | Slates | Correlation | Avg miss (pts) | Under floor | Over ceiling | Best lineup vs perfect |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NBA · DraftKings | 19 | 135 | 0.77 | 7.7 | 20% | 10% | 88% |
| NBA · FanDuel | 19 | 97 | 0.76 | 8.0 | 22% | 11% | 90% |
| NHL · DraftKings | 20 | 85 | 0.39 | 5.0 | 22% | 14% | 77% |
| NHL · FanDuel | 20 | 67 | 0.43 | 6.0 | 23% | 16% | 77% |
| NFL · DraftKings | 9 | 72 | 0.65 | 4.8 | 22% | 12% | 87% |
| NFL · FanDuel | 9 | 59 | 0.66 | 4.2 | 22% | 13% | 91% |
How these statistics are measured
- Archived before lock. Each slate's projections, floors and ceilings are saved before its first game starts and never edited afterwards.
- Graded on official results. Actual DraftKings and FanDuel fantasy points are computed from the leagues' official box scores the next morning.
- Correlation is the Pearson correlation between projected and actual fantasy points across every projected player on a slate, averaged over slates.
- Average miss is the mean absolute difference between projected and actual fantasy points, in points.
- Floor and ceiling are the 10th and 90th percentiles of each player's projected range; a well-set range is missed 10% of the time on each side.
- Best lineup vs perfect compares the highest-scoring of 20 lineups built before lock with the best lineup that hindsight allows under the same salary cap.
These are StatWarrior's own projections and may not describe other providers. Projections are model estimates, not guarantees. The full nightly scorecard is on the track record page.
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Journalists, bloggers and researchers may quote these figures and reproduce the table with a link back to this page. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Suggested citation: StatWarrior, “Daily fantasy sports statistics: projection accuracy by sport,” https://statwarrior.com/dfs-statistics (data as of ).
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