Best ball is a fantasy format where you draft a roster and then do nothing else all season: there are no lineup decisions, no waivers, and no trades. Each week the system automatically slots your highest-scoring eligible players into the optimal lineup, so your score is simply the best your roster could have produced.

Removing in-season management shifts all the skill to the draft. Without a waiver wire to patch mistakes, roster construction becomes everything — you draft for depth and correlated upside, stacking positions and accepting boom-or-bust players because only their best weeks ever count. A bye week or an injury just means a bench player’s score gets used instead.

Sleeper offers best ball natively as a league format, with roster moves switched off by default. It’s popular precisely because it fits people who love drafting but don’t want to babysit a lineup for eighteen weeks.