CourtShare is a free-to-play fantasy basketball stock market where you buy and sell shares of NBA players. Prices move based on trading activity, within a structure built around limited share supply and a persistent record of transactions.

Season 1 (Beta) runs during the 2025–26 season.

Why CourtShare exists

The NBA community already spends a lot of time discussing player value: who is overrated, who is underrated, who is a sell-high, and who the public has not caught up to yet.

In other words, people already think in the language of buying low and selling high.

The issue is persistence. We have Twitter, Reddit, and great communities everywhere, but takes get lost over time and in the algorithm. By the time a take comes to fruition, it’s hard to prove timing, conviction, and consistency.

CourtShare addresses that by creating a crowd-sourced market mechanism where the community can collectively appraise player value—and where individuals can show they were earlier, sharper, or more disciplined than the market.

Positions create receipts: they are timestamped, sized, and persistent, which makes them easier to evaluate over months and seasons.

What CourtShare is

  • A market where each player has limited share supply and prices respond to trading activity.
  • A record where trades are timestamped and can be discussed.
  • A portfolio that persists across seasons, so conviction and timing can be evaluated over time.

What CourtShare is not

  • Not gambling: Court Cash (CC) is an in-app currency with no cash value and no withdrawals in beta.
  • Not traditional fantasy: positions are designed to persist across seasons rather than reset annually.
  • Not “paper takes”: trades create receipts that can be revisited later.

CourtShare is not a brokerage product. CC is a closed-loop, in-app unit used for gameplay and reputation tracking during beta.

Key terms (quick reference)

  • Share: a unit of exposure to a player’s market price.
  • Position: the number of shares you hold in a player.
  • Float cap: the maximum shares available for a player.
  • In circulation: the shares currently held by users.
  • Utilization: in circulation relative to float cap (a crowding/tightness signal).
  • Market sentiment: the net effect of buys and sells expressed through trading.
  • Fair Value (FV): a model-derived reference price based on basketball signals.

How the market works: three building blocks

1) Scarcity: limited share supply

Every player has a limited supply of shares. Three metrics describe supply and crowding:

  • Float cap: the total shares available for that player.
  • In circulation: shares currently held by users.
  • Utilization: how much of the float is held (in circulation relative to float cap).

In beta, utilization is informational: no automatic mechanism triggers at a utilization threshold. As utilization rises, the market becomes tighter and price movements can become more volatile because a larger portion of the available supply is already held.

Players are expected to remain stable during Season 1 (no planned retirements during beta).

Tiers (Season 1 policy)

CourtShare uses tiers to standardize supply design across the league and to set supply bands consistently.

  • In Season 1, tiers are initially assigned by the founding team.
  • In later seasons, tiers will be more systematic and malleable, allowing players to move up or down based on sustained market demand.

Tiers referenced in beta:

  • Tier S
  • Tier A
  • Tier B
  • Tier C
  • Tier D (lowest-float cohort)

Tier examples:

  • Tier S: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama, Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Doncic, LeBron James
  • Tier A: Anthony Edwards, Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton, Jalen Brunson, Donovan Mitchell
  • Tier B: Jalen Duren, Coby White, Jalen Green, Josh Giddey, Michael Porter Jr.
  • Tier C: Kevin Porter Jr., Zach Edey, Zaccharie Risacher, Kyshawn George, Ryan Rollins
  • Tier D (lowest-float examples): Patrick Williams, Vince Williams Jr., Xavier Tillman

2) Market sentiment: price discovery from trading

Market price is primarily driven by trading activity. At a high level:

  • Net buying pressure tends to raise price.
  • Net selling pressure tends to lower price.

What matters is relative pressure. The same number of shares traded has different impact depending on the player’s available supply and current market conditions. As a result, CourtShare prices act as a real-time snapshot of community attention and conviction.

That can include more than highlights: role changes, injuries, lineup experiments, playoff context, and long-term belief can all show up as sustained demand.

3) Fair Value: a fundamentals reference

Fair Value is a model-derived reference price computed from on-court production signals and role context. It is a consistent benchmark used to help identify overreaction and mispricing.

Fair Value is provided so that users can separate two questions:

  • What the market is doing right now (sentiment).
  • What the model expects based on underlying performance signals (fair value).

What Fair Value is made of (Season 1)

Fair Value uses a weighted blend of advanced metrics and role/context signals. It is designed to be a consistent, basketball-first reference point.

The Season 1 FV inputs include:

Impact signals

  • BPM (Box Plus-Minus): a box-score based estimate of overall impact
  • OBPM and DBPM: offense/defense components of BPM
  • VORP (Value Over Replacement Player): cumulative value relative to a replacement baseline
  • WS/48 (Win Shares per 48): a rate-based measure of win-share contribution
  • PER (Player Efficiency Rating): a box-score efficiency signal

Role and usage signals

  • Usage rate (USG%): how much of the offense runs through a player when they are on the floor

Reliability and sample size controls

  • Games played (GP): availability and sample size
  • Minutes played: sample size and role stability

How to interpret this set:

  • The impact cluster (BPM, VORP, WS/48) is designed to reward players who are consistently positive on the floor, not just high-volume scorers.
  • The OBPM/DBPM split helps separate offensive output from defensive value.
  • PER adds an additional box-score efficiency signal alongside the impact metrics.
  • Usage helps contextualize role (primary creator vs. secondary vs. low-usage finisher).
  • Games and minutes help the model avoid overweighting tiny samples.

FV is a cross-sectional reference and can be wrong in meaningful ways, especially for:

  • rookies and new roles (limited historical signal)
  • injured players returning from long absences
  • players whose value is primarily scheme-specific or matchup-specific

How price is derived (high-level)

CourtShare treats price formation as a blend of two inputs:

  1. ~70% market sentiment
  2. ~30% fair value

Market sentiment drives discovery in the short term, while fair value provides a stabilizing reference over time.

  • Sentiment captures what the community is willing to express through trades.
  • Fair value provides a fundamentals-oriented benchmark to measure that sentiment against.

Trading

You trade by buying and selling shares:

  • Buy: increase your position when you believe the market is underpricing a player.
  • Sell: reduce your position when you believe the market is overpricing a player, when you want to reallocate, or when your thesis changes.

Positions persist, which makes it possible to measure timing, conviction, and decision quality over multi-month and multi-season windows.

Receipts and persistence

Every trade is timestamped and can be revisited later. This enables:

  • performance measurement across months and seasons
  • portfolio-level track records rather than single-post opinions
  • discussion anchored to specific decisions (entries, exits, sizing)

In practice, this creates a durable history of decision-making rather than a feed of isolated claims.

Court Cash (CC): currency design in beta

Court Cash is the in-app currency used to trade.

  • Each user starts with 1,000 CC in beta.
  • CC is non-redeemable during beta (no withdrawals).

Even without cash-outs, the in-game economy still needs inflation controls. That means CC has:

  • Sources (how CC enters the system over time).
  • Sinks (how CC leaves the system, to keep incentives balanced).

One sink is a small CC-denominated transaction fee on trades. It helps manage inflation and reduces spammy behavior.

Over time, the system can add additional sinks/sources as needed (for example: rewards, grants, and other distribution mechanisms) while maintaining a closed-loop economy during beta.

How to read the market

When evaluating a player on CourtShare, three signals typically matter most:

  • Price level and recent movement (sentiment proxy).
  • Float cap / in circulation / utilization (scarcity and crowding).
  • Fair value and the gap to market price (model vs. market).

What matters is clarity: what the market believes, how crowded the trade is, and what the fundamentals reference says.

Where you will see this

  • Market view: tier, price, and market-wide scanning.
  • Player pages: float cap, in circulation, utilization, and fair value context.
  • Ledger / activity views: timestamped transactions and discussion tied to trades.

Contact

For questions, comments, corrections, or to join the writing team, email courtshare78@gmail.com or join the CourtShare Discord.