Jason Katz opened his Hot List countdown with Ja’Marr Chase and closed it with CeeDee Lamb, and only one of those picks should start an argument. The top four match what most major outlets published this summer. Katz just ordered them differently. The fifth spot is where he goes off the board, and the reasoning behind it is the weakest part of an otherwise sharp list.
Ja’Marr Chase Leads a Top 5 Fantasy Wide Receiver Tier Nobody Disputes
“He is the king. High floor, high ceiling,” Katz said of Chase, who caught 125 passes for 1,412 yards and eight touchdowns on a league-high 185 targets in 16 games. That was a WR4 finish in PPR, and it came while Joe Burrow missed nine games with a toe injury.
“He is proven to be quarterback proof,” Katz said. The receipts hold up. Chase averaged 21.5 PPR points in the games Joe Flacco started for Cincinnati, and Flacco is back on a one-year deal as the backup, which keeps the insurance policy intact.
Nacua at No. 2 is defensible on volume alone. He led the NFL with 129 receptions, ranked second with 1,715 yards and finished as the half-PPR WR1. Katz’s angle is what’s still unclaimed: “Amazingly, Puka only played 70% of the snaps last year and he ran a route on just 77.2% of Rams pass plays. Elite wide receiver ones are typically well above 90% in both categories.”
What Katz doesn’t weigh is the off-field year. Nacua entered a rehabilitation facility in March and faces a civil lawsuit stemming from a December incident, which makes him the highest-variance pick in the tier even before anyone talks about his injury history.
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Smith-Njigba third is the aggressive call in the other direction. He won Offensive Player of the Year, led the league with 1,793 receiving yards and signed a four-year, $168.6 million extension in March. Katz called him “the ultimate alpha” and put his target share at 35.9%. Fantasy Points Data charted it at 32.6%, still first in the league. The concern Katz names is the right one either way: Seattle attempted just 481 passes, fourth-fewest in football.
St. Brown at No. 4 is the safest slot on the board. “He’s arguably the safest player in all of fantasy football,” Katz said, and three straight seasons finishing top four in points per game back that up.
CeeDee Lamb’s Fantasy Ranking Ignores George Pickens
Then comes Lamb, and Katz defends him with the wrong variable.
“One area of concern though is possibly the target share, only 23.1% last season, but I would not be overly worried about that because it includes a Week 3 game he left injured after his first touch and a Week 18 game where Shotty pulled starters at halftime,” Katz said.
Two games don’t cover it. Lamb went from 10.1 targets per game in 2024 to 8.4 in 2025 and finished with 75 catches for 1,077 yards and three touchdowns in 14 games. Three touchdowns. The reason lines up on the other side of the formation. George Pickens made second-team All-Pro, led Dallas in receiving yards and is playing 2026 on a $27.3 million franchise tag after the Cowboys declined to extend him ahead of the July 15 deadline.
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Katz is right that Dallas scores. The Cowboys put up 471 points, seventh in the league, in a 7-9-1 season with the worst scoring defense in football. That environment supports two fantasy starters. It doesn’t make either one a top-five pick.
The bigger blind spot runs through the whole list. Seattle lost Klint Kubiak to the Raiders and handed the offense to Brian Fleury, Mike Macdonald’s third coordinator in three seasons. Detroit hired Drew Petzing, its third in three years. Two of Katz’s top four are priced off environments that just changed hands, and by October that will matter more than any target share from last November.
