Every list of great player-seasons leads with batting. The highest-rated seasons in the draft database are mostly 800-run years, and the record chases that fans remember are almost all made with the bat. But when we ranked every bowling year in the database by the game’s own rating order, a different truth fell out: the bowling market is where drafts are actually won— because elite bowling costs a fraction of elite batting.
The proof sits at the very top of the list. The single highest-rated bowling season in the game is Dwayne Bravo’s 2013 — 32 wickets, a record haul at the time — and it costs 1.7 Cr. The best batting seasons in the game run 10 to 24 crore. The best bowling season costs less than a backup opener.
The ten best bowling seasons in the game
| # | Player-season | That season | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dwayne Bravo — CSK 2013 | 32 wickets at eco 8.0 | 1.7 Cr |
| 2 | Kagiso Rabada — DC 2020 | 30 wickets at eco 8.3 | 6.2 Cr |
| 3 | Lasith Malinga — MI 2011 | 28 wickets at eco 6.0 | 27.8 Cr |
| 4 | James Faulkner — RR 2013 | 28 wickets at eco 6.8 | 4.0 Cr |
| 5 | Harshal Patel — RCB 2021 | 32 wickets at eco 8.1 | 15.8 Cr |
| 6 | Mohammad Shami — GT 2023 | 28 wickets at eco 8.0 | 8.2 Cr |
| 7 | Jasprit Bumrah — MI 2020 | 27 wickets at eco 6.7 | 10.3 Cr |
| 8 | Imran Tahir — CSK 2019 | 26 wickets at eco 6.7 | 1.5 Cr |
| 9 | Bhuvneshwar Kumar — RCB 2026 | 28 wickets at eco 8.0 | 10.8 Cr |
| 10 | Wanindu Hasaranga — RCB 2022 | 26 wickets at eco 7.5 | 14.9 Cr |
Look at the costs, not just the wickets. Four of the ten best bowling seasons in the entire game — Bravo, Faulkner, Tahir, and Rabada — cost 6.2 Cr or less each. All four together come to 13.4 Cr: less than most single elite batting seasons. Only Malinga’s 2011, priced at 27.8 Cr, is expensive the way great batting is expensive.
The economy kings are their own category
Wickets get the rating, but a handful of seasons are legendary for what they prevented. Sunil Narine’s first two years are the tightest sustained bowling the league has seen — 24 wickets at an economy of 5.47 in 2012, then 22 more at 5.46 in 2013 — and Malinga’s 2011 paired 28 wickets with under six an over. In a 16-match simulated season, that suffocation shows up in close games.
| Player-season | That season | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Sunil Narine — KKR 2013 | 22 wickets at eco 5.46 | 7.0 Cr |
| Sunil Narine — KKR 2012 | 24 wickets at eco 5.47 | 8.0 Cr |
| Lasith Malinga — MI 2011 | 28 wickets at eco 5.95 | 27.8 Cr |
| Mohsin Khan — LSG 2022 | 14 wickets at eco 5.96 | 0.28 Cr |
The bargain bin is a wicket factory
This is the part that decides drafts. The batting bargains in the database are rare and famous. The bowling bargains are everywhere— genuine 20-wicket seasons for the price of a net bowler. This is exactly how the squads that reach a perfect 16-0 afford their batting stars: they spend big on two or three elite bats and staff the attack from this table.
| Player-season | That season | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Yuzvendra Chahal — RCB 2015 | 23 wickets | 0.20 Cr |
| Tushar Deshpande — CSK 2023 | 21 wickets | 0.26 Cr |
| Harshit Rana — KKR 2024 | 19 wickets | 0.25 Cr |
| Shreyas Gopal — RR 2019 | 20 wickets | 0.30 Cr |
| Mohit Sharma — GT 2023 | 27 wickets at eco 8.2 | 0.66 Cr |
| Avesh Khan — DC 2021 | 24 wickets at eco 7.4 | 1.0 Cr |
Mohit Sharma’s 2023 deserves a sentence of its own: 27 wickets — a top-ten bowling season by volume — for 0.66 Cr, from the deepest franchise-season in the game. There is no batting equivalent at that price anywhere in the database.
The expensive mistakes
The trap picks work the same way they do with the bat: a famous name, a premium price, and a season where the numbers were not there. Among the priciest bowling seasons in the pool, these returned the least.
| Player-season | That season | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Charl Langeveldt — KKR 2010 | 5 wickets at eco 8.0 | 23.8 Cr |
| Ishant Sharma — KKR 2008 | 8 wickets at eco 7.7 | 23.8 Cr |
| Irfan Pathan — DC 2011 | 11 wickets at eco 7.5 | 26.4 Cr |
And one honest asterisk on the elite list: Malinga’s 2011 is a genuinely great season — but at 27.8 Cr it costs more than Bravo, Rabada, Faulkner and Tahir together. Elite is not the same as efficient.
What this means for your draft
The pattern across the database is blunt. Top-shelf batting is scarce and priced like it. Top-shelf bowling is scarce too — but the market keeps mispricing it, decade after decade. A drafter who knows the 20-wicket bargains by name walks into every Normal-mode draft with crores the table above just handed back. In Expert mode, where the stats are hidden, that memory is the edge. Put it to work on today’s daily challenge.