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Happy New Year! The boys are back in town. What a great start to 2022! Lance Stephenson signed a 10-day contract with the Indiana Pacers where he played his first four seasons in the NBA and Kyrie Irving played his first game of the season for Brooklyn. The cool thing? These two things happened in the same game as the Nets beat the Pacers 129-121. Kyrie put up 38.75 Draftkings points in 31 minutes at $8900 while Lance recored 41.75 Draftkings points good for 13x at the minimum price of $3000 (that's a gpp winner)! Let's see if we can find tonight's Lance.
The full crew is back as Son, Brent, Craig, and I hit a wide range of topics in this marathon of a podcast. We start off with recent news, including the Devin Booker injury, before debating some other players such as Kyrie Irving and Zach LaVine. We have a lot of talk about draft strategy before looking at an expert mock draft Son did to point out mistakes that some owners made. All of that and more on the latest edition of the Razzball Basketball Podcast!
Fantasy basketball can be very different from other fantasy sports, in that there is not one proven draft strategy. The “Running Back-Running Back” fantasy football strategy is timeless, along with the standard mantra of “Wait on Tight End, Kicker, and Defense,” to which “Wait on Quarterback” is being added more frequently. In fantasy basketball, the position is not as important as the player. The best players in basketball play all different positions, so targeting specific positions early in drafts is not a reliable strategy. Some people plan to “punt” categories, which means they intentionally draft players who do not excel in a certain category (free-throw percentage is a popular one), but that is a strategy that presents itself out of desperation as the draft progresses. The lack of a specific, proven strategy is why you will hear a lot of experts tell you that the best fantasy basketball draft strategy is no strategy. But I disagree.
Razzball's version of the Four Horsemen is back this week, with Son, Brent, Craig, and Viz back together.  We start off by each picking some players from Son's Top 200 that we are targeting late in drafts and why they could be undervalued.  There are some intense debates!  From there, we look at Craig's Top 100 and look at the major difference points between his rankings and our fearless leader's.   Mixed throughout the podcast, there is plenty of draft strategy talk to help you formulate a plan before you draft based on your league settings and during the draft.  All of that and more on the latest edition of the Razzball Basketball Podcast! 
There are a ton of elite point guards that will be taken in the first three rounds of your draft. From Russell Westbrook to Mike Conley, there are not enough guys to go around for everybody. Okay, maybe there are, but nobody in any league I’ve ever been in was into sharing. There are even elite wings that will get you point-guard-like assists. This is mainly Giannis Antetokounmpo and LeBron James, but can even apply to guys like Kevin Durant and Jimmy Butler. But what happens if you’re picking in round 3 and you haven’t gotten an elite assist getter yet? Do you panic? No. Do you reach? Not for a point guard, but maybe for your beer (unless it’s Bud Light– if it's Bud Light you throw that shit in the trash and re-evaluate.) This is where you can adopt the “punt assist” strategy. This punt strategy often gets overlooked by more common punting strategies such as punting free throws, but it’s very helpful if the assist dominoes don’t fall in your favour the first few rounds. Here are some guys to target if you decide to go down the punt assist route, and how your team should shape up by the end of the draft.
Let me start by saying this: do not go into a draft planning on building a punt FT (or punt anything for that matter) team. Never. Don’t. You aren’t being smarter than everybody else. You’re playing yourself. Unless you’re a late draft pick in a 36-team league, it’s probably not gonna work for you. Also, never decide to build a punt FT team just because a punt FT guy falls a bit. I made this mistake last year and took Drummond in one of my leagues, after having Davis and Porzingis already on my roster. My thought process was, “I can definitely make some trades to make this work." I did get Gobert, which helped, but throwing away a category to get better at stats your fantasy team already generates is, not only inefficient, it’s frustrating. On top of this, do not draft guys when building a punt FT team just because they’re bad at free throws. I can not stress this enough. The point of drafting is to build a team that can win as many categories for you as possible, not to see how bad you can lose one. It’s comical how often people (myself included) try to see how bad they can get their FT percentage, thinking that they’re outplaying everyone else. You guys think this article is for you, it’s actually for me. I’m just trying to hold myself accountable when I’m drafting. So when do you build a punt FT team? The simple answer is: when it helps you. What I’m hoping this article does is give you some scenarios when building a punt FT team makes sense. If you’re stubborn and are gonna go ahead and build one anyway, I’ll also give some advice on how to round out your team. Wait, I forgot the most important piece of information you’ll see in this article. How the hell are there NBA players shooting less than 50% from the FT line? Seriously. I can’t wrap my head around it. That’s like an illiterate writer. That’s like a runner that can’t walk. That’s like the restaurant I used to work at who’s name was Burger’s etc. and stopped selling burgers. So many confused customers, just like there must be so many confused NBA fans.

In his mammoth tome, The Book of Basketball, a work I begrudgingly call both comprehensive and wholly entertaining, Bill Simmons shares the theory that 24 is the pivotal age for athletic shooting guards. He uses Jordan, Bryant, McGrady, Wade, a 25-year-old Iverson (lost five months as a high school senior sitting in a jail cell) and David Thompson as examples. Please, blog, may I have some more?