Fantasy Basketball Advice

With no (pro) games last night, a true fantasy killer* likely spent the entire evening alone in a dark room, with a mason jar used primarily for urine (primarily) plotting nothing else but how his final nine fantasy days are going to go. Eighty blocks ahead of the next guy? Serge Ibaka becomes less potent. (mason jar break). Down by a point in field-goal percentage? Tyson Chandler, I need you now more than ever! I effin’ need you now more than evah! (paint the walls with some finger blood). Need nothing but threes from here on out? Gary Neal, you’re getting the start over Tim Duncan. And San Antonio is stunned! (yank out some hair!) You get the idea. This thing is still winnable, whatever that thing may be. The championship, reaching third place for the first time, not being in last for the first time. Don’t quit, but also, don’t continue trucking along the way you have been (unless the way you have been has put you far head of the next guy), in which case you should probably rethink spending so much time in the dark not watching Butler and UConn. You’re not being strategic, you’re being weird. For the rest of you, start targeting the categories that you can’t really catch up or be caught on. Focus on the statcats you’ve got a realistic shot at beating the next guy in. Sure, you’ll find yourself benching some of the guys that helped get you this far, but so what? You’ll mail them a piece of your $20 fantasy winnings in two weeks. They’ll get over it, then they’ll thank you. Because there is a lockout coming and many basketball players don’t have applicable life-skills outside of a child’s game. Pity them! And pity you if you come this close to winning a fake games incorporating that child’s game and sputter out in the end. Now dim the light and start etching tomorrow’s roster into the palm of your hand with a rusty shiv!

* Another different but equal fantasy killer? Imagine Phil Jackson naked. All elbows and knee joints. Fantasy. Dead.

Outside of player injuries, players sharing equal minutes with other players at a position for stretches of games is just about as annoying as it gets. In fantasy basketball, anyway. In real-life basketball, the voices of Heat announcer Eric Reid and Knicks announcer Walt Frazier are just about as annoying as it gets. (Why does Frazer always sound like he’s grinning?) But in fantasy, little else evokes such white-hot pissyness as two players sharing equal playing time. Brandon Bass and Ryan Anderson are going through it. Ty Lawson and Chauncey Billups are unoffcially going through it. Everyone in the Kings’ frontcourt or the Pistons’ backcourt is going through it, anyone who’s ever looked at Jose Calderon has gone through it … it’s a part of the game. It happens. It’s as common as men Mikhail Prokhorov has made to look like chumps. So what are some things to look for when you’re face-to-face with a timeshare and deciding the likely player to come out on top?

First of all, timeshares, like home-schooled children, are all a little different. It’s possible owners might want no part of either player until the mess is settled. It’s also possible that each owner will choose one and hope things fall their way. As with most advice doled out here, take it with a grain of salt (and large amounts of alcohol. Really, if you can only do one, go with the alcohol). The first guideline is to always favor the more proven of the two timesharing players. This is the one in the hand is worth two from D-League rule and assumes that if the player suddenly forcing the timeshare could play like a starter, he’d be a starter. Really, the only instances in which you’d want to move away from that philosophy is if a) the starter being forced into a timeshare is old and busted (Chauncey Billups, Ben Wallace, Shaq), b) the more proven player is recovering from an injury (Aaron Brooks, Calderon), and c)the proven player has a beef with the team (Troy Murphy, Samuel Dalembert). In instances like the Kaman/Jordan situation that will soon bubble up in L.A., Kaman is the proven player there, but I’m guessing Jordan plays more minutes even after he returns. In cases like this, the Clippers were 1-9 with Kaman playing and are 14-16 since The Hylandre took over. Add in that Kaman is less aggressive, fragile, clunkier than the rest of this athletic rotation, and the buzz on Jordan has been extremely positive and smart money says Jordan is L.A’s new starting center even after Kaman comes back. What’s that … ? I’m being reminded that Vinny Del Negro is the Clippers’ head coach. Smart money has since shifted its odds to even money. In cases of players who all kinda suck (Hill, Hayes, Miller in Houston), coaches almost always lean toward the better defender, offense be damned. If all the players are equally inept, choose the one with the better DRtg or blk/stl numbers. The point is that while there are exceptions to every rule, the rule being excepted should always be that coach’s take far fewer chances than fantasy owners would like them to.

This one’s for the douchebags, as Kanye might say after playing the theme to ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ for a seemingly endless amount of time. Sometimes fantasy basketball can’t be all pigtails and pillowfights. Sometimes to win your league you gotta get a little dirty. And yeah, inviting yourself over to your leaguemate’s house, asking if you can use his computer to check e-mail and then offer yourself a lopsided trade with his team because you know he never logs out of his fantasy homepage is the classic dirty fantasy tactic, but it’s also cheating. The only thing worse than cheating at fake sports is lip-syncing bad songs. Seriously Milli-Vanilli, your songs were as bad as your porkpie hats. You couldn’t have found Prince’s collaborators and slipped them a few bucks to fake you a few timeless classics? At least when Britney Spears lip-syncs poorly, she’s doing it to songs so catchy I have to slam a medium sized rock into my head to forget. No, let’s stay within the bounds of fairness.

Sometimes owners have two or three free agent pickups that they just can’t decide on. Toney Douglas or Eric Bledsoe? Reggie Evans or Hakim Warrick? Kyle Lowry or Jonny Flynn? In competitive leagues, where the waiver wire is constantly being tapped, sometimes all you need is a few extra days to solidify your decision. I mean, we’re into the meat of the season now and you can’t afford to waste your time on Nazr Mohammad for five games if Saturday’s performance was a fluke, right? Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins-low. Amiright Yeezy? Unfortunately, in competitive leagues, a few extra days is exactly what you won’t get. This is where the Waiver Block Maneuver comes in handy. Can’t decide between Amir Johnson and Brandan Wright? Pick up Wright, then immediately drop him in favor of Johnson. In many leagues, rostering a player from a free agent pool, then dropping him back into it automatically triggers a 2-3 day waiver wire period where other teams would have to burn their waiver priority to grab that player if they want him. You’d be surprised how many owners will skip a player who will cost them their high waiver priority. You never know if tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day, a really great no-brainer of a waiver pick-up might be available. And if it’s not a case of wanting to maintain a high waiver priority, it’s a case of instant gratification. Owners don’t want to wait three days to pick up a player, they want him now. Tonight. Before he plays tomorrow against the Knicks, for Christsake!

Essentially, this is the same rule I apply to calling a girl back for a second date. By forcing them to wait three days, they forget all about how they felt earlier in the week and either agree to date me again or decide that Wright isn’t worth it (depending on which side of the analogy you decided to focus). Again, the Waiver Block Manuever is kind of a dick move. But if it buys you a few days (and if you’re really meticulous, you can keep this going for weeks) to decide which waiver pick-ups are worth it, then do it. And then have a toast for the scumbags, everyone of ‘em that I know.

For those of you in leagues that limit the number of games each position is allowed to play over the course of a season (usually it’s limited to 82 games per position), you’ve no doubt sweated over your games played pace at some point already. If you haven’t, you will. Or should. If you play every player on your roster every chance you get, you’ll be done by March and Ilgauskas would have had as much of a say in your team’s performance as Brook Lopez. You don’t want Big Z speaking for your team. He gets nervous. Sweat stains form around his thighs and he flips over tables to relieve the tension. It’s totally predictable. The only surprise is whether or not he rips off his ill-fitting dinner jacket when he does it. On the other hand, you never want to play it conservative all season and leave a dozen games unplayed. That’s just weak sauce. You play to play the games, Herm.

Unlike baseball, you have more control over your season-ending games count. Power forwards don’t take 30 games off a season like catchers do (unless they’re Elton Brand – zing!) and players in the NBA don’t usually have routine days off like baseball players. The key to managing your games played is understanding that injuries are a lock. Someone on your team is going to miss at least five or six games this season due to injury. Most managers wait until these setbacks happen to deal with it. As Jack White said, you can’t take the effect and make it the cause. However, less than 10 percent of the league (39 players out of 450+) played all 82 games last season and of those 39 only about 20 of them made it onto your average fantasy team. That means that injuries are going to hit your team … and your team … and your team too. It’s inevitable. So in this case, when the effect is inevitable, a good strategy is to prepare for it. If your team starts its season healthy and has a dozen players performing well, but only nine starting slots – play ‘em all as often as you can. Shift your lineups to get those high-functioning players as much burn as you can. Then, if one or two or three players go down with injury, you’ve already built a reserve of games using those injured players’ stats.

Be smart about doubling up on positions. Don’t just play everyone on your team. But if there’s only one space to put both Danny Granger and Rudy Gay in your fantasy lineups, don’t keep Gay on the bench just because you don’t want to zoom past your games played count pace. It’s more important to fill each of those games with quality lines than timely ones. Instead of scrambling to fill in for an injured player, go heavy on the positions while you can so that when someone does go down with an injury, all it means to your team is that your games played count will level out a bit without making your team any weaker. Now go out there and be somebody!

So you’ve made it through the first week of fantasy basketball and came out the other side not only covered in mucus, but also likely one of two types of fantasy hoopsters: Either the type that wants to wait a few weeks to see what kind of lineup you drafted before making any changes, or the type that dropped three players 90 seconds after the draft was over. The waiters wonder why the droppers can’t just learn to draft better. The droppers wonder (usually out loud and on your leagues’ public bulletin boards) why no one else is snatching Travis Outlaw or Francisco Garcia. It’s either black or white, but if you’re thinking about my baby it doesn’t matter because, as is the case over at Razzball Baseball, the truth lies in the Grey gray. If you wait two weeks to tinker with your team you’re missing out on players that are eventually going to win someone else your league, but if your first three picks are the only remnants left from your draft, you’re not thinking rationally. Think of the first two weeks as neither a time to validate nor heal your team, but the first step in a 23-week process of making your team better than everyone else’s. Here are some guidelines to consider before adding and dropping during the early stages of the season:

1. Don’t pick up anyone on the strength of one game, and think twice before you do it on the strength of two. By the end of Day 2, all but one of the leagues I’m in saw Shannon Brown and his stupendous, tremendous, heart-stopping, earth-shocking 16/1/1 with four treys and four steals get snatched up by someone (not me) who thought they had just witnessed this generation’s less-5′oclock shadowy Vince Carter. Two days later he played only two-thirds of the minutes and posted an 8/1/1 line (no treys). Does this mean Brown should be dead to you? No. Does it mean you should wait until a guy makes a habit of producing? You bet your sweet Bippy. (Sweet Bippy may never forgive you for betting her away).

2. Always consider the player’s role in the context of his entire team. Minutes are the single most important quantitative statistic you can use to predict a player’s fantasy worthiness. And a way to predict mpg early is to evaluate their role on their team. Francisco Garcia was mentioned earlier in this post. Scroll up to refresh your memory. Then immediately go see a doctor about your memory that apparently needs to be refreshed every 70 seconds. He dropped a 22/3/4 line with an abundance of blocks and steals and threes and mirth and joy but people stayed away because he was filling in for Tyreke Evans. Then he posted a slightly less-impressive line of 18/3/2 with steals and blocks and an abundance of threes and ‘Reke now in the lineup and people rushed to grab him. While I’d hope no one dropped him for Evans, Garcia is a good pick up (despite his 4/4/0 line from Saturday) because he’s performing well on a team that is facing considerable flux on its roster. Right now, Evans is the only sure-starter on this squad. The Kings have no back-up PG and a revolving door of the underwhelming Donte Greene and the still-raw Omri Casspi both at the SF spot. This suggests that a hybrid SG/SF like Garcia will get a lot of burn playing backup SG to Evans, playing SG while Evans plays the point, or playing SF in smaller rotations. In this instance, Garcia has a potentially large role on this team, which means the minutes will be there. Players in Garcia’s situation, or Wilson Chandler‘s situation in New York, are good bets early if you stash them on your bench.

3. Look at the player’s history. If the player in question is a rookie, this becomes considerably more difficult. But if the player has been around the block a few times, and never posted the same high-quality line that he’s posting now, it’s a red flag that what you’re seeing is a bubble about to burst. Look at Daniel Gibson. Not only is he a bad pickup because Mo Williams is due back tomorrow, but Gibson’s averages have exceeded everything he’s ever done before. His per36 career averages are 12/3/2.5. So far this season he’s averaging a per36 of 18/3/7.5. Is it because LeBron is no longer a Cav? Maybe. Is it that he’s taking over many of Williams’ minutes? Perhaps. But remember, I’m looking at per36, not per game averages. Gibson averaged 12/3/2.5 every 36 minutes before this season and although massive statistical jumps like this aren’t impossible, you should bet that there are extenuating circumstances at play and those extenuating circumstances are going to balance our sooner or later.

4. Consider all the stats. Reggie Evans has 30 rebounds in two games. Thirty. And honestly, on that team in Toronto, I don’t see why they won’t just parade him out there for 82 games or why he can’t lead the league in boards. Fifteen a game. That’s a mighty total. Mighty enough that nearly 15 percent of fantasy owners added him to their roster. He offers a line of .200/.000/0/1/15/0.5/1/0.5 which is the fantasy basketball equivalent of a midget with size 22 shoes. Owning Evans is like bumping the rebounding averages of each player on your team by 1, but then removing one utility spot from your roster. Not your entire league. Just yours. Scouring the waiver wire in the early parts of the season, like being alone on Valentine’s Day, make you desperate and eager to overlook any number of glaring problems with the guy you’ve labeled a stud. A one-stat monster is just that – a monster.

5. Consider the defense. After three games, it’s possible that the surprise performers were the beneficiaries of weak opponents early on. In the case of Reggie Evans, he grabbed 16 boards off a Knicks team that is going to be in the bottom 10 in total team rebounds this season and followed up that performance with grabbing 14 off a depleted Cavaliers team that was without Anderson Varejao. Anyone want to bet Evans averages more than 11 rebounds in his next three games against the Kings, Jazz and Lakers?