Fantasy Basketball Advice

Unlucky Week 13 is gone with the wind, having left 16 teams exactly where we left them in Week 12. It happens. More teams are giving up. More teams are increasing their stat cat distance from the guy behind them. Like a professional slam dancer with three hip-replacements, less movement is inevitable.

With four weeks of regular season and playoff fantasy hoops before us, I thought I’d look aft of us to see who the masters of class are more than three month into the season.

The California Defenders lead all teams with a .498 FG%, it’s the only team shooting better than .478.

Brooklyn Shine‘s .8112 FT% tops the league, but only by .0005 percentage points over his Big Ball Dance buddy One Piece.

Team RICH is living high on the hog behind the arc with 585 total threes, which is good for third overall in team 3ptm average. Fun fact: The top three three-point shooting teams in the league all belong in the All-Star Dance-Off ’08 division. That fact was at least kind of fun, right? I mean, would you have preferred I call it “vaguely amusing detail?”

Teach Me How To Gortat is the scoringest team in the bunch as well as the team with the most assists. His dimes are prevalent enough that he’s also ranks no.1 in team assist average and was the only team across the 2,000 assist threshold as of Wednesday March 21.

Boom Boom Pau tops the rebounding totals with 3,381 (ranked no. 2 in team rebounding average).

Fear the ‘Stache is first in team steal totals and average.

Drunk Dialing D12‘s 435 blocks are good enough to stand atop the total blocks chart, but only get him ranked third in average team blocks.

Next week, I’ll introduce the final league scoring system and how Razzball incorporates final division standings with the averages laid out in the spreadsheet. Here’s the spreadsheet.

Twelve weeks down six weeks left to go. Or if you’re a fractionista, you might say we’re two-thirds done. If you’re a percentagist, you might say we’re 67 percent complete. If you’re impatient, you might tell me to shut up and get on with it. Then, because I’m a literalist, I’d point out that I cannot both shut up AND get on with it. I’d only be able to do one and by doing one, I would pointedly not be doing the other. Then, if you were a normal person, you’d punch me in the throat and walk away. And if I were a rationalist, I’d understand that I got what was coming to me.

Anyway, we’re another week older and deeper in debt. Not a ton of crazy movement. Team joniuscaesar has a league-wide record 549 games played so far, 51 games ahead of the runner-up. Rain Maker, with 365 games played, has played the fewest games of the 60-team league and I’m pretty sure he checked out back when Jeremy Lin was not yet a name to which people automatically attached puns.

Removing the players with the most and least games played, I averaged out the GPs across all five divisions. All-Star Dance-Off ’08 came in at 484 GP so far (40 games a week). Wall’s Dougie came in next averaging 461 GP (38 a week). Big Ball Dance had 450 (37.5), Chili Shimmy had 433 (36) and Dream Shake is caboosin’ it averaging only 423 games so far (35).

I look forward to next season, when THE league is back to 82 games and OUR league all has the same GP settings. It’ll be neato-keen.

Just when you were starting to get to know Week 11, it peed all over your toilet seat, finished off your leftover orange chicken from the Jade Dragon, scratched all your Stooges records and drove westward toward the Pacific.  Life will never be quite the same. These are our Wonder Years — or at least our Oneder years, if you’re into That Thing You Do.

The year has also been wondrous for SmokenTrees StrokenThrees, who has quietly climbed from 42nd place on January 25 to 11th this week. It’s easily the farthest, steadiest climb of any team over the last seven weeks. He’s third in the Big Ball Dance division behind the overall leader One Piece and ninth-placer Shock the Monkey. Steve Novak and Isaiah Thomas have accelerated STST recently, while shrewd grabs of Ryan Anderson and Nikola Pekovic have helped him come on up for the rising over the last few months.

While Trees ‘n’ Threes climbed seven spots in the last two weeks, I Give it a TEN! and California Defenders climbed the highest ladders since before the All-Star Break (8 and 9 spots respectively).

Team joniuscaesar, currently fourth place in the All-Star Dance-Off ’08 division, took a nine-spot slide from 46th to 55th, while Kiwi Connection dropped from 22nd to 38th, making him almost as hateful of DeMar DeRozan as I am. If you unfocus your eyes and stare at the small version of this week’s graph shown above, you can spot Kiwi immediately. While most everyone else is rising or falling only a few spots, Kiwi jumped out of the plane without a chute. Shoot! Splat.

Ah well, cats and kittens. You’ve got nine lives and there’s always next week.

Hit up the spreadsheet if you’re into crunchin’ your own numbers.

Things after nine weeks are continuing to move with less movement than Amar’e Stoudemire going for a rebound. Only one team chute ‘n’ laddered more than 10 spots this week. Van Gundy Death Stare (which I misread as Van Gundy’s Death Star every single week) dropped 11 spots this week, which was inevitably going to happen to any team stuck with Nene, Derrick Rose, Turkoglu’s rotting corpse and the entire Pacers rotation. Not sure how he’s going to fix The Nene Affair (which, bee tee dubya, would make an excellent R. Kelly album title), but Rose is back, which is better than Rose’s front.

It’s a short week this week, so we’re taking a break and will return for week 11, wherein Jeremy Lim will have played as many minutes in his career as Greg Oden has, the NBA will have created a DH-like position in which one player only plays defense on one end of the court, while the other just cherrypicks for easy layups, making Jared Jeffries and Amar’e Stoudemire giddy as hell and Jarrett Jack switches into the home jerseys of Portland and Toronto mid-game without anyone noticing.

Here’s the spreadsheet. Have a great weekend!

Week 8 bangs and shimmies its way to a close with seven of last week’s 10 top teams staying right where we left them. Week 7 saw the bottom feeders remaining sedentary. This week it’s the top feeders. Also, I’m pretty sure “top feeders” is not a term for anything. I think it’s just something I made up to entertain myself because Lord knows, “The Office” is no longer entertaining me. And while we’re speaking about entertaining things, I like looking at a team’s rankings from one stat category to the next and get an overall feel for what kind of team they are fielding. Usually if a team ranks high on, say, 3ptm, FT% and STL, that team is probably not going to fare as well in the RBD, BLK, FG% category. Simple, right? Looking at a few of the RCL’s teams, the occasional squad sticks out as being quirky, clearly led by a couple players with unique skillsets that buck the system, go against the grain, and are constantly damning the Man.

Boom Boom Pau ranks in the top 4 in both RBD and STL, which are not usually two categories that pair together well. His solid rankings in those two categories are brought out even more by the fact that he ranks outside the top 21 in everything else.

chris kaman his pants ranks in the league’s top 10 in both PTS and RBD, so one would assume he’s got a platoon of elite big men. He ranks 52nd  in FG%, usually a gimme among PF/C-led teams.

Smokey McPots ranks in the top 14 in both FT% and 3PTM, suggesting his team is the opposite of ckhp. Smokey’s team is likely filled with trigger-happy guards and yet he ranks in the bottom 13 in AST, a common stat often tied to little guys with solid shots.

Coca sCola might be my favorite outlier. His team also ranks in the top 9 in both FT% and 3PTM and in the bottom 9 in RBD. None of this is surprising until you realize he’s also top 12 in blocks. What kind of team shoots accurately, blocks a ton, but can’t grab a rebound if it fell on the floor in front of him?

Take a look at your own team. Some of you have very obvious weakness/strength correlations, some of you don’t. Considering these things might help you form some trade ideas or strategies going forward. Or not. Here’s the spreadsheet.