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And we’re back baby!  The All-Star break in Nawleans has come and gone, with a disappointing dunk contest, no bounce passes in the skills contest (yeah, what was up with that Prez?!) and All-Star jerseys that made the finale look like an adult rec league game on a Thursday night.  “Help, I think Stanley has a hernia!”  I was constantly thinking to myself about the Major League quote, but the opposite.  Brian Scalabrine or Matt Bonner coming into their first practice with sleeves and a hat on, and their coaches were like, “We don’t wear caps and sleeves at this level son!”  Sure made that coach look stupid on Sunday night!  And if you’re a Cleveland fan, you’ve got to be thinking, “Crikey wtf is going on!?” after seeing Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters go off in their respective ASB games over the weekend.  Then to see neither of them do anything against the 76ers last night!  To be fair, the Cavs let their scrubs do all their damage in a blowout.  So I guess if Cavs are thinking crikey, Philly fans are thinking, “if we don’t win 20 games this year, I’m giving up cheesesteaks!”  Drastic?  Probably.  Be liking asking me to give up that delicious BBQ.  Now I’m all sorts of hungry… How did this get into food?  Let’s just dive right in to last night’s return to action, like how you’d dive into an all-you-can-eat Southern food buffet with mac & cheese, hush puppies, chopped BBQ, whole BBQ, biscuits & gravy, and then, and then…:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

A shortened week 16 has concluded in our Razzball Elite league, and with a huge 8-1 win, Kap’s Team has taken over first place.  He sure Nashed them Potatoes!  For yours truly, a brutal loss that led to some ranting on the Yahoo smack board.  My gears were grinded!  My Potato was a stupid baked one and not garlic Nashed!  4 weeks remain in the regular season as teams jostle for the 6 playoff spots, including Slim sliding into 6th with a huge week.  Go get em Slim!  Keep the championship in the Razzball family!  Reactions from Slim and I below as we gear up for the week:

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The All-Star Break is here!  With skills competish, Mike & Mike in the evening, and everyone’s favorite – the Slam Dunk Contest.  It’s exactly what everyone needs during the grind of the regular season, even for us fans who are only nursing such injuries like Larry Drew-ophobia, general malaise, and fantasy bewilderment.  I have all of those symptoms!  Plus we all get four straight nights of not worrying about our fantasy rosters, nights off to spend with ladies (Valnetine’s Day just happens to be during the All-Star Break, who planned this?  Does Jared own the NBA?!), nights off to go out drinking without constantly checking box scores on the iPhone, and nights off to spend working on some Fantasy Baseball rankings…  Oh, and nights off to dig out our cars, sheesh this weather!  So with all that in mind enjoy the All-Star Break, get on twitter and have fun faux-titling the Dunk Contest throwdowns, and I’ll be back on Wednesday next week as we approach the fantasy playoffs.  Here’s what I saw last night in the few NBA games and a few injury updates:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

When Glen Davis went to the pre-season Magic weigh-in, the trainer was like, “355 Big Baby, really?”  “These hips don’t lie!”  And in a very full slate of games last night, we had two pretty premiere big men have their hips not lie and go out on them.    “Help I’ve fallen and can’t get up!”  The NBA to start issuing players life alerts to wear around their necks.  DeMarcus Cousins was the first to succumb to the AARP ailment.  Suffered a left hip flexor, but coach Mike Malone said it probably wasn’t serious.  Destiny is like, “wait a ‘left’ hip?  I thought, like, for people we had only one hip!”  No child left behind fails us yet again.  Good thing it’s the All-Star break for Boogie!  An All-Star Boogie!  Dude, that should totally be an event.  Breakdance Horse!  Hah.  Then Derrick Favors went out and re-aggravated his right hip that had caused him to miss games here and there over the past month.  This one is a lot less bueno.  But hey, DeMarcus and Derrick have a pair of healthy hips!  If only they were siamese twins – they’d get, like, 35 rebounds a game.  Favors will likely get an MRI and be brought along very slowly since this is a re-aggravation.  Enes Kanter to the rescue!  Might get some solid run and deserves love in a lot of leagues.  And don’t sleep on Rudy Gobert in deep leagues if you need some blockage.  Speaking of blockage, look at some of the traffic photos of NC from yesterday.  No one learned from Atlanta!  And the best basketball game on the slate, UNC-Duke, cancelled.  Travesty.  Let’s get this global warming going again!  Here’s what else I saw last night in fantasy hoops:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

So, the Feds are after you.  Your Ponzi scheme and billions of dollars are up for seizure.  Well, that, or your $20 league dues and your friends sending you obnoxious texts about how you’re not going to the playoffs.  So if you’re in H2H and in this shortened week, what is a Madoff to do?  How about putting in a quick grab of Chris Kaman, who has erected himself into surging fantasy relevance.  Too far JB!  A raging 25/14/4/1/3 line last night, taking a whopping team-high 24 shots.  That’s now three straight games of at least 17 Pts, 8 Rebs, 3 Asts and 2 Blks.  That’s the floor!  While tonight’s slate is pretty jam-packed, Thursday is a light one.  With the Lakers one of the few teams in action, Kaman could really make the difference this week for ya in Pts and Blks.  While he does have a shelf life whence Pau Gasol returns, if Gasol is indeed traded I think Kaman has played well enough to stick.  Of course you never know with Doh-toni, but Robert Sacre isn’t exactly a guy to be developed for a long-term future and they don’t have any other true 5s.  So don’t be afraid to stash some of your free cash in the Kaman islands.  While he is owned in 43% of Yahoo leagues already (a bit shocking to me it had hopped up that fast), there’s plenty of IRS-free banks left to stash him up.  Here’s what else I saw last night across fantasy hoops:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Week 15 has concluded in our Razzball Elite league, and with another winning week, The Nature Boy has retaken sole possession of first place.  Unfortunately for teams on the outside looking in (and by outside, I’m further outside than Hawaii is from the Continental US) the rich got richer and poor got poorer.  Despite a tough win for my squad against a playoff team, only one other team in the bottom half of the league mustered more than 3 points.  This league has no middle class!  I blame Heathcare.Mozgov.  A lot of teams were able to weigh in this week as we are only 5 weeks out from whittling 20 to the playoff 6:

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“Deer in the headlights”.  Makes sense for this team!  And it starts with the pack leader Mr. Larry Drew, who we’ve slammed on ad nauseam here on Razzball hoops.  But to rub salt on the wound, or in Milwaukee’s case I guess it would be to leave out a salt lick, both fantasy relevant Bucks bigs are hurt.  Larry Sanders – who was first reported to just having blurry vision after being poked in the eye – actually has a fractured orbital bone.  Could this have actually happened later that night at a Milwaukee nightclub receiving a right hook from a bouncer?  Maybe!  I’m just excited to see Sanders in rec specs.  All he’ll need to do now is grow a goatee and dye it white and he really will be Colonel Sanders!  Then to top it off, John Henson rolled his ankle last night landing on Zaza Pachulia‘s foot.  Zaza was like, “Henson, is this your ankle?  It struck my foot!”  No updates on the severity, but we saw how long they waited to bring him back from that wrist injury so I’m a little sceered.  For Sanders, I’d try and wait until he sees the specialist today to tell him how jacked up his eye socket is.  It’s been suggested it could be 1-6 weeks, so if indeed closer to the full 6 weeks and you’re barely hangin’ by a thread I think you have to cut him loose.   Tough to take a 0 the last weeks before the playoffs. Henson is another wait and see, but I doubt it will be nearly that long.  But in both cases, if you’re in H2H and really needing a win this week, I couldn’t fault losing either in a All-Star Weekend shortened matchup.  An extra start means even that much more in a week like this one.  Sure someone will probably scoop up your Bucks roadkill to cook into their Chinese Food, but hey, at least it’s not in your dinner.  Zaza is worth a look himself as a streamer in the interim.  Here’s what else I saw last night in fantasy hoops:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

So imagine you’re heading into fantasy hoops last night, wondering what the headline would be.  You knock on the mansion’s door and Tim Curry is standing there all snippity-proper.  You say, “Hey, Timmy, someone is gonna kill it tonight!”  Could it be, Colonel Larry Sanders Mustard?  Nope!  His vision is too blurred to be the culprit.  And no, it’s not because he topped off his third bottle of Cristal just to have another blunt weapon, it’s because he got poked in the eye!  Could it be Reverend Jeff Green?  No way, he had his big night a few games ago, we all know it’ll be at least another two weeks until another good one!  So it’s surprise suspect #3, Professor Mason Plumlee, who went all Krzyzewki on the Pelicans leading the Nets in Pts Rebs Stls and Blks for a 22/13/0/3/2 line.  Shot 8-10, 6-9 from the stripe, and made Anthony Davis lose a wee bit of hair on his Brow.  “I’m supposed to be the high-flying big man in this game, Mason!”  The crowd wasn’t chanting MVP for ya in this one!  Awww, that’s mean.  After playing under 12 minutes the previous two, Plumlee got 28+ in the past two games and productive in both.  Keep Kevin Garnett at 13 minutes a game, Kidd!  I think a good way to approach Plumlee right now is like James Johnson.  Puts up solid stats all around (although a little less all-around than JJ) when he gets the minutes.  I think he’s gotten himself to fringe 12-team worthy depending on your roster comp.  Definitely needs to get scooped up in deeper.  I think enough minutes will be there for him to fill in some Pts/Rebs/Blks.  Here’s what else I saw over the weekend in fantasy hoops:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

One team.  Two broken noses.  Four bloody nostrils.  One protective face-mask company that has lost a client.

In case you missed it, in the battle of the oldest teams ever in NBA history (yeah, no stat to back that up, but pretty sure George Gervin played a few minutes in the third…  [Ok, ok, the Spurs benched all their old guys, whatever!]), both Nando De Colo and Matt Bonner broke their noses and got all bloody.  Bonner with his mask still on!  On both (De Colo, Bonner) you got some really good in your face camerawork.  I feel like both of those could become UFC moves.  The “Russian wrister”!  The “Livingston shoulder slam”!  De Colo gets mad props for coming back in the game in the second half.  Bonner gets mad props too for trying to come back in, but Pop wouldn’t have it.  Pop hates props!  Plus Bonner’s quote, “By tomorrow, I’ll either have a new mask or a new face” is friggin’ awesome.  Kinda have a boner for Bonner.  While De Colo is not a standard league option, with Tony Parker an elf on the shelf with a bad back, De Colo got 27 minutes 11/3/2/2/1.  Near rainbow!  It’s actually a pretty light slate of games looking ahead on Saturday, so De Colo could be a nice streamer for you in deeper leagues if Parker stays on that shelf.  But as Slim pointed out to me earlier in the week, they’re against Charlotte – a top-5 PPG NBA D, but his defense and boarding should be fine if you need a lil-a-dat from a PG over the weekend. Here’s what else I saw last night in fantasy hoops:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

As we mentioned a few months ago, the Philadelphia 76ers D is bad.  Like D League bad.  They could use some D league!  At one point, they were close to 8 points a game worse than the the 29th worst team defense.  But with the Lakers having all sorts of problems, they’ve entered the bottom feeders with Philly giving up a league worst 109.9 a game, LA now 29th at 106.2, then third is at 103.8.  Suffice to say – soft D.  Kinda like in the word djent.  Any metal fans out there?  Or in Django Unchained.  The big benefactor last night was another huge game from Jeff Green, who shot 11-18 (5-7 3PTM 9-12 FT) for 36/8/2/0/2.  Should’ve been doing this all year!  Green had that even bigger 39-point outburst two weeks ago against the Wizards, so that’s two biguns sandwiched with cold cuts of bleh.  Kinda like a $5 footlong when you choose meatball but have to eat it later… Stevens said a couple of days ago that they need to get Green the ball in the post and in transition more.  I guess that equals making 5 of your 7 threes!  Hah.  While I do think Green will be better, and the return and minutes exansion of Rajon Rondo to help create better oppotunies will help, if you can get some really solid top-60ish value in a sell-high, run and do it.  You may be saying, “top-60, this JB is reaching too high!”  Heading into the year, ranked 63 in Yahoo and ESPN at 58!  And I had him at… Yeah I don’t wanna talk about it.  So getting draft day value at 100% would be very nice.  Much lower than that and I’m still holding. Here’s what else I saw on a busy night of NBA action:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

The Lakers and dear ol’ coach Doh-toni are just an absolute mess right now.  And just to make things even more interesting, there are injuries, mystery, intrigue, vets returning, and a scheme to divert water reservoir rights.  With Pau Gasol out for two weeks with a bum groin and a good chance out of L.A. before the trade deadline, this whole team is turning into the end of Chinatown.  “Forget it, Jake.  It’s Chinatown!”  And you really can forget pretty much everyone on this team right now, as three vets returned, two guys got hurt, and it’s turning into a bigger Hollywood disaster than The Adventures of Pluto Nash.  I bet Norbit could play PF for the purple and gold!  Since going through everything that happened for the crumbling Lakers would be an 800-word paragraph, let’s hop out of the open and machine gun through em, plus what else happened last night in the world of fantasy hoops:

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Week 14 has wrapped up in our Razzball Elite league, and we’ve finally got a shake-up atop the standings.  Feeling a lot less nature-y this past week with a 4-5 loss to Scurry to the Left, The Nature Boy is now tied for first with Kap’s Team.  But even more exciting was my first huge win!  No hangover from the beard ride Slim gave me last week… We shouldn’t have made “didgeri-don’t” the safe word!  Only six weeks of the regular season remain, so it’s crunch time for the teams out of the top 6.  Read more below from owners that chimed in on their squads as we recap week 14:

Please, blog, may I have some more?