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I’ll be honest, my original plan was to have this piece written and published at the end of last season, back when the failed chase for the top spot in the RazzJam was still fresh in my mind. But the NBA season is long and the Playoffs are so good, so when I fell just short of a championship, it seemed just fine to me to put this on the shelf for a bit. So, I sat on this with it being 95% completed and rested instead. Then Middleton went down and the Bucks got beat. The sun came out, the Celtics ran out of gas, and another Golden State summer onto my shores like a warm wave, even though I’ve traded in the Bay Area for Bay View. 

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There is a reason the last week of the NBA schedule is usually avoided by many fantasy leagues, as it has been called the “Silly” season. Many teams are all out of objectives to chase and are flat out tanking or have already clinched their playoff spots and are resting their stars and even rotational players. This results in many funky boxscores that are not to be expected at any other point of the season. Corey Brewer anyone?

But don’t be afraid, I am here for you to squeeze fantasy value even in this trying part of the fantasy schedule. If your H2H league is still running though, may I suggest an alteration for next year in order to finish it one week earlier, but for you fine folks that play Roto this is the most important week of the year as you chase the categories that can give you that one extra point to win it all. As a result, I don’t see a reason to include a Sell column at this time, as anyone can be safely dropped at this point of the season with so few games left.

Regarding last week’s suggestions, Kent Bazemore and R.J. Hampton continued their solid finish to the season, while Frank Jackson unfortunately got injured. Special mention to Mo Bamba who also got injured but this finish to the season suggests that he will be a major draft target for next year and can be a true breakout star if he can get the starting spot from Wendel Carter Jr.

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As NBA fans and fantasy basketball players we all lust for the power of NBA general managers. Many of us wrongly assume we could do a better job heading our favorite team’s basketball operations—it isn’t hard to get those ideas if you happen to be a Knicks, Magic, Timberwolves, Suns, or Kings fan. But what we long for as much as the power, is the seriousness of the endeavor. NBA GM’s get to make decisions that carry weight. A draft pick is quite simply a choice—a highly public, decade-defining choice in some cases, but a choice all the same. We make choices every day—the blue or the red tie, Toyota Camry or Nissan Altima, Fleabag or The Good Place, two drinks or twelve, poetry or literally anything else that might actually pay the bills. We make applicable sports decisions as well. We choose between Kyrie Irving or Damian Lillard in our fantasy draft, we add Kendrick Nunn or Davis Bertans off the wire, we kill Russell Westbrook in the group chat, we build property on Julius Randle, Dion Waiters, or Lonzo Ball Island. We tweet, we engage, and we argue. We win our league or we don’t. In time, we are either vindicated or pilloried. At best, we have a lighthearted thing to lord over people we care about, at worst, we have to dye our hair, wear ugly ill-fitting clothes, or in a more recent trend, consume enough waffles to avoid sleeping in a Waffle House. But largely, no one notices or cares, as our sports opinions are indiscernible dots in a sea of data points.

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Points guards are the Mother Teresas of the fantasy basketball world, as they like to give. Shooting guards are….the cavemen. See ball, shoot ball, take ball, then shoot ball. Rinse and repeat. These are obviously generalizations, but shooters shoot, and that’s what this post is all about. I kid, kind of. The elite at this position are across-the-board contributers, while the rest are indeed cavemen.

To see my per-game value projections for each player, click HERE. In the “Pos” box (which stands for position, not the other thing you were thinking), type in “sg” and the table will sort by just shooting guards.

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Average doesn’t really cut it in the NBA. It never really did, and it especially doesn’t in today’s league. But the perfectly mediocre Detroit Pistons were believers, squeaked into the playoffs with a perfectly mediocre 41-41 record, then got absolutely trounced by the Milwaukee Bucks in the opening round, which began the next phase of their… plan. Whatever that plan is. Rebuild? Tank? From the looks of it, they plan to be content with their current state of just being meh.

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Let’s recap the four-year Stan Van Gundy era in Detroit. One season above .500 (44-38). Three seasons with win totals of 39, 37, and 32 games. Acquired Blake Griffin and his five-year, $171 million contract for essentially a first-round draft pick and Tobias Harris, who put up 19.3 points, 6 rebounds, 3.1 assists, 1.2 steals, 0.6 blocks, and 2.2 threeecolas last season. Ricky Lake Griffin contributed 19.8 points, 6.6 rebounds, 6.2 assists, 0.4 steals, 0.4 blocks, and 1.9 threeecolas. In the 2017 NBA Draft, SVG selected Luke Kennard ahead of Donovan Mitchell. Shaking my head vociferously. His previous draft picks were Henry Ellenson, Michael Gbinije, Stanley Johnson, Darrun Hilliard, and Spencer Dinwiddie, who has turned out to be the best of the group but, of course, was traded for Cameron Bairstow back in 2016. Re-reading what I just wrote makes me think of a part from my favorite movie. There’s hope, though, as the Wicked Witch of the East….urrr….I mean SVG is dead. Not literally of course.

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Welcome back Razzball Nation. What a night the draft was. A true testament to Adam Silver and the NBA for putting on a fantastic spectacle which had more twists and turns than a South American mountain road. One clear message that came from current and former players was that work is only the beginning. For this article, I have also taken a twist and turn, as I bring an email dialogue between myself and Steve Connell about the draft. Steve works hard researching high school and college basketball and provides inspiration for many of the Dynasty Deep Dive articles. Two minds are better than one, right?

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Another day in my recovery from back surgery and another post, this time bringing you more ideal landing spots for another ten prospects destined for the 2018 NBA draft.

The final ten ideal landing spots coming tomorrow before we get into the nitty-gritty of my predraft fantasy rookie rankings.

Let’s quit the jibber-jabber and get straight into the action.

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