My Fantasy

I played fantasy basketball for the first time this past year, and let me tell you, it’s exhausting. And fun.

I have some thoughts on what a fantasy coach should do to ensure that his/her team doesn’t fare as poorly as mine did.

So here are ten tips to send you on your way, fantastically, come October ’07:

1. The draft matters. Mirroring a game with real players, fantasy coaches have little control over in-the-flesh players who are actually coached. And this is probably the way the world should be. So use last year’s stats, consult some depth charts, and pick decently. And stay aware that, with little luck to the draw, chance happens throughout 82 games—during actual, non-fantasy play—and there’s not much anyone can do when Dwayne Wade loses his shoulder or Shaun Livingston is flagrantly fouled by the floor. Who can guess who will have a great year after being out with knee surgery and who will be sat out for hilariously ill-fated tanking purposes.

2. Stupid people like me give you a leg up. Although you may only have to be as smart as a basketball player to execute a fantasy draft properly ("I can't remember the story--he was going through slavery or something--but every time somebody asks me what my favorite book is, I say Black Boy." –Ron Artest), some of us aren’t even that smart. Again, the draft is very important. I drafted some people rather early on that you should never draft at all, even in leagues such as mine, with twelve teams with sixteen spots apiece. Of course I got the twelfth pick, and used it to grab Chris Bosh and Ben Wallace to start. Okay. Then, somewhere in the next four or so, I grabbed Larry Hughes and Adam Morrison. Larry Hughes shot exactly 40 percent, mostly playing the role of Pissboy alongside King James. Adam Morrison was my sixth pick, I think, a slot during which other coaches were grabbing the likes of Luol Deng and Rasheed Wallace.

3. It bears repeating to not draft Adam Morrison. In my fantasy, he fucked me. He shot 37% on the season, a little lower than the Bobcats’ winning percentage and a little higher than my real-world free throw ability. He got no stats in other categories to offset this big-time missing behavior. Plus, he’s so ugly it’s cliché to say he looks like a child molester. If he weren’t a basketball player he’d be at least 13 MGD’s away from do-able. Between him and Next-Scottie-Pippen Larry Hughes, I should have named my team “Blind.”

4. Instead, I named it “Sweet Shop Window.” Don’t do as I do. Instead, pick an apt and humorous team name, or at least one that makes sense. I’m not quite sure why I chose the one I did. It certainly didn’t anticipate my team’s demise, not the way Luke’s self-acquitting “I Masturbate” fit its tenth place bill. Sweet, Shop, and Window are words that conceivably could fit in the same sentence, but just don’t make sense consecutively, like Pussycat Dolls or this girl from my college named Even Pay.

And it wasn’t just me. Our league, the cliché Yahoo! Sports Champagne Room (nope, no sex was had here, har har har) contained other nonsense teams. My girlfriend, who finished fourth, was Pamplemousses, which is French for grapefruits. Makes you think. Another French one was Les Fous Roux, because apparently everyone who knows French needs to throw sissy mot power at you, even in sports. “Piccolo.Velez…Scout” and “Hard Minos” and other names are similar to SSW, just nonsense.

(PVS had been “Don’t Sweat it, Just get it,” which was certainly better, though it was too oddly evocative of “Say it, Don’t Spray It.” Still, I’d watch the Chicago Don’t Sweat It, Just Get It.)

5. The season also matters. Fantasy basketball isn’t chess, but it’s not roulette either. How you deal with injuries is important, especially in a season like last year’s. Furthermore, in some leagues, people make more than merely terrible trade offers, and so that’s another potential route for improvement. With sufficient attention to changing rotations and developed proficiency in balancing nine statistical categories, your team can do much with a twelfth-out-of-twelve draft pick.

6. I almost made up for a shitty draft by being the best person in our league at mid-season pick-ups. These included, among others, Andris Biedrins, Brandon Haywood, Bostjan Nachbar and Jason Richardson. I also advised my girlfriend to pick up Lamar Odom before anyone else realized he was suddenly returning from a shoulder injury, a sacrifice on my part which may have cost SSW the playoffs.

7. Try to look like Manu Ginobli. I do. This will, apparently, get you further in the consolation brackets of the playoffs.

8. Don’t draft players from the team that you root for in the real world. I had Kirk Hinrich and Ben Wallace, and this pissed me off when I went head to head with teams with Deng and Nocioini, who would steal my stats while the Bulls won.

9. Don’t draft players from the same team. One team, bringit, drafted about five from Detroit and five from San Antonio. Although both great real-world teams, such overloading hurts your ability to fill starting spots consistently in a fantasy league, and bringit got 11^th out of 12, which was the real last place since 12^th-place PVS, after changing his team name, quit playing about three weeks into the season.

10. Don’t be outspoken about other people’s shitty draft picks. You may end up in last place, PVS. And Don’t let PVS into your league, he’ll punk out, not sweating it nor getting it.

If it weren’t for fantasy basketball, I don’t know if I’d even watch the regular season of its real-world counterpart, where everything happens in the playoffs. I think Avery Johnson may want to coach in the Champagne Room next year, because in our league the first place team gets a bye in the first round. In our stick-to-the-stats set-up, most of Golden State didn’t even make it to the playoffs.

The point here is that there’s clearly (not) more skill to fantasy basketball than to actual basketball, and not being athletic but good at judging other people who are has its own charm.

If you follow all the above ten tips I’ll put money on your fantasy team in my High Stakes Ultra-Meta Fantasy Fantasy Basketball League.