There’s a laundry list of reasons why I have done so poorly with fantasy basketball leagues. 1st, I just never seem to care quite as much about fantasy basketball as football. Football has established itself as “the” fantasy sport, and everything else (even though fantasy sports originated with baseball) is pretty much small potatoes compared to it. When people ask me how I like fantasy basketball compared to football, my usual response is something to the effect of, “It’s ok. It’s just different.” So, take that for what it’s worth, but it leads to my next reason of why my past fantasy basketball teams have sucked so hard…2nd, I have never actually been present for a fantasy basketball draft (at least not that I can remember). The amount of times I wound up with a starting frontcourt of Adonal Foyle and Lamar Odom those 1st few years was absurd. Missing your league’s draft is a cardinal sin of any semi-serious fantasy player. At the bare minimum, you at least should pre-rank the players you want to draft if you know you’re going to miss it, but I rarely did this either. So distracted was I with my fantasy football prospects (and life in general) that fantasy basketball drafts would usually come and go without my knowledge at all. 3rd, I was very often the victim of the strange and bizarre. I’ve said it a million times before, but injuries and luck are part of the deal with fantasy sports…but it was tough to account for some of the things that would happen to my teams. One year, I made a trade with someone where the centerpieces were Yao Ming and Amare Stoudemire. The deal got accepted, and Yao had one of his many season ending injuries while the trade was still pending. I thought this was fair game, but the deal got vetoed by the league commissioner, and I was stuck with Yao’s decaying body. I was furious, but there wasn’t exactly much I could do. In a last gasp effort, I traded away my next best player, Rashard Lewis, for 3 or 4 lesser players. I just needed bodies, and I was hoping that I could catch lightning in a bottle with at least 1 of them. The league commissioner, my friend Josh, thought I was up to some kind of shenanigans though where I was trying to throw my season and give an unfair advantage to my trade partner, Eyun. He essentially David Stern-ed my team (locking me from making moves and assuming control of my roster).
I’m hoping that this year turns out a little bit different. Through 3 weeks, Krissy and I (she’s my co-commissioner) are 13-11, which is good enough for 7th place in a 14 team league. We weren’t logged in to our draft, but we at least had the good sense to do a draft pre-ranking this time. I thought I was going to have to live through another trade veto when my offer of D-Rose for LeBron got accepted, but it eventually got pushed through. Our roster is at least solid. If it wasn’t for 2 long term injuries to Manu and Z-Bo, it might be downright scary. One thing’s for sure though: at least I will be paying attention this time.
The key to our fantasy basketball season...
My last post was my Redskins wrap-up for the 2011-2012 season, but I couldn’t help but add 1 more little tidbit of information after reading an article in the Washington Post. Strangely enough, the Redskins hold a 7-2 regular season against teams that made it to the NFC championship game during a particular season dating back 4 seasons. It was an idea I actually had (but can’t take credit for since I didn’t write it) back when the Giants beat the Falcons during Wild Card weekend. If the red hot Giants could upset the Packers, it would be yet another year where the Skins beat one of the championship game participants during the regular season. In 2008, Washington beat the Cardinals once and the Eagles twice to go 3-0. In 2009, the Skins lost by a field goal in a game that they absolutely should have won to the eventual Super Bowl champion Saints. In 2010, the Redskins beat both the Packers and the Bears. This year, they had their 2 most convincing wins of the season against the Giants (although they got manhandled by the 49ers in a game that wasn’t as close as the score indicates).
It should be noted that in none of these 4 seasons did the Redskins have a winning record. The article correctly points out that this gives Redskin homers something to point at to feed their delusions that the Skins are a relevant franchise. It’s also one more thing that could serve to drive the more grounded Redskins fans mad. How can they be that bad, and yet still give good teams competitive games? Well, maybe that is the whole point (if there is 1 at all). They NFL thrives on competitive balance, and any 1 team can beat another on any given week. Even in the event that a seemingly dominant team pops up in this day and age (the Patriots in 2007-2008 and the Packers this year), there’s a good chance they will get beaten at some point as well. Also, those teams that the Redskins beat those years were either teams with records barely above 0.500 who got hot at the right time of year (the Cardinals in 2008 and the Packers last season), were not the team they were by year’s end that they were at the time the Skins played them (the Bears last season), were talented but wildly inconsistent (the Eagles in 2008 or the Giants this season), or some combination of the 3. So, when Brian Orakpo tries to convince us through Twitter that the Skins are actually not that far away from greatness, and they just need to bring the same intensity every week that the team brought to those 2 Giants games, try to look the other way.
So, that means the Skins are really at least the 2nd best team in the NFC, right?
Speaking of “The Curse of Le Boulez” and “historically bad seasons” earlier on in this post, the Wizards might be well on their way this year. The only thing that might save them is the fact that this lockout-shortened season will come with an asterisk in the history books. It’s not just that they are 1-12 so far, it’s that they look like the most bumbling franchise in the NBA (maybe in all of sports). I have always been somewhat emotionally detached from the Washington franchise. I am and always will be (rightly or wrongly) more of a fan of the college game, and the Wizards/Bullets have been as consistently mediocre as any team in the league since I was a kid. Couple those points with the fact that they traded away 1 of the only Washington players worth watching (Chris Webber) in the last 20 years and made dumb personnel move after dumb personnel move ever since, and they aren’t exactly doing a lot to gain my undying support. Still, I admit that I went to a handful of Wizards games during the Gilbert Arenas era, and if there is a team that I would call my NBA home team, the Wiz would be it. 1-12 is 1-12 though. In this 66 game season, that extrapolates to a record of 5-61 for the season should they keep this pace up, and it would mean only 6 or 7 wins if it were a full 82 game season (the record for futility in an 82 game season is 8 or 9 wins I believe). Even worse than the record is the cast of characters that makes up Washington’s roster. John Wall appears to have regressed, and there are fair questions about whether he is really a basketball player, or just a great athlete who happens to play basketball (his turnovers are up, and his shooting is down). I’m willing to give him a pass right now just because he has literally no help. Actually, “no help” doesn’t begin to describe it. Just from the standpoint of basketball as a sport being played for fun, the other guys logging major minutes for the Wizards this year look like the least fun players to play with ever. Rashard Lewis, unfairly or not, has become the posterboy for the overbloated contracts in today’s NBA that were partly the blame for the lockout. While his skills have declined, and he’s not worth a third of the money he’s making, he probably is at least a serviceable player…but he carries around the stigma of the bad apple that spoiled the bunch, and given that he’s getting old and playing for a team going nowhere it often looks like he is only interested in cashing his paycheck and getting the hell back on the team bus. Worse than that are these 3 characters: Andray Blatche, Nick Young, and JaVale McGee. Where does 1 start with this trio…“7 Day Dray” is the epitome of the lazy selfish athlete. Young is a glorified chucker. McGee appears to have no basketball IQ (or overall IQ for that matter) whatsoever. Add to that 2nd year guard Jordan Crawford, who is at least young and relatively inexpensive, but who is almost as big of a black hole on the offensive end as Blatche or Young. All are enormously talented…none will be in the league in 5 years. None of them “get it.”
Yesterday’s game was a microcosm of this. McGee, who earlier in the year started an online campaign lobbying fans for All-Star votes (really, All-Star votes?), threw a pass to himself off the backboard for a fastbreak dunk in the 3rd quarter, and was subsequently benched. The post-game comments of Blatche, Young, and McGee were quite revealing. Young actually had the gall to give McGee props. Why that surprised me, I am not sure, but it did! Blatche, team captain as he is (cough, gag), said he didn’t really care for McGee’s play, but basically gave a “that’s just Javale being Javale” type of response. McGee’s response was that of a high school prankster who has been sent to the principal’s office one time too many for it to have any effect on him. “Apparently, if you get a fast break and throw it off the backboard in the 3rd quarter, and you’re 1-11, you’re not supposed to do stuff like that,” McGee uttered after the game. He could have saved his breath. If he had rolled his eyes, and said, “Whatever,” to the reporter’s question, that would have sufficed. Wall, who had his best all-around game of the season in defeat (38 points and 8 assists), sounded like a guy who would rather be somewhere, anywhere, else. “A dunk is a dunk. I would rather seen him do a regular dunk. We’re down. We’re 1-11. 1-12 now. So there’s no point in doing any kind of excitement…” No wonder Wall always looks like he just got the news that his dog died; he goes to bed knowing who he has to come to work with the next day! What’s truly sad is that the Wizards brass had a chance to unload all of these guys this offseason. I don’t know the ins and outs of the new NBA “amnesty clause,” and I’ve read that it wouldn’t have been entirely beneficial to use on Rashard Lewis, but they still could have used it and got out from under his enormous contract. Young and 7 Day Dray could have been given their walking papers. McGee’s trade value (whatever you could in fact get for him) was certainly higher before the season started than it is now. At 1-12, you couldn’t be any worse starting all the young guys on the roster than you are right now. And yet, they chose to bring them all back. Why, we may never really know. Your 2011-2012 Washington Wizards, everybody…where amazing truly happens
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