Fantasy Basketball

Fantasy basketball season is upon us!  It’s time for obsessive-compulsive managers (like me) to start planning their lineups and brushing up on their NBA knowledge.  This year I actually started a league among my friends after spending the past three seasons playing at our office league.  Aside from eating up most of my free time, playing fantasy basketball at least gives me some material to write about on this blog after a month-and-a-half of neglect.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the nuances of Fantasy sports,  it’s a game wherein you pick real-life players from a particular sport and league, the NBA in our case, and form a team where the actual statistics garnered by your players earn your team points.  At the end of the season, the team with the  most points wins.  Sounds simple, but as they say with most games, easy to learn, but difficult to master.  And in this case, highly addictive.

Our league conducted its draft last Sunday, with a total of 13 managers, mostly rookies.  You might think this would reduce the overall competitiveness of the league, and you’d be right as there were undoubtably a couple of head-scratching picks during the draft.  However, you can’t really tell this early in the preseason if players will eventually live up to their hype so some of the rookie managers could pull off some surprises .  Add to that the participation of five grizzled veteran managers, including our office league champion last year and the previous year, and we’ve got good mix of experience and eagerness.

It’s just the first week of our league and already there’s been a slew of moves among the managers.  The waiver wire has been raided for whatever speculative talent is left, and trade offers are already being furiously passed around, though none have been completed as of this entry.  In the coming days and weeks, I’ll try to share the (mis)adventures of my team plus any notable action within the league.  I’ll probably start off with an overdue analysis of our entire draft lineup, hopefully in the next couple of days.  Until then, it’s back to a lot of fantasy reading and scheming.