CELTICS GREEN BLOG by and for boston celtics fans: EJA's Fantasy Philosophy

by eja117 1:27 PM

This is eja117 and this is my new weekly column about fantasy basketball. You may want to know my qualifications. I came in 2nd out of 14 in 2005, won our league in 2006, won again in 2007, and have currently pulled myself from about 10th out of 12 to 3rd this year and am 1.5 games out and just last week knocked off #1 (KGinGreen) 8-2. Also people don’t know this, but the year before I joined the Celtics Green league I came in 2nd in another league that played by different rules.

The most important thing you need to know about playing fantasy sports (in particular basketball and in particular in my league) is that this is the most important rule of all…..you must be active. If you don’t set your rosters and if you don’t make at least one move a month then you are the 6th most evil thing ever right behind Commies, Hippies, Nazis, Pacifists, and people that use the metric system, in that order. Yeah I know. That list is a kilometer long and weighs a metric ton, but hold on cause I’m gonna give you liters of knowledge.

In terms of winning a fantasy league we should (apologies to Julie Andrews) start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. When you start with the alphabet you start a,bc. When you start with a fantasy team you start 1,2,3. Rounds that is. In the draft. All rounds. There are multiple strategies out there. I’ll go over some of the most common. However I wrote a lot so today I will only go over the first two.

Strategy 1 Prerank your players and let the chips fall where they may

Nooooooo. BIG mistake. I did this my first year in 2005 with Celts Green guys and it yielded interesting results. I was picking last and my first two picks were Steve Nash and Jason Kidd. This was fine. Guys who score points, threes, assists up the yinyang, ok percentages and they can both rebound. So what was the problem?
The problem was that I wasn’t there to stop the computer from doing stupid things. Rounds 9-14 went like this Toine, Eric Dampier, Shaun Livingston, Jasikevicus, Kenny Thomas, Bruce Bowen. So do you see the problem? The computer can’t do everything for you and it’s hard to do perfect predraft ranking and take rookies into account.

Strategy 2 Go big. Really big.

I can vouch for this strategy. It has its benefits. I was frustrated at coming in 2nd the year before and vowed I wouldn’t have the same problems again. I wanted blocks, fg%, rebs, to be competitive in points, and to not have the same TO problems that going so pg heavy had caused me before. There is one drawback. Don’t overdo it. That year I was picking 2nd, which helped. I picked in order KG, Jermaine O’Neal, Amare (who was coming back from a major hairline fracture) Ben Wallace, and Ilgauskas. It ticked people off and I was as happy as a clam, but now I needed guards and a lot of the good ones were gone. I freaked out. I went for Brandon Roy (which was fine, but then he got hurt) Wally, Sam Cassell, (I was trying to get assists, threes, and points) and then I hit gold. Andre Miller in round 9. Then Rudy Gay, Mike Miller (still looking for 3s) then I hit gold again. Kevin Martin in round 12. I remembered him from when I had picked him the year before off the waiver wire. I knew he’d be good. I had tried to hit home runs with Roy and Gay. That was stupid. Then I tried to wrap up blocks with Perk (my one Celtic. I always make myself take a Celtic and up till this year a Lithuanian). Then I got cute and picked Grant Hill with the 2nd to last pick. A good team but I had overdone it. Fortunately I had cornered the market on big men and Derren traded me Vince Carter for Ben Wallace. That was awesome. Now I was well on my way to a championship, but I still had to duke it out in the final week with CF.

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