OK, let’s have a little heart-to-heart here. We love ourselves some fantasy basketball, obviously, because we waste so much of our lives doing this blog. But this whole thing where guys just sit out the last few weeks of the season is just awful. It totally kills the fantasy season, throwing teams that had been dominant all year long into complete disarray, and basically turning the final few weeks of the year into a total crapshoot. I talked a lot before about risk vs. luck and while there is a certain amount of risk here, there is SO MUCH luck that it’s nearly impossible to make safe guesses about who’s playing and who’s not. It really ruins the fantasy basketball season when it should be at it’s peak.
So when this happened last year, we did a little crossing of our fingers and hoped it was a one-time thing. But now that it’s happened twice in a row, well, we’ve got a trend on our hands. And unless David Stern steps up in the next year and somehow demands that teams play their best players unless they’re seriously hurt, we’ve got a problem on our hands.
So how do we fix this problem? How do we take this into account and really make fantasy basketball worth playing? A couple of thoughts:
1. Head-to-head with playoffs just might not be a viable option anymore.
Sorry, PR and H2H enthusiasts, but I’m really worried about head to head or any other system that places so much weight and importance on the last few weeks of the season. Trust me, as a Wizards fan, I know what it’s like to have your team go into the post-season without it’s full lineup, and it stinks. So one thing that might be worth thinking about for head to head leagues is to just get rid of the playoff system, and just have a race in the standings. It’s not a perfect system and may not have the excitement of the playoffs, but does the current system really have the excitement of the playoffs?
The best comparison I can think of to what’s going on right now is like playing Texas Hold ‘em, but the flop comes at the end of the hand, not the beginning. It would turn the game into so much MORE luck than it already is, and that’s what’s happening here. Luck, to an extent, is exciting, because it makes the game unpredictable and interesting, but too much luck makes strategy just useless, and that’s no fun. I think it’s worth thinking about getting rid of the playoff system in H2H.
2. End the season early.
This is probably the most obvious option. There are a couple of issues here, though. One, how early do you end the year? I would say that April 1 is probably a good starting place, but I think you can make arguments for both before and after April Fool’s day. Another issue is that regardless of where you end the season, with the unbalanced schedules in the NBA, teams will have played a different number of games regardless of when you place that end date. Still, I think there’s a slightly different way of handling this.
Rather than ending the season early by DATE, why not end it early in terms of games played? What if your league had a maximum games played of, say, 75 games rather than 82? This way if your player shuts it down early, you’re not necessarily at a disadvantage. And if he shuts it down WAY early, well then you can be a little picky in filling the missed games, rather than making total guesses as to who’s going to play and how much. It also takes away part of the problem of guys who miss one or two games here or there, because in the end it doesn’t matter as long as they play 75 games or so. Major injuries still have an effect, but you’re not stuck playing a second rate guy just because one of your studs has a stomach virus or something. Granted, this isn’t a conventional approach but I think it could make the game more more exciting. It also makes the last few weeks enjoyable as teams try to decide which games to use and when.
3. Have a supplemental draft and increase roster sizes for the final month of the season, and also change waiver rules.
This solves a couple of problems. One, right now waivers are more of a hindrance than a help because it takes players out of commission for days at a time when their value can change drastically multiple times over the course of even one day. Two, not being able to play a guy until the day AFTER you pick him up makes this problem even worse. Getting rid of waivers and the day delay - which are useful earlier in the year to keep guys from just making a thousand moves all the time - might be worthwhile for the final month. Meanwhile, the supplemental draft and increased roster size would allow for even more flexibility - guys could grab handcuffs for their players and not just give up on guys that may come back at some point. For example, a guy who owned Paul Pierce could grab Gerald Green or Allan Ray in the supplemental draft, rather than having to decide to drop a player to ensure that they’ve got the C’s starting swingman on their roster, or risk Pierce’s status changing on gameday and being stuck with no options.
None of these are perfect options, but clearly somthing’s gotta change. What do you think?