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?
21 Responses to “So What Do We Do Now?”
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April 11th, 2007 at 7:34 am
yr on it!
my co commish and i have been thinking of ways to remedy the problem with H2H. We only do H2H to compete directly against each other. But I dont like the luck side of H2H, i’m suggesting a move to roto. i finished 6th in our league standing this season, but 2nd overall in roto. Isnt fantasy basketball all about stats!
Theres really no reason to do H2H other than being with a group of friends. Even then, the end of the season ruins any fun and dominace you had over yr friends. Nothing like being able to talk sh*t all season long becauseyou won the league by 10-15 games and then get ran in the 2nd round by the 4 or 6 seed!
I have no solution to solve the problem, but im hoping to convince the rest of the league to finally make the jump to roto.
April 11th, 2007 at 7:41 am
Hi, i didn’t try H2H this year, but i can imagine managers pulling their hairs out now trying to figure out which players would get dressed for the next game.
I remember earlier this season, a post talked about finishing the games early for roto, i guess that strategy has worked well for me. I’m leading the league by 3 pts, and would probably win it, not because i have the best stats but because other managers can’t finish their games quota.
As for H2H, my opinion is that this dilemma calls even more for managers to be ruthless, like dropping Iguodala, Jefferson, or even Nowitzki and Howard. I guess a shallower league would help if there are good FAs in the pool, rather than a 16 team league with the best player out there being someone like Calderon or Justin Williams.
April 11th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Yes I totally agree with your rules…
I only play Roto games, but it must me ass to have dominated the league up till the final weeks and have guys sit out at the last minutes…
I’m not sure where I can comment on this next…But can you write an article about how it is more competitive and hard to play in leagues of size 12 than leagues of size 16-18.
Of course most it all depends on ur league mates, but I still find it harder to compete in 12 man leagues because over the course of the year you will not have to rely on major sleepers to help ur team. This increases the chance of teams remaining in the hunt for the majority of the year and thus interest in leagues, which means more people competing for better players.
I played in a 17 man league this year, and as soon as Nenad Krtic went down my other center was Kwame Brown. I totally gave up when Kwame went down and my choices as my second centers were Lamarcus Aldridge(3 months beofre he exploded and injury prone kendrick perkins) Obviously I was out of the race by January.
However in a 12 leaguer, it was much easier to find injury replacements…as my Yao Ming went down, but I found guys like Mark Blount, Nene, and even Troy Murphy who helped keep us in.
Injuries are all part of the game, but one or two injuries shouldn’t sink ur whole team without being able to find at least half adequate replacements
Anyway …just my two cents
April 11th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
A disgraceful, thoughtless post. Please delete immediately.
April 12th, 2007 at 6:15 am
How is this thoughtless?
I told you I totally agree with all his proposals…
I can totally feel for people who have just lost their entire team to injuries in the final week…Its my third year playing fantasy basketball, so its really my first time seeing a teams get destroyed at the very end.
Anyway, please keep your douchy comments to yourself,
April 12th, 2007 at 8:45 am
@Jensen, just so you know JBFC is just a spam commenter here. Once you know that, it’s kind of amusing to see him comment after nearly every post. Unfortunately for the real John Basedow, I’m sure the spammer isn’t actually John Basedow. I like making fun of Johnny Boy as much as the next guy, but it is kind of malicious to create a spam bot in his name.
April 12th, 2007 at 8:52 am
bv,
You’re definitely on the right track. I think the only problem is that, IIRC, the big fantasy sites like Yahoo don’t let you customize the league to the extent that would be required to implement the above solutions. I think if you have H2H, most sites force you to have playoffs. I know with CBS, they let me select when I wanted the playoffs to be, but I still messed up the timing of it.
I think the lower games limit option is probably the best one. That way, someone like Dirk can dominate 75 games and rest the last 7 and you don’t have to worry about it. It would probably be best to apply that to Roto leagues with daily lineup changes, but – now that I think about it – it might be interesting to do it with H2H leagues with daily lineup changes. Then you could “rest” guys in weeks that you’re dominating, and “save” their games for another week. And the limit would prevent people from piling on games during the week as happens when someone decides that H2H with daily changes and no games limit is a good idea.
April 12th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Ok, let’s give my 2 cents on this one.
I play in a customized 12-team league, with 15 players per team. We use a budget system to sign our players, and can lock them for up to 3 years with some restrictions.
We play a roto regular season, consistent on 17 weeks, and then go on to a H2H play offs, that last for 6 weeks (3 rounds of 2 weeks each), so we ended our season on April 8.
Two seasons ago we reduced the regular season so we could end our play offs earlier, because we felt that some day it could be unfair to finish the season with the stars of the finalists sitting down just to rest for the play offs. I’d say it was quite a nice decision.
You’ll never rule out some injuries, just as this year, when my team lost Arenas for the final week, although Josh Smith and Gerald Wallace went to the rescue to earn me a title.
I know it’s not perfect, but to leave 10 days to the end of the season helps a lot, and also, winning the regular season on a Roto system (which i didn’t do) gives you a good amount of respect from others.
May 12th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I run a H2H league with average stats. This takes unbalanced schedule out of the equation. It also removes the abstract “umm..my team just won with 185 assists!”. Instead, my team wins with 8.5 asst/game! Doesn’t that make more sense? Bball is a sport of averages.
As for ending date, we ended about 10 days before the end of the season.