Like a nagging Marcus Camby injury or a ridiculous Knicks trade, there are just some things that we can expect to happen at least once every year.  And one of those things is the Annual Stromile Swift Maybe This Is For Real Game.  And we just saw it last night, as Stro put up 24/5/4 with a steal and a block, filling in for Darko Milicic.  Before we get into this incarnation of the Swift Maybe This Is For Real Game, let’s look at previous incarnations:

11/17/06 - 21/7 with 2 blocks in 32 minutes, filling in for Pau Gasol
12/26/05 - 26/13 in 35 minutes, filling in for Yao Ming
11/20/04 - 20/12 with 2 steals and 2 blocks, filling in for Gasol
11/29/03 - 19/8 with 1 steal and 1 block, filling in for Lorenzen Wright.

And so on.

But this is pretty much common knowledge.  Swift has been jumping on and off waivers for pretty much his entire NBA career.  The question is … is there a right way to play this?  Is there a way to take Swift and make him valuable for your fantasy team?  Let’s go over a couple of strategies and see if we can figure out if they’ll work for Stro:

Option No. 1 - Pick up Swift immediately, and play him as long as the guy he’s replacing is out.

This is a pretty common strategy being used all the time - right now, for example, Beno Udrih is creating a ton of value while Mike Bibby is out, and Hilton Armstrong already got picked up in our league once Tyson Chandler went down.  But for Swift, it’s not particularly effective.  If you’ll notice from the list of games above, you might notice that all the guys he was filling in for missed significant time.  Last year, Gasol missed the first six weeks of the year, but in that time Swift had only one 20-point effort and only topped 7 boards twice.  Same sort of thing happened when Yao Ming missed 25 games in 05-06.  Not only that, but in the case of last year, the VERY NEXT game following his breakout, he put up just 3 points in 16 minutes.  So, that’s no good.

Option No. 2 - Keep Swift on your bench, wait for him to heat up, and play him right before he breaks out.

At first, this sounds impossible.  And it probably is.  But if you temper your expectations, it’s not totally ridiculous.  If you’re hoping to start Swift on a breakout game, I’ve got bad news for ya.  But if you’re just hoping to get some OK minutes out of a Center, well, this might not be a bad strategy.  While Swift’s big games come around just once or twice a year, he does put together strings of failry decent games.  Look at last March, for example, where he put up 15 and 13 with 3 steals in 4 blocks.  If you started him after that, you would have had three games with averages of 10 points, 4.6 boards and 2 blocks with nice percentages.  Not setting the world on fire, but I’ve seen Centers starting for fantasy teams late in the year with worse lines than that.  Of course, the next game after this mini-run he put up goose eggs.  The issue here is that it’s ridicuulous to hold onto a guy all year just for one of these little bursts, so I don’t think this strategy works either.

Option No. 3 - Grab him and trade him.
Maybe if you’re in a league with a lot of newbies this will work, but we’re going to assume here that you don’t want to get into any fights with your leaguemates.

Option No. 4 - Low Investment, Low Expectations, Quick Start, Quick Hook.
This is probably the best option and it’s not even that great of one.  Listen, we all know that Stro is impossible to manage.  But there is one strategy that I think could work, and it’s got 4 keys to it:

- Low Investment - Don’t drop anything of value to get him.
- Low Expectations - Only start him if you’ve got games to make up at Center or possibly Utility.
- Quick Start - Don’t wait around with him on your bench, he won’t do anything consistently so don’t wait for that.
- Quick Hook - Drop him at the first sign of trouble.

That’s it.  And, I guess, get lucky.  Because that’s the only way it’s really going to work.