An Announcement and a Bit on Fantasy

What up world, this is Sway. Just kidding. Do you remember that guy though? I wonder what he is doing now. Probably still talking really deliberately. And what about Gideon Yago? Remember him? Is he still in Iraq?

Anyway, that segues into my next bit which is to announce that sometime in the near future I am going to start a companion unit to this blog where I only talk about TV shows. The TV Shows could be serious like The Wire or they could be awesome and ridiculous like The Hills. You'll just need to check it out to find out. I watch some pretty sweet things on TV and love to talk about them so I figured I'd get rolling with that to provide some alternate content while keeping it seperate from the sports stuff here.

With that being said, now the sports related part of my post.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned how proud I was of my fantasy basketball team. Even further back, I mentioned that I liked fantasy baseball and basketball far more than football on account of how much more strategy those two entail - stockpiling various statistics instead of just two. Anyway, fresh off the two baseball drafts I had over the past week I wanted to of course talk about my basketball team.

Don't worry, I'm not going to give you war stories from "matchups" or anything like that. Instead I would just like to present you with the starting lineup I have used for most of the year for my fantasy hoops team to illustrate exactly why I love fantasy baseball and basketball so much. I've already told you the first reason.

The second reason is along those lines and it is my belief that you don't win fantasy baseball and basketball leagues in the first few rounds of the drafts, you win them in the middle and late rounds. Granted a busted early round pick can sink you, but if you nail a few mid and late round picks, you are probably sailing to victory. Granted you could maybe make a similar argument in football, but I'm not buying it because there is such a star system in place in standard scoring there that you can easily win on the back of one or two players if you get them in the right years. Has anybody with Tomlinson not finished in the top 3 in their football leagues the last three or four years? Of course there is no way to prove it, but I doubt it. On the flip side, the guy who had A-Rod's monster season in my fantasy baseball league last year finished 6th out of 10 teams. That is probably because he employed fantasy team killer Juan Pierre in his outfield which goes to further my point because baseball and basketball are all about checks and balances. If you have one beast in your lineup but you have a blackhole too, the beast can often be almost marginalized. Hence the need to make a well balanced team and hence the reason to nail the middle and late rounds of your draft - as well as the late, early ones like in the 3rd - 5th round range. OK, I'm rambling. To illustrate my point I am going to rank in my mind the order of importance each player on my fantasy basketball team had to my overall success this year and you will notice that a) my best guys were all my mid-round guys and b) that it is hardly a star-studded team on paper but was so well balanced that I finished one game off having the best record in the league. Of course the not so great thing about fantasy is that one key injury and nine times out of ten your team is cooked. Yes there is skill in winning fantasy, but honestly the luck factor is just as big a key. You can't protect against injuries or seemingly inexplicable awful years from key players.

Guards:
Chauncey Billups (Drafted 3rd Round, 3rd Most Important Player on My Team)
Kirk Heinrich (Drafted 4th Round, 8th Most Important Player on My Team)
Steve Nash (Drafted 1st Round, 2nd Most Important Player on My Team)
Stephen Jackson (Drafted 9th Round, 6th Most Important Player on My Team)

Forwards:
Antawn Jamison (Drafted 6th Round, 4th Most Important Player on My Team)
Danny Granger (Drafted 8th Round, 7th Most Important Player on My Team)
Tayshaun Prince (Drafted 7th Round, 9th Most Important Player on My Team)
Udonis Haslem/Andrea Bargnani/Ryan Gomes (drafted Bargnani, picked the other two off of waivers and rotated them all year and they were the 10th most important players but all contributed solidly when playing - especially Gomes who I am going with now in the playoffs)

Centers:
Marcus Camby (Drafted 5th Round, THE Most Important Player on My Team)
Pau Gasol (Drafted 2nd Round, 5th Most Important Player on My Team)

OK, so you see my point kind of. All of my top picks were my best players - granted not in that order - but if you look at my actual lineup I only have three All Stars out of ten. I think that says something right?

Well, that's it for me. I tried to prove my point. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. Either way, the fact that I got to Stat Track my baseball team today for the first time of the season today really gets me going in awkward and indecent ways.