Fantasy Basketball: Gooden Gold
Injuries often open the door for certain players to elevate their game.
Milwaukee’s Drew Gooden seems to cherish his opportunity.
The injury to Andrew Bogut is the latest opportunity for Gooden to up his game.
So far, he has delivered. In the two and a half games he’s played since Bogut went down with an ankle injury, Gooden has averaged 19.0 points, 8.3 rebounds, 3.0 assists, 0.7 blocks, 1.3 steals and 1.0 three-pointer.
Gooden has seven starts this year. In those starts he’s averaging 17.4 points, 9.4 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 0.3 blocks, 0.7 steals and 0.4 three-pointers. The simple fact is—with Bogut out, the Bucks are going to ask Gooden to play 30+ minutes per game.
With that amount of run, I expect him to put up those kinds of numbers regularly.
He has obviously put up better numbers as a starter, but playing center has suited Gooden well. He has 33 career starts at the position and has averaged 13.7 points and 9.8 rebounds, which is 1.3 more points and 1.3 more rebounds per game than he averaged in 421 career starts at forward.
At first glance, there is a pesky little problem—the Bucks face the Orlando Magic four times over the next 18 games.
In 16 games against Orlando since Dwight Howard’s rookie year, Gooden is averaging 16.0 points and 9.0 rebounds. Not many people can say they had that kind of production against Howard.
Gooden is owned in most ESPN leagues (81.0 percent), but there still could be some time to snatch him up in Yahoo! leagues where he is owned in just over half of their leagues.
In deeper leagues you may want to look at teammate Ersan Ilyasova.
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