Fantasy Hoops Roundtable: A Look in the Mirror

Time for another fantasy basketball roundtable.

Jeff/Tom of Damn Lies & Statistics are responsible for this week’s Fantasy Hoops Roundtable debate topic.

Click here to see the full article.

This Week’s Topic

How are your fantasy teams doing this year? What has been your best move? Biggest mistake?

My Response

I am in two leagues. Fortunately, I made the playoffs in both. One of them is a keeper league and the other is an annual league. I’ll start with the keeper league.

Last year I began making a power play before the season even started. I traded my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th round picks for the No. 2 overall pick to pair with the No. 1 that I held from winning a pre-draft contest. With the top two picks I secured being LeBron James and Chris Paul, I continued my aggressive approach by mortgaging this year’s draft picks in an effort to take home the title. It paid off. This year, however, I was handicapped in the draft with a stockpile of late round picks.

I managed to select a few multi-category goes with my only early picks (Stephen Jackson & Boris Diaw) to pair with my trio of keepers (LBJ, CP3, and Iggy). The rest of the players became interchangeable. I worked the waiver wire almost to perfection landing Darren Collison and Carl Landry among others. I managed to finish with the second best record, but thanks to our divisional format I was stuck in the 4th seed.

Instead of getting a bye in the first round, I got to square off with a team that we both had advantages in four categories. It was going to come down to field goal percentage. Iggy’s 5-for-22 performance on March 15 set the tone. I was playing catch-up the rest of the way. Ultimately, I fell short in my quest to defend my title.

It wasn’t a perfect year, though. Early on, I told myself that I didn’t have the horses to defend the title, and I should just try to get by with the my guys and the available free agents. Unfortunately I veered from the path a bit with some minor draft pick trades. Most of those deals ended up blowing up in my face thanks to a bit of bad luck.

I dealt a 5th and 7th rounder to make up for my rebounding deficiency with Marcus Camby and Joakim Noah. I dealt a 10th rounder right before our trade deadline for Luol Deng, who subsequently went down with a calf injury. I traded an 8th and a 14th rounder for Eric Gordon and a 10th and 11th rounder, which I may have done straight up without getting Gordon. He also missed time.

I didn’t quite mortgage my future as bad as last season, but if I had just stuck to my guns and let this season play out, I would have been in much better shape. In fact, I could have gone the opposite route and secured some early draft picks for myself. However, if the players I dealt for didn’t all go down with injuries I could have possibly taken home the crown so I have no regrets.

In my other league I secured the No. 2 seed and a first-round bye. The first round of the playoffs is going on this week (March 22 to 28). My biggest mistakes in this league were in the waiver wire. While I excelled in my other league out of necessity, I missed out on Andray Blatche and Darren Collison. I ended up cutting Marcus Thornton before his second stretch of monster numbers. That league is still ongoing so time will tell if my mistakes were costly.

How has your season gone?

Panelists

Brian of EmptyTheBench.com
Ryan Lester of LestersLegends.com
Nels of GiveMeTheRock.com
Tommy of HoopsWorld.com
Jeff/Tom of Damn Lies & Statistics