People continue to doubt me on this column. I received an unprintable message essentially telling me that anyone following my advice on who not to draft too high would ruin their draft.

I have been playing Fantasy Basketball since the days when you had to figure everything out by hand. In the past 8 years, I’ve never finished lower than the top 3 in a season, and I’ve won the past three seasons in my league. (Last year I played in 4 leagues, which is way too many to actually keep track of all of your players, and I won in my primary league and placed in the top 3 in the rest of them.)

With that digression, I better explain my logic on the one player which continues to stir up the most controversy. I could provide similar logic for Yao Ming (though I think he could potentially creep into being worthy of a first round pick if he can ever manage to stay healthy) or many of the other listed players.

I don’t want this column to run too long, so I will pick the one player who everybody tries to call me on every year.

Dwyane Wade

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We’ll end our rating of players for Fantasy Statistical categories with turnovers. (Turnovers are used in some Fantasy leagues and are not used in others, so this may or may not affect who you pick up.)

It’s very hard not to pick up a guy just because he has a lot of turnovers because the best guys have the ball more and normally get more turnovers. The other problem you will have in making picks with turnovers in mind is that some owners’ teams end up playing a lot less games, mainly because they are stricken with injuries. It is really hard to have an active guy get less turnovers than a guy who doesn’t play at all.

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Just like getting the top point scorers can really help you lead in points and missing out on the top guys will be be to your detriment, getting the top blocks guys in the league can do wonders for your blocks and missing out on them is likely to make you lose in this category. Unlike points, where just about every person on a team scores at least a couple of points, many people average no blocks per game.

One thing that is bad about picking players for blocks is that they rarely help you in more than one or two other categories, if that. With that in mind, you often have to step away from your approach of picking a very well rounded player and just pick a guy for blocks.

With that brief introduction, here are your choices for improving your blocks category:

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Steals is usually one of those forgotten categories in a typical Fantasy Basketball Rotisserie League draft. You watch the percentages carefully. You make sure you get the top guys for points and three pointers. You make sure your big men are good rebounders. You make sure your point guards get good assists. You hope that someone that you picked, most likely one or two of your guards, gets you enough steals that you can compete.

I’m not sure why we treat steals like this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is because nobody else worries about it much either, so you aren’t competing with people who are specifically picking for steals.

What that really means is that you can lead this category by being the only one specifically picking for it!

The good news is that you don’t really have to give up anything either, because many of these guys excell in other categories as well. You just need to make sure that you pick a couple of those players based on their steals and not just by which player had three or four more assists than the other guy.
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Assists are the domain of the point guard. There are only a few exceptions to this, most notably LeBron James, Tracy McGrady, Andre Iguodala, and Kobe Bryant. To compete, you’re probably going to have to get at least two of the top 25 assist guys (and one of them really should be from the top 3 tiers), so pay close attention on who you are going to have to draft.

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