As most of you can see, I took the holidays off from blogging about Fantasy Basketball, but I’m back.

The article that caught my eye today was the fact that the Atlanta Hawks and Miami Heat will have to replay 51.9 seconds of their game.

The particulars are these:

1. Shaquille O’Neal received his sixth foul, fouling him out of the game when he really didn’t have six fouls. The statisticians errored.

2. The game ended up going into overtime with Atlanta winning the game.

3. They are planning on playing the 51.9 seconds before the next game where the teams meet.

Shouldn’t they play it FOLLOWING the next time that these teams meet, just to simulate the tiredness that both of these teams would have had? Is Shaq even going to be available for that game, seeing that he is now in Los Angeles receiving treatments for his ailing body? Would Riley really have played the poor free throw shooting Shaq for the end of that game anyway?

And what happens to anyone who bet on that game and different results lead to a different payout?

But those questions really beside the point for this article.

What is going to happen to all of the statistics for the 51.9 seconds and overtime? If the statisticians get 6 fouls wrong, are they really going to know what statistics were accumulated after that point? I suppose there could be a lot of tape watching if they didn’t keep good track of that before.

Are Fantasy sites planning on trying to honor these “new” stats or are they just going to let sleeping dogs lie and just ignore the results of this do-over game? Seeing as how the first game went into overtime and that it is unlikely that this game would also go into overtime, the statistics could be markedly different. Anybody who had players from Miami or Atlanta could stand to lose a lot of stats, from the 51.9 seconds along with the overtime session.

For leagues that allow the adding, dropping, and trading of players, are they going to remove the statistics accumulated after the 51.9 second mark on that day? Who gets the statistics the next time around, the ones who currently have those players or the ones who had the players at the time? Do they even know who had the players at the time? (Not all leagues would really keep track of that.)

Although not technically correct, my vote would be for all fantasy leagues to just ignore this ruling and the 51.9 seconds that will be coming soon. We’ll have to wait and see what leagues ACTUALLY decide to do, but my sneaking suspicion will be that they will take the easy way out and do just that.