I finally had my Fantasy Basketball Draft in my 10 team league. I’m not really sure if my players are going to manage enough points to stay competitive, but I think I did well in a lot of the other categories including, amazingly enough, turnovers.

I had the 6th pick in the draft which precluded me from drafting Chris Paul, who I was most interested in.

Here are my 13 players (10 rotation players and 3 bench players), including the order that I drafted them:

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Where blocks are concerned, there are two players which stand out and then there a bunch of good players which really don’t come anywhere close. If you go for one of the top two players, you won’t have to spend any more time looking for blocks.

If you opt for someone different, you will most likely have to get three good block players to compete.

As bad as that might sound, it actually isn’t necessarily that hard considering two facts:

1. You normally have at least a couple of forward positions, one or two center positions, and two or three utility positions where you can pay a little more attention and get enough blocks.
2. There are a lot of good rebounders who can be counted on to get you some blocks, so you aren’t being forced to expend positions on players who only can get you one category.

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We normally get rebounds when we draft power forwards and centers. The more power forwards and centers we can draft, the better we do in rebounds (and often field goal percentage and blocks), and the worse we do in assists (and often free throw percentage and steals). As we draft for rebounds, however we need to be very careful about some of our other statistical categories and that we are not doing irreparable harm to them for this season.

Let’s take a look at a few of the players who lead the league in rebounds and which ones you should keep an eye on and which ones you should simply avoid, despite their aptitude on the boards.

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I am used to seeing lots and lots of articles where sports analysts complain that the league has been watered down by too many teams.

That’s why I was surprised to see an article the other day on why there aren’t enough teams in the NBA. As evidence of this, the writer supplied the names of young NBA players who were very good, but, as of the writing of the article, had still not found a team. Some of them were restricted free agents and others just didn’t have enough spots on their current team for them AND for the players drafted in the off-season. The writer also noted that there were several retired players looking to make a return to the NBA, taking up roster spots that might have been used by these unrestricted and restricted free agents.

The arguments were persuasive, Read the rest of this entry »

I get annoyed at some sportswriters who think that every team except for the NBA Champion (and sometimes even the NBA Champions themselves) needs to make high profile trades and acquisitions in order to improve their team.

They grade a team on what they did to shake up their team in the off-season, including giving some teams poor grades for ONLY re-signing their free agents and a couple of draft picks.

There are teams that make frequent trades and/or bring on good free agents and they never seem to improve much. There are teams that never seem to make any trades and they are good to great year after year.

That’s not to say that teams shouldn’t EVER make some moves to get markedly better, but I think two things need to be taken into account by every General Manager in the league. (I actually think most of them do, much to the dismay of their local sportswriters and/or fans.)

At the risk of repeating myself, I explain yet again why the boring teams in the offseason are usually the teams playing in the NBA Finals.

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