Give Me The Rock

While I watch the Celtics play another game on the road like the Beacontown Beavers (pre-Teen Wolf edition)…

It seems like a daunting task, but could you have put together a decent fantasy team out of undrafted players at the start of the season? Now, the word undrafted is a moving target as it depends on the league, but for this post I am going to use the GMTR Draft Compilation spreadsheet that Nels put together last October. It contains mock drafts from this wonderful site, Dropping Dimes, Fantasy Sports Radar, CBS Sportsline, Sports Forecaster, and the too-bad-its-gone Fantasy Basketblog. It also contains the actual results of the Dropping Dimes Experts League draft. For a guy to be labeled “undrafted”, he had to be undrafted in all those drafts. So, what kind of team can we make?

Starters

PG: Anthony Carter (finished at 96 on the rater): While Carter got pretty much no attention during the season (hit me up in the comments if I’m wrong about that), the 32 year old started 67 games for the Nuggets, averaging 5.5 assists and 1.5 steals a game. As a free agent, expect him to be ridiculously overpaid by some team in need of a “veteran point guard” this summer.

SG: Ronnie Brewer (91): Brewer wins the award for top ranked undrafted player in 07/08, at least according to the GMTR player rater. In his second year with the Jazz, Brewer averaged 27 minutes, 12 points (off 56 percent shooting!), and 1.7 steals a game.

SF: Francisco Garcia (94): Garica’s season was kind of like John Travolta’s acting career. He started off strong, then disappeared, then came back, then disappeared again, then all of a sudden he’s dressing up like a woman and we’re loving every minute of it. It wasn’t always pretty to watch, but it added up to something.

PF: Jamario Moon (100): Ok, he’s more of a small forward, but I guess everyone likes to draft all the power forwards. Plus, he did average 1.4 blocks a game. Moon defined the word undrafted this season and was the first guy I thought about when coming up with this idea. Interesting fact: Moon started 75 games for the Raptors this season, which broke Damon Stoudamire’s rookie franchise record of 70. Cred: His website, which I will anxiously check every morning from now on waiting for his first blog post.

C: Brendan Haywood (113): A season ending heart condition to Etan Thomas opened the door for Haywood, and he sort of took advantage of it, average 11 and 7 in 80 games. For a reason I can’t explain, I expected more from him.

Bench

John Salmons (98): Smelly Fish started 41 games for the Kings and had the best season of his career, even if not everyone is a fan of his work.

Beno Udrih (106): What’s not to love about Beno? Well, he had a little trouble staying healthy, but he posted career highs in his stats across the board and looks to be the Kings PG of the future.

Linas Kleiza (140): Remember that time he dropped 41 on the Jazz? Yeah. That was awesome.

Jeff Foster (148): I figured this team needed a second center, so Foster and his 9 rebounds a game it is. I didn’t expect more from Foster, but he delivered on it.

The result? No, this team would not be competitive in a fantasy league. Not a chance. But add a solid first and second rounder, say Chris Paul and Marcus Camby, and this team still might not win a league but it’d be solidly mediocre. Just like this post.

It’s hard to like a team with James Posey on it, but it’s also hard to like the group of Lame-O players clustered around LeBron James.

I don’t remember where I read about it first, but someone noticed how in those There Can Be Only One commercials how they two players’ eyes always blink at the same time.

Here’s a really noticeable example.

Seriously? I am starting to think they’re fake. Or at the very least, heavily digitally edited. I mean, is it really possible that in every ad, two different people blink at the exact same time? I don’t think so. I think they probably edited it because someone found it distracting when they blinked at different times.

Whatever the case, they are really cool ads, but I do have a hard time watching them now without noticing the blinking. And now I inflict that suffering on you as well.

The On Deck Circle seems like a more likely candidate for a Carnival of MLB, judging by the name at least… but they’ve got Carnival of the NBA #56 over there, so check it out.

There is not much I can really add that hasn’t already been said about Bussinger-gate in terms of the “blogosphere vs. MSM”. But let me proffer this: This is not a “blog” problem or an “MSM” problem. This is not a necessarily a problem at all, depending on how you view American society as a whole (and the rest of the world, perhaps, I don’t know what Deadspin’s map overlay looks like). The fact is just that the generation(s) that are growing up now and consuming information are the generations that were raised from babes with The Simpsons, and grew up with South Park and The Family Guy. So the threshold is higher in the sense that sports fans are used to “crude and lewd” and many of us have absorbed that into our sense of humor. If journalists and writers in the MSM think that the style that Deadspin, With Leather, etc. have is disgusting, it is probably because those journalists and writers are of a generation that grew up and developed a different sense of what is funny and what is objectionable.

That’s my theory. For what it’s worth.

And for what it’s worth (to address another disturbingly childish and all too common attack on bloggers): I own a $500,000 home (that’s a half a million dollars in case anyone thinks I made a typo) within the city limits of Chicago, IL (3.9 miles from Wrigley Field), and I work for a Fortune 500 company (which is significantly higher in those rankings than Disney, ESPN’s parent company), and I like my job, and I’m keeping it. Oh, and my mom lives in Portland, OR (Hi Mom!), putting me about 2,126 miles from her basement.

And now I just want to go over to YardBarker and give a thumbs up to every Verified Athlete post over there just to throw the bird up at the Middle Man Media.

I was going to actually write something about the whole DeShawn-LeBron-Soulja-Boy-Jay-Z thing, but I’ll just do a quick recap in case anyone missed it:

0. Evidently, LeBron said the Wizards suck.
1. Publicly, DeShawn Stevenson said LeBron was overrated.
2. LeBron said that responding to DeShawn would be like Jay-Z responding to Soulja Boy.
3. Soulja boy showed up at Game 3.
4. Jay-Z recorded a track dissing DeShawn (you can download it at the link up there)

I’m pretty sure R. Kelly is orchestrating this whole thing. Just you wait. When a midget shows up in the beef, then you’ll believe me.

I’m cutting short the whole MisPlaced CapitaliZation ScanDal because Becky through out an Arrested Development reference. I almost felt like that was worth a whole post by itself, but there really isn’t anything more to write. Too bad I had the Suns getting to the WCF in my BallHype Bracket. But, since none of the series are over yet, I am still tied for first place overall.

And finally, LOLSonics. It’s almost like today is Friday with all this stuff that going around.

I know the feeling. The NBA regular season is over and your life feels empty. Fantasy baseball is a nicotine patch to last through the summer, but fantasy football sucks, as does having to face the real world without being able to talk about how you picked up Beno Udrih in the third week of the season and now he’s your starting point guard on your first place team. So, what do you do?

Have you tried playoff fantasy basketball? You don’t hear much about fantasy basketball during the playoffs. With the popularity of regular reason fantasy sports, I wonder what’s keeping it from being bigger. An extremely long regular season can’t help. After 82 games and almost 6 months, it can be tough finding takers for another month and a half. And after scouring the internet for good 2 minutes, I wasn’t able to find a site that will let you manage a fantasy basketball league with your friends during the playoffs. As Bill Simmons would say, its 2008, can’t we make this happen already?

In fact, this playoff league is the first that I’ve done. We were able scrounge up five teams and the commissioner is keeping stats by hand like its 1985. Eight players per team. Scoring consists of adding up points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks for each player for the duration of the playoffs. Here’s how my draft went (I had the second pick).

1. Kobe (Garnett was my first choice, but he went number 1)
2. Pau Gasol (At this point, I’m pulling for a Lakers/Celtics final)
3. Ray Allen (Really pulling)
4. Amare Stoudemire (all the good Celtics and Pistons are gone – time to speculate)
5. David West (I feel better about this pick now, but at the time, all the “experts” could talk about was the Hornets “lack of playoff experience”)
6. Caron Butler (with guys like Jason Kidd and Mehmet Okur going at this point in the draft, I couldn’t help myself)
7. Gilbert Arenas (As long as I was hitching myself to the Wizards bandwagon… ugh… this will probably turn out to be the worst pick out of anyone’s draft)
8. Tracy McGrady (Give me 7 games, Tracy. That’s all I ask)

Considering guys like Rondo and Tayshaun Prince were drafted, it seem like I went with “pick great players even if they’re going to go out in the first round approach.” And now that the Suns, Wizards, and Rockets all look they won’t make it out of the first round, I can see how that might have not been the best plan of attack. Interestingly, no Hawks or Sixers were picked and I picked the only Rocket (in the last round). Now that the Jazz are up 3-1, maybe I should have passed. But Carmelo Anthony and Iverson were drafted from the Nuggets and Chris Bosh was taken, so maybe there’s still a chance.