Give Me The Rock

Or something like that.

Line of the Night: Jordan Farmar (6.12) put it on last night (don’t ask me what he put on, come on) with an excellent shooting performance, including 4 threes, and ending with 24 points. He also had 4 rebounds, 3 assists, 3 steals, and a block. And we know how the player rater loves defense. Especially when it’s combined with threes and good shooting.

Honorable Mentions: Sure, there were only 3 games last night, but LA placed 4 of their players in the top 10. Milwaukee was next best with 2. And good work NBA.com:

Wait for it…

Yep! Devin Harris is still on Dallas!

Anyway, as you can see, Kobe’s 21/1/8 with 4 steals and 2 blocks put him at 5.69; Andrew Bogut (5.61) provided the second surprise of the night (after Farmar’s #1) with 22 and 15, plus 4 assists, 1 steal, and 2 blocks; Tim Duncan (5.23) had 31 and 15, but since he shot 10 free throws and only 7 of them, he slid in right below Bogut who didn’t miss any free throws (nor did he take any).

Third suprise of the night: Ricky Davis (4.58) is probably not available since he’s at least good for something in the world of fantasy basketball. So, he’s not the WWLotN, but he did have 14/4/9 with a steal, a block, and 2 threes. Not bad for 0 turnovers.

Waiver Wire Line of the Night: If Jordan Farmar is available, he’s gotta be the pick… but in case he’s not, I guess it’s Ronny Turiaf (3.62). He was only 2/8 from the field, but made all 3 free throws for 7 points, and added 12 rebounds and 3 blocks.

The Biggest Loser: While the Lakers had a lot of good performances yesterday, Derek Fisher only came up with 2 field goals in 11 tries. He played 24 minutes, so that’s an attempt just about every 2 minutes, but only a make every 12 minutes. Combined with 3 rebounds, 1 assist, and 2 turnovers, it was not a good night for the Fish.

Friday’s Tiny Dancer: In honor of Jordan Farmar and his chart topping teammates. here’s Annika from the Laker Dancers.

PS: Sorry this post sucked. I don’t know what happened.

LeBron may have become the youngest player to score 10,000 points, but the NBA.com Player Rater did not forgive his 7/24 shooting from the field. Nor his lack of steals and blocks. No sir. 2.87.

Line of the Night: Amare Stoudemire (6.17) only has 7,331 points, but he also has the Line of the Night with 32/14/4 on 11/19 FG and 9/10 FT, not to mention 4 blocks and a steal.

Honorable Mentions: I think we’re going to have a lot of these today, so I’m just going to make a list:

(PTS/REB/AST/STL/BLK)

Brad Miller: 25/13/6/2/1 + 3 threes! (5.53)
Chris Paul: 25/6/15/3/0 + 2 threes (no exclamation point) + 1 turnover! ! ! That’s an Assist2Turnover ration of 15:1!!! (5.44)
Marcus Camby: 12/14/4/2/5 Ho hum. Another day at the office for Camby. (5.33)
Mike Bibby: 25/5/12/1/1 - Guess it just took a sec to get into the swing of things in Atlanta. (5.09)

Waiver Wire Line of the Night: Anthony Carter (4.88) is probably available in some less competitive leagues where people don’t know who he is. Vince Carter’s cousin? I don’t know. He was a perfect 4/4 from the field last night for 12 points, 4 rebounds, and 12 assists. Add in the 4 steals and everyone on Denver is looking like a decent fantasy player at this point. Well, everyone who’s in their 7 man rotation playing more than 20 minutes.

If Carter isn’t available to you, and you have daily roster changes, take a look at Jannero Pargo (4.13). He looks like he’s in for another 2-3 good games if you pick him up right now.

Martell Webster (3.90) had 15/5/2 with 3 steals and 2 threes.

The Biggest Loser: I kind of want to go with LeBron, since he did clock in at #78 last night with that awe-ful shooting. But since I already mentioned him, let’s find someone else to pick on. How about Andrei Kirilenko (1.91)? He played 24 minutes last night, but ended up with only 4 points, 1 rebound, and 2 assists. To his credit, he did have a block, and has been averaging 1.7 blocks per game this season.

The Eddy Curry Watch: Curry (1.92) finished just ahead of Kirilenko last night, because he had a (presumably) career high 2 blocks! Way to go Big Eddy! He also added 0 points on 0/3 shooting, 3 rebounds, and 1 assist. No turnovers, though! And I’m going to assume that in only 16 minutes of PT, he didn’t have enough time to try to take someone off the dribble from outside the three-point line. I bet he totally could have taken Emeka Okafor or Nazr Mohammed for a ride, though. In other Knicks news, Zach Randolph hoisted 2 more three pointers last night.

Talking about your fantasy team is like blabbing on about the wonderful finger painting your child made in kindergarten the other day. “Look, precious made the grass blue and the sun green.” How cute. Now stop talking to me.

But, since the big fantasy news of the day is either Jamaal Magloire’s first practice with the Dallas Mavericks, or 38-year old PJ Brown joining the Celtics to backup KG, forgive me for talking about a couple of my fantasy teams.

As you may know – through a mix-up somewhere in the series of tubes known as the Internet - I was invited to participate in the CBS 30-Man Expert’s League. Starting with the draft and throughout the year, I channeled my inner Forrest Gump and made idiotic moves that somehow worked out well enough to get me into the playoffs (yes, the playoffs have started in the league already some reason). And then, even though my team sucked hard last week, the team I was playing against completely fell apart and I stumbled to a first round victory.

So, I made it to the Elite Eight in the 30-Man League. And this week, I’m facing off against Brian Flood of Rotoworld and his juggernaut of a team. Somehow, in a league with 30 teams, he ended up with a starting five of Chancey Billups, Joe Johnson, Marvin Williams, Kenyon Martin, and Brad Miller. Compare that to my team of Chris Paul, Ricky Davis, Josh Howard, Andres Nocioni, and Sean Williams and I’m feeling like mine is a little shorter than his (especially with the Ricky Davis we’ve seen lately).

Anyway, here is the entire CBS Elite Eight 30-man bracket:

CBS
1. Jake Payton
vs.
5. Ross Devonport

2. Dave Richard
vs.
3 Tony Mejia

World
1. Rick Kamla (NBA.com/NBATV)
vs.
5. Aaron Gleeman (Rotoworld)

2. Brian Flood (Rotoworld)
vs.
3. Patrick Madden (GiveMeTheRock.com)

I’m already losing to Flood this week, so if you see Chancey Billups walking down the street and you feel like talking a bat to one of his knees, I’m willing to offer you a safe house until things calm down.

In other news, here’s last week’s results from the GMTR Readers league.

Win or lose, that is solid top to bottom. This league is probably the most competitive I’ve ever played in. Week in and week out, every single team in the league is competitive (and this is in week 17!) and it has been an incredibly active and fun league the entire year. I want to thank everyone in the league for playing and keeping it so competitive. You guys are awesome. We’ll definitely do it again next year (and create a second league if the demand is great enough).

This is going to have to be a quick one since I was chaperoning a field trip this morning. If you’re lucky, I might post a picture of the piece of art crap I made with 18 students from a local Chicago high school. I might also post a picture of the pasta sauce arugula grilled cheese sandwich I just made. That was the real work of art.

Line of the Night: Mo Williams (4.99) really took it to the NBA.com Player Rater by getting NO steals and NO blocks last night, but still taking home the Line of the Night. No offense to Mo, but this is one of the worst Lines of the Night I think I’ve ever seen. I mean, 37 points is all well and good, but 12/22 shooting isn’t like Dwight Howard good. And 3/6 three pointers is only just decent for someone like Mo Williams. Tack on the 7 rebounds, and 6 assists, and sure it’s good line, but Line of the Night? Really?

Honorable Mentions: Vince Carter (4.86) had kind of a similar line to Mo, with 26/8/5, but added 2 blocks and 2 assists in there; Shawn Marion (4.79) was pretty close in there with 24/8/2 and also had 2 and 2; Steve Nash (4.75) had a very Steve Nashy kind of line with 25/2/13. There’s more, but when you’ve been through 120 days of basketball games, last night just seemed kind of average all around.

Waiver Wire Line of the Night: Steve Blake (3.66) was only 4/11 from the field, but made 7/7 free throws for 17 points, 7 rebounds, 5 assists, and a steal. I’m not sure why he wasn’t ranked higher, consider the other performances last night.

Earl Watson was out with a respiratory infection, so Luke Ridnour (3.53) put up 8/6/15 with 3 steals. I’m not saying you should pick him up now, but this is the kind of thing you should remember, so that if you hear anything about Earl Watson getting injured, you immediately run to a computer and pick up Ridnour. Or, just use someone’s iPhone. That’s what they’re made for, you know.

The Biggest Loser: This was an easy one. The day after scoring 33 points and hitting a game winning shot, DeShawn Stevenson (1.06) had the second to worst line of the night, going 2/12 from the field, and 1/3 from the line for a total of 5 points. He also had 1 rebound and 2 assists.

I’m not sure when JE Skeets got his gig as an NBA Expert on Yahoo! (I’ll admit, I don’t listen to the podcast), but if anyone deserves it, it’s him. And he’s announcing that Yao Ming will miss the rest of the season to undergo surgery on a stress fracture in his foot. Not sure how surgery will help with a stress fracture, but there must be something I don’t know about modern medicine.

Anyway…

Does this make Dikembe Mutombo a good pickup? Yahoo (not Skeets) says yes:

Feb 26 With Yao Ming out for the year, Mutombo will likely see increased minutes.

Recommendation: He hadn’t been used much of late, and we actually think the Rockets power forwards - Luis Scola, Chuck Hayes and Carl Landry - will pick up a lot of the slack, but Mutombo will be out there when the team needs a true center.

Seeing as Mutombo hasn’t been on the court for a few, I’d also go with Scola, Hayes, and Landry before picking up Mutombo, but if you’re in a competitive league, those guys might be gone by the time you read this.

Scola was just added in the GMTR Readers League. Landry was actually added by the same team a few days ago… interesting…

I have just added Landry in the DroppingDimes Experts League (the other two guys were already on teams - tells you something about playing with Experts now, doesn’t it?).

What about the guards in Houston?

I’m actually going to posit the theory that this will hurt the Rocket Guards. Really, Yao does Scoring, Rebounding, and Blocking. So his absence creates an obvious opportunity for people who do that. But for the guards (with the exception of Tracy McGrady), there won’t be a lot of extra assists or open three pointers to go around all of a sudden. There will likely be more of McGrady taking on teams by himself, creating less assist opportunities, and more shots late in the clock. Yeah, I don’t really know that much about how the Rockets play, but unless they switch it up to a fast-paced game, I don’t see how Rafer Alston and Luther head are going to benefit from playing without Yao Ming.

On a more macro level, this probably means that the city of Houston can say Arrivederci to any playoff games they might have been looking forward to. At least they probably weren’t already selling them like some teams…

Oh, and I guess Gerald Wallace is injured. Who knew???

Line of the Night: Dirk Nowitzki (5.3) enjoys having Jason Kidd on his team: says Dirk, “He still catches you off guard sometimes. It’s been a lot of fun.” Sure, 29 points off 10-19 shooting, 10 rebounds, 4 assists and 3 threes sounds like a lot of fun to me. Winning is also fun, and the Mavs beat the Bulls 102-94 for their first win at home since they traded for Kidd. Even Dallas fans are having fun with the team. But what’s the most fun? Getting drunk with your friends and having the pictures of said event get put up on the Internet. Let’s hope we get to see a Dirk/Kidd rendition of those pics before the end of the season.

Honorable Mentions: All the games were fairly low scoring, which overall makes for a pretty piss poor night of fantasy performances. However, Allen Iverson (5.0) scored 28 with 7 assists and 3 steals; Chris Bosh (4.8) had 28 and 10 with a couple blocks; DeShawn Stevenson (4.6) scored 33 points and hit 4 threes (including the first game winning three of his career); and Jason Kidd (4.5) is also having fun with himself in Dallas (he had one of those crazy 11/9/8 with 4 steals lines).

Waiver Wire Line of the Night: I’m not sure where you go with Carlos Delfino (4.5). When he’s hot like last night – 23 points primarily off 6-7 for three – he’s a lot of fun to have on your fantasy team. But when he’s off (like on the 24th) he contributes almost nothing. He’s the only bench guy I have on my team in the CBS 30-man league with any significant value, yet never put him in my weekly lineup over Ricky Davis because I’m scared to see what line he’s going to throw up on any given night. (Note to self: That might have been a bad move this week).

This Tastes Like Crow Line of the Night: Erick Dampier (4.3). His offensive game is still MIA, but the dude grabbed 16 rebounds and blocked 7 shots in a whopping 37 minutes of playing time. I still say no way in hell to him having long term fantasy value, but props to a good defensive (and fantasy) line last night from the Damp. And if he can get 37 minutes every night, well, this meal might not be over quite yet.

The Biggest Loser: Sometimes there is one thing that towers above the rest in it’s sheer worthlessness that without a doubt, it stands as a benchmark of how bad something can be (Lindsey Lohan’s acting career, for example). Today, Mike Bibby (1.5) is that benchmark. He shot 1-11 on the night, which included 0-5 from three and 0-2 from the line, and finished with 2 points. There will be better games ahead for Bibby, which on the bright side, is more than can be said for Lindsey Lohan. Although unlike Bibby, she can do nude if she really gets desperate, right? Oh, wait.

Line of the Night: LeBron James (5.8) doesn’t own the line of the night, but he clearly has some kind of timeshare agreement with it. If he calls ahead and makes reservations, it’s his. James went for 25/7/11 with 3 steals as the new-look Cavs beat the Grizzles 109 to 89. How did all the new Cavs look? Would you believe Ben Wallace (4.0) – with 12 and 10 - had the best game? Really, he did. Delonte West (3.3) shot a horrid 2-12, but he did manage 6 assists and 3 steals. And Wally Szczerbiak (2.7) was 4-10 with 10 points and didn’t do much else.

Honorable Mentions: Rashard Lewis (5.7) only managed 16 points, but filled up the rest of his box score with 7 boards, 4 threes, 2 steals and 3 blocks; Lamar Odom (5.5) went for 19 and 11 with 3 blocks; Jason Kidd (5.4) had 17 assists and 4 steals (32 assists for Kidd in his last 2 games – it look likes the country has a little room for old men after all); and Paul Pierce (5.4) led the Celtics to their first win in their last 4 games with 30/7/5 and 4 threes.

Waiver Wire Line of the Night: Andrea Bargnani (5.7) is available in one of my more shallow leagues. Last night, he torched the Knicks for 25 points off 5 threes and added 7 boards, 5 assists and 2 blocks by “being more aggressive from the beginning [of the game]”. Clearly, being aggressive is a good approach to the game of basketball and it’s a good sign that he realizes it, but the recent addition of Primoz Brezec isn’t great news for Bargnani’s long term fantasy value.

As predictable as a coin flip: I’m going to continue to beat the Tyrus Thomas (4.6) drum until he’s owned in every single league in existence, including bass fishing leagues, or he starts sucking again, whichever comes first. Thomas scored 18 points in only 26 minutes yesterday. He also managed 6 boards, 5 assists, 2 blocks, and 4 lines of cocaine in that small amount of time. And it’s good to see that Shane Battier (4.3) is still alive. His double-double (which was his most productive game in 2008) helped the Rockets win their 12th straight game.

The Biggest Loser: No wonder the Suns got spanked by the Pistons 116 to 86. Shaquille O’Neal (1.9) was 3-8 from the floor and 1-8 from the line and finished with 7 points; Grant Hill (1.6) was 0 for 6 from the floor and put up the old goose egg, and Boris Diaw (1.5) was 1-4, scoring 2 points. With shooters like that, it’s no surprise that Steve Nash (3.6) only managed 6 assists.