Playoff Fantasy Basketball

Categorized as: Author: Patrick, Fantasy Basketball, NBA Playoffs
Posted on: April 27th, 2008

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.

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