There is a time limit on draft picks (1.5 hr during working hours), which in a 30-man league can get a confusing even with automatic email updates. While most people have been on the ball, there have been a few autopicks from the CBS list.

I can’t speak for Evan Silva personally, but after looking at his picks so far, I do like his 3,4, and 5 a lot better than his 1 and 2.

@dyeyk, I tried to come up with a Points league where the Points awarded were based on Hollinger’s PER calculation (the simple version – without all the normalization). In the end, it made it harder to assess player value, the points awarded were kind of like funny munny, and it didn’t change the value of most players significantly.

@Brendan, you hit upon one of the very reasons I started this blog in the first place. Those experts don’t give us enough content over the summer, and then when they bombard us in Sept/Oct, it’s fairly obvious or stuff that’s just not very accurate.

@dyeyk (pt 2), I agree with your Waiver Wire idea. I think it totally makes sense to have WW/Free Agent pick ups only processed once a day based on how many people are trying to pick up each particular player. Is there a way to do that in any league you know of? I think Yahoo basically does this at the beginning of the season where players go on Waivers after the draft, but that only lasts for as long as the normal Waiver Wire length.

SOLUTION?

Have all FA on permanent waiver-wire status until somebody picks them up, in which case a 1 day waiver deadline (12mn) commences.

This way everybody lines up. Say for example, last year, when Ford went down, everybody must have raced to their monitors to pick up Calderon. In this system, no such thing happens, everybody is given the rest of the day to “bid” for Calderon off the waivers. By 12mn that day, the system looks at all the players who have bids and then sorts the winners by waiver priority. Those who won the waiver pick up, automatically gets moved to end of the waiver priority queue. Those who don’t have bids remain in a permanent waiver-wire status. Easy peasy.

I’ve been a lot more vitriolic about corporate fantasy “experts” like the guys on ESPN or CBS lately. I just think that fantasy bloggers are more about the edge of theory and player rating, where the big companies are more interested in administering leagues and driving up market share, so you get guys like Karabell just sound like an idiot with his “out there” argument for Chris Paul at #2 behind LeBron.

Anyway, this is quite disappointing. I’ve never seen Bill Simmons shoot himself this much in the foot. It’s obvious that the man is trying to innovate for the sake of innovation. The problems he posts are relevant don’t get me wrong, but the solutions he posts are shallow, like something he just jotted down in 10 min.

I could have a million opinions on this article, but one that stands out the most is my rebuttal on his view of the kinds of statistics we use for fantasy (points, rebs, blocks etc)

We have to take step back and look at history here. For years, basketball statistics has been very shallow. We thought that what makes a player good, are the amount of points or blocks or rebounds he gets. Thus we patterned Fantasy Basketball on those stats. But we know now that that is not true. Basketball Statistics have advanced and we have better measurements such as Ass/TO ratio, PER, +/-, Win Scores, Usage Rate, Rebound Rate etc. All better gauges of a players true value. Even real NBA teams rely heavily on these stats.

If he wanted to talk about realism, why not use the above statistics for a fantasy league? I for one, find the idea intriguing <3