Day 51 of 170: Troy Murphy Does His Best Danny Granger Impersonation

Categorized as: Author: Patrick, Fantasy Basketball
Posted on: December 17th, 2009

Line of the Night: The second line of the night for Troy Murphy (1.51) this week. And he did it in a sea of good lines with his efficiency – Murphy was 10-13 from the floor, scoring 26 points and adding 15 rebounds, 5 threes and no turnovers. At this point, I think we pretty much know who is going to be stepping up for the Pacers while Danny Granger is out.

Honorable Mentions: With 12 games going yesterday, there were plenty of strong fantasy performances. Pau Gasol (1.4) had an insane 26 point, 22 rebound double-double in an overtime win over the Bucks. He also blocked 4 shots; Dirk Nowitzki (1.28) bounced back from a poor shooting game on Monday to score 35 on 13-18 shooting; Lebron James (1.17) had a 36/6/7 in a win over the Sixers; Dwight Howard (1.14) had a less-impressive-than-Pau 18 points and 14 rebounds, but did block 8 shots and didn’t need an overtime to do it; and LotN winner from yesterday Tim Duncan (1.08) isn’t too old to go for back-to-back good games with 27 points and 15 rebounds against the “Yes Vlad Radmanovic is our center” Golden State Warriors.

Injury of the Night: Chauncey Billups (0.36) left last night’s game in the third quarter with an apparent groin injury. He’ll get an MRI on it today and is currently listed as day-to-day. In his absence, Carmelo Anthony (1.06) stepped up his game to even higher… uh… heights, scoring 38 points while going a crazy 19-20 from the free throw line. If you’re a Billups owner, it might be a good idea to pick up Ty Lawson (0.11) just for insurance purposes.

Waiver Wire Line of the Night: Jason Williams (0.71) is only owned in 19% of leagues, but with Jameer Nelson returning soon, Williams’ days of 13 point, 7 assist games are coming to an end.

Instead take a look at Omri Casspi (0.55). More important than the 22 points he scored against the Wizards was the fact that he started for the first time all year and played a season high 38 minutes for the Jazz. The wildly underperforming Spencer Hawes (-0.41) was mercifully benched for the first half of this game and only got a total of 8 minutes. That pushed Jason Thompson to center and opened up a starting spot for Casspi. It remains to be seen if this a permanent move, but the Kings won this game so it wouldn’t be surprising if they continued to start Casspi for as long as they were winning.

The Biggest Loser: Do we go with the Golden State Warriors for starting Vladimir Radmanovic (-0.79) at center? I know their options are limited, but the 105 year old Bill Russell could do better for them at center at this point than Vlad’s 1 point and 1 rebound in 25 minutes.

Or maybe our expectations of Vlad are so low at this point that we have to point out someone else. Kevin Durant (-0.68) certainly brings higher expectations. Durant was throwing up bricks against the Mavs, going 4-18 from the field and turning the ball over 4 times. The fact that the Thunder “only” lost by 14 points is impressive considering that Russell Westbrook led the team in scoring with 16 points.

All Eyez on Me: The NBA’s customary three games tonight, which is good because apparently there is a little holiday coming up that I apparently have to buy people gifts for. I don’t know, sounds like some kind of scam to me.

Orlando (19-6) at Miami (12-11) – Rule number one of blogging: anytime you can link to someone else’s work to save you time and effort, you’ve got to do that. But in reading the Peninsula is Mightier game preview, it got me focused on the curious case of Mario Chalmers, who was benched in the Heat’s last game for missing a team shoot around. The larger problem is that Chalmers has actually regressed stats-wise this year compared to his strong rookie season and still apparently has many things to learn about running an offense. That may give Carlos Arroyo a chance to get some extra play for the Heat going forward, although not necessarily enough to be worth picking up in normal leagues.

New York (8-16) at Chicago (8-15) – What do we have to look forward to in this one? Well, the battle of Joakim Noah vs. David Lee. And Eddy Curry is slowly – and I do mean slowly – being worked back into the Knicks rotation to “raise his trade value” which is just wrong on so many levels.

Phoenix (17-8) at Portland (14-11) – 25 games in, Bright Side of the Sun takes a long hard look at the Suns. One thing I learned is that the Suns league the league in team 3 point percentage at 43%. They current have 6 players who are shooting over 40% from three on the season, not led by Channing Frye, but rather Jared Dudley and his 48% shooting from three.

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Tags: Kevin Durant, Omri Casspi, Troy Murphy