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Scott at Waiting For Next Year is hosting the Boom, Roasted Edition of the Carnival.

GMTR got two links in the Carnival compared to just one for everyone else. Boom, roasted.

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• Carnival of the NBA #62 (0)

So, I decided to go through my Google Reader and throw together the links that I liked.

Seems everyone loves them some Shaq and the Jabbawockeez.

http://www.hoopsfantasy.com/kobe-and-shaq-co-mvps-in-all-star-game-video/

Kelly Dwyer has the insightful insightfulness when it comes to the actual All Star Game.

You’ve seen the entire Sprite Dunk Contest via YouTube, so now, check out James “Flight” White in the NBDL contest. And of course, The Basketball Jones had The People’s Dunk Contest.

Oh, and did you know that Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant are going to join LeBron James in New Jersey in 2010? Baleed it.

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• Day 97 of 170: Fake Tough Guys (1)
• GMTR Mock Draft Analysis: Round One (17)
• Day 12 of 170: LeBron James Will Do That in Your House (5)
• Day 39 of 124: Where Brandon Jennings Defies the Odds (24)
• Day 21 of 124: Battle: Los Angeles (19)
• Day 18 of 124: Where John Lucas Does his Best Derrick Rose Impersonation (57)
• Chris Paul to the Lakers – David Stern, NBA Blocks Deal (5)

ESPN’s Seth Landman talks about Marvin Williams before going on to evaluate some players who are trending up and down.

The Fantasy Sports Blog had Lesters Legends’ Top Fantasy Basketball Performers for 2/9/09.

And finally, it’s not fantasy-related, but StevieY19 roasts the Bulls, and it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Can’t wait to see more bloggers do this for their teams. I’d do it to, but Stevie already did it for the Bulls and did a damn fine job of it.

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• GMTR Podcast #22: Fantasy Basketball Recap of the Year Spectacular (2)
• Day 36 of 124: Kobe Bryant Passes Kareem (37)
• Day 32 of 124: Where Tyrus Thomas Beckons You with his Sweet Siren Call (59)
• First Month Report Card: Top 20 Power Forwards in Fantasy Basketball (2)
• First Month Report Card: Top 20 Centers in Fantasy Basketball (9)
• Day 30 of 124: Where the Magic Have No Tricks up Their Sleeve (60)
• Day 28 of 124: We Can Build a Better Gasol (23)

Points in the Paint is now big enough to have moved to the Bloguin network. Erik will still be posting here, but he’s kind of acting as a double-agent now, I guess. His double-agenting begins with that Ronny Turiaf post, and continues with this post about how to make the playoffs in your head-to-head league. It’s almost as if Rachel Gibson (aka Rachel Nichols) and Jason Bourne had a love child.

Fantasy Basketball Jedi reports that Jameer Nelson is probably out for a month with a dislocated shoulder. A shame, because he was really starting to come on as a fantasy basketball player (as evidenced by his Top 20 ranking on both the 8 and 9 cat Player Raters).

The creatively-named NBA Fantasy Basketball Blog has Fantasy Basketball All-Stars from both conferences. Clearly, they’re not just the best fantasy players in each conference, but more like a list of underrated fantasy players who are performing at a high level.

Speaking of All-Stars, we all know that Chris Paul is a fantasy stud, but did you know he’s valuable as a real-world basketball player too???

Oh, and did you hear Kobe dropped 61 on the Knicks in MSG? According to Hardwood Paroxysm that qualifies him to become Death, The Destroyer of Worlds. And you can’t really argue.

And I think I forgot to mention… she’s going to be in the GI Joe movie. Which, by the way, is going to be AWESOME.

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• Day 36 of 124: Kobe Bryant Passes Kareem (37)
• First Month Report Card: Top 20 Shooting Guards in Fantasy Basketball (10)
• GMTR Podcast #25: The Kobe System (28)
• Day 21 of 124: Battle: Los Angeles (19)
• Day 20 of 124: Deron Starts Scarin’ – Kobe Keeps It Going (23)
• Day 18 of 124: Where John Lucas Does his Best Derrick Rose Impersonation (57)
• Day 17 of 124: Old Man Kobe (46)

RotoEvil hands out an extensive set of mid-season fantasy awards

RotoAssist has advice that would probably be more apropos for the beginning of the season, but sometimes we need to forget about trees for a second and realize that our team is a forest.

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• Dam for a Stream before it's a River? (8)
• Final Fantasy Basketball Pre-Season Links (0)
• Fantasy Basketball Tiers: Power Forwards (9)
• Fantasy Basketball Player Tiers: Shooting Guards (10)
• Fantasy Basketball App for iPhone (7)
• Links for Fantasy Basketball Draft Weekend (2)
• The Top 150 Fantasy Basketball Players for 2011-12 (31)

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• Carnival of the NBA #63: Stress Relief (3)

Going through the links in the order I opened them up in Firefox…

Lesters Legends was so fast they had to add a caveat that Zach Randolph might be traded after Crawford. The Warriors analysis is still valid, though.

John Lorge also threw up a quick post at Bleacher Report.

Brendan at 2nd Round Reach starts with a post on the Harrington-Crawford trade, and follows up up with a clever motivational poster that more than accurately explains the reasons behind sending Zach Randolph and Mardy Collins to LA.

Eno Sarris posted on Fantasy Lounge Sports using a unique Sell Hi Buy Lo system. There’s some other guys in there too, in case you had a momentary lapse and forgot there were more than three teams in the league.

Matt Buser has his guesses at the depth charts for the teams involved at Yahoo’s Roto Arcade.

Finally, Stephen Kersey at HoopsFantasy has a brief analysis with (I believe) unintentionally funny pictures.

So… what does Nels think?

New York Knicks

Well, I’m not putting a lot of faith in Cuttino Mobley topping Nate Robinson on the depth chart. Even if he does, they’ll probably be splitting the minutes to the point where Mobley won’t have much more value than he did with the Clippers.

Al Harrington obviously gets the biggest boost in value of anyone in any of these trades. He’ll probably get back to the same kind of stats he had last season with Warriors before being given the opportunity to rest up for his new assignment.

Someone will have to pick up the extra scoring (as Patrick mentioned, they need to replace 40 points), but for all we know, it could be Al Harrington who will go back to scoring 18 points per game.

Los Angeles Clippers

This one is pretty easy for the up-front work… at least, in that, Randolph, Marcus Camby, and Chris Kaman are all going to take slight hits. Randolph will probably see the least significant drop since his main priority is scoring and only after that, rebounding. He’s still going to score a lot, because why else would the Clippers trade for him if they didn’t plan to use him as their replacement for Elton Brand.

I highly doubt that Kaman will maintain his current 36 minute per game average. Camby is more likely to hang on to his 27, because he’ll be backing up Kaman and Randolph. He can spell them each for 14 minutes, leaving 34 minutes at the 4 and 5 spots.

Eric Gordon looks like a pretty good pick up to me. I mean, really, does anyone take Ricky Davis seriously anymore? He’s not going to get more PT than Gordon, especially as the season goes on.

Golden State Warriors

I think it’s pretty clear to everyone that Jamal Crawford will continue being a relatively decent fantasy player until Monta Ellis returns. Us JC owners are hoping that comes later than soon, of course. Until that time, though, Crawford fills their need at the PG spot very well. Of course, this means that when Kelenna Azubuike returns from his mild knee sprain then Anthony Morrow’s run is probably over. Crawford and Azubuike will be taking up most of the minutes on the court at the 1 and 2 positions.

Since Al Harrington wasn’t actually playing for the Warriors, there’s not a lot else that will change for them.

Take it all in, fantasy owners. There’s going to be a lot of playing time to watch in the upcoming few days.

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• Knicks Clean House: Patiently Wait for the Summer of LeBron (4)
• Jordan: One Week Plug-in for Your Fantasy Team (7)
• Day 47 of 170: In Which I Can't Really Be Sure (3)
• Day 35 of 170: The Don Nelson Motivational Tour: Tickets Still Available (2)
• The Commute for November 12, 2008 (2)
• Fantasy Basketball Preview: Los Angeles Clippers (5)
• 2010-11 Top 25 Fantasy Centers (3)

First on the agenda – before I talk more about the new and improved INTENSE DEBATE comments – what is The Commute? Well, The Commute is sort of like the Carnival (or Carnivore) of the Fantasy NBAs that I so seldom post around here. It’s also sort of like the Day Number posts in that I hope to do this on a daily basis, because honestly, why waste all this time I spend reading about fantasy basketball with just some dynamic shared links in the sidebar? I go through the day spending way too much time in Google Reader, and I also usually get at least one or two relevant links from my Google Alerts. So, in The Commute, I will collect those links and when I feel like it and/or have time, I will comment and/or blockquote from them.

Next up: New Comments! Yee HA! Got my invite to install Intense Debate and did so as promptly as possible. I’m happy to notice that people without Intense Debate accounts are able to comment as easily as ever, and now we can try to expand the community ever further into some sort of fantasy basketball fetishist social network. If you didn’t realize that was the entire point of this blog in the first place, you may quietly excuse yourself now and no one will think less of you.

So, you can now reply to comments instead of having to use @user, and you can rate comments so people can get an idea of how reliable the commentors on Give Me The Rock are. You can also use your Intense Debate profile on other blogs that support Intense Debate (which should be a lot once it becomes a default plugin for WordPress), and have the ability to aggregate all your commenting action in one location. And also in that profile, you can add, well, a profile! Add links to your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and lots of other things (I haven’t done this just yet, but I’ll get around to it). You can also easily pull in your Gravatar (even though that only really matters to the couple of people commenting who have gravatars).

Okay, so on to the actual fantasy basketball content!

Everyone’s Favorite: OJ Mayo has made the Hot Spot on Yahoo’s NBA Home page. Usually I don’t put much faith in the 3 players they display there, but Luol Deng and Ben Gordon have been heating up as well, so maybe they finally got a good formula. Or they finally got lucky.

Starting now from the left: NovaFantasySports.com provides their weekly Hot or Not. It’s kind of like the real Hot or Not except with more words and less pictures. They also agree that OJ Mayo is hot. So are Chris Duhon (though not as much as Jamal Crawford), Brandan Wright, Zach Randolph, and Nene Hilario.

Eric Karabell takes a look at the impact off-season moves are having. Because it’s one thing to look at them when they happen and make predictions. But Karabell looks at what is going on now with Andre Iguodala, Chris Kaman, Andrew Bogut, Mike Conley, and Chris Bosh.

I recently discovered newsday.com’s fantasy sports column written by Adam Ronis who is one of those guys who enters the Big Money fantasy competitions.

Speaking of guys who enter Big Money fantasy leagues, Evil E analyzes the team he drafted in a league with a $650 entry fee. Get inside the head.

Lester Legends recap for 11/11 – the top performers in Points, Rebounds, Assists, Steals, Blocks.

Stephen Kersey at Hoops Fantasy talks about the Knicks. An excerpt:

First of all, Jamal Crawford and Zach Randolph both appear to be safe bets. Crawford has been very consistent over the last few years and should put up similar stats this year. Don’t expect to see a big jump in his production because although he has a green light this year, he’s always had a green light. Randolph, on the other hand, should see his production rise — due partly to D’Antoni and partly to Eddy Curry being out of the way.

FantasyBasketball.com’s The Pulse blog talks about the explosion of Ronnie Brewer. Of course, we had him listed at 105 on the Player Rater, so theoretically he should have been drafted in just about every league in existence.

Brendan continues 2nd Round Reach’s Rotation Reports with the Central Divison in which he tries to offend an entire country who’s sole purpose is to offend nobody.

And finally, another guy (Adam Ronis being the first, Evil E being the second) who isn’t scared to throw his picture on his blog, CBSSports’ Sergio Gonzalez. This time he’s writing about Nick Young, who has been filling in ably for Gilbert Arenas. Sure, he’s no Gilbert Arenas, but then, Gilbert Arenas is no Black President. There is also a list of guys to look at picking up.

And there you have it. The Commute. Oh, here’s my exit.

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• Day 32 of 124: Where Tyrus Thomas Beckons You with his Sweet Siren Call (59)
• Carnival of the Cap Space Trades (7)
• 2010-11 Top 25 Fantasy Centers (3)
• Day 159 of 170: Don’t call him “Iggy” (3)
• Jordan: One Week Plug-in for Your Fantasy Team (7)
• Day 76 of 170: Ray Allen is a shooter (1)
• Day 35 of 170: The Don Nelson Motivational Tour: Tickets Still Available (2)

Atlanta Hawks
Matt McHale: Basketbawful
Hoopinion: Peachtree Hoops

Charlotte Bobcats
BrettL: Queen City Hoops 
Ziggy: BobcatsPlanet

Miami Heat
Darren Heitner: SportsAgentBlog.com
Gregory Broome: The Peninsula is Mightier

Orlando Magic
Ben: Third Quarter Collapse

Washington Wizards
Rashad: Hoops Addict
HoopsAvenue: HoopsAvenue
Mike Prada: Bullets Forever
Truth: Truth About It Dot Net

Also see links to all the previews at CelticsBlog.com

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