Drafting in a high end "expert" league: 82games plays NBA Fantasy Basketball

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Drafting in a high end "expert" league

While high end (read: not trivial entry fee) fantasy football and fantasy baseball contests seem to proliferate with each year, there's been surprisingly little happening on the NBA fantasy basketball front for people wanting to play against presumably tough competition with something more than bragging rights at stake.

So it is that 82games lent its support to Greg Ambrosius' effort to launch the "National Fantasy Basketball Championship" which apparently has been licensed by the NBA itself (no doubt as a proving ground in part for this concept).

It was a last minute kind of thing and unfortunately the fourth twelve team league wasn't filled in time...a shame, particularly since ESPN's Bill Simmons was tentatively entered had it filled.

The Details:
- three separate 12-team leagues
- rotisserie scoring with conventional categories (Pts, Reb, Ast, 3's, Stl, Blk, Fg%, Ft%)
- start four G's, four F's, two C's, two Flex each week, with four bench players

Since we don't think of players in terms of their "fantasy value" but instead their "real world value" it takes a little reconfiguring of our player perceptions in many cases!

82games Team
(Drafting from the #6 spot, serpentine draft)

1. Gilbert Arenas, G
2. Andrei Kirilenko, F
3. Rashard Lewis, F
4. Marcus Camby , C
5. Jason Terry , G
6. Manu Ginobili , G
7. Richard Hamilton , G
8. Wally Szczerbiak , G/F
9. Darko Milicic , F/C
10. Shareef Abdur-Rahim , F
11. Ryan Gomes , F
12. Udonis Haslem , F
13. Donyell Marshall , F
14. Jose Calderon , G
15. Primoz Brezec , C
16. Ruben Patterson , F

Will this team be competitive? Only time will tell of course, and the league has no trading but a free agent bidding process once/week. With 12x16 = 192 players already off the board, there aren't likely to be many free agents with tons of value!

The full picks round by round of all teams in the league can be seen on the Mock Draft Central NFBBC grid sheet. Here's your chance to diss our fantasy expertise!

NBA.com Fantasy Games

If you have an interest in fantasy hoops, the NBA official site is offering up some choices, the one of which catches our eye is the Pick One Challenge where you select a player each day to accumulate fantasy points, with the kicker being you can only use a player once a season! That's a game that is ripe with strategic options and could be very interesting from a tactical standpoint. Sadly the prizes are a little paltry to be frank, coming as it does from the league office!

Yahoo! Experts League

To set ourselves up for even more ridicule, we've accepted an invitation to participate in the Yahoo! Friends And Family League, an experts event of sorts, which has had many notables from the fantasy basketball world over the years. That drafts tomorrow, so you'll be able to see what went down in a slightly different format (there's a Turnovers category, and only 9 starters a week) on Thursday at Yahoo! Experts League

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