The third year of my All-Cute Team is set. That's the name of my fantasy basketball league. The name originated because I thought, and continue to think, that Allen Iverson is a "cute" man. It may sound questionable, but go and find a picture of him. Right now. Seriously. Keep this window open, open another one, and google search Allen Iverson and then click on Images. Done? Okay. Now you have to agree, that is one cute man. Not sexually attractive - unless thuggish is your thing - but cute. Like a puppy. A man-puppy. This led to me to the creation of an all-cute team. What other guys in the NBA have a puppy-dog cuteness to them that is totally NON sexual. I can't stress this part enough.
Creating weird "all-(adjective)" teams is sort of a Bill Simmons thing, but I may have invented the all-cute team before he came up with any of his teams. It's also a fictional team. We can play this game with anything - we can play the all-lascivious president team and put Clinton and JFK up on there for example. It's possible every president would be on there, so maybe that's a bad example. But you get the drift.
So my all-cute team ended up pretty good. While the motivation behind the all-cute team is very real, the actual execution of it, is different - I don't actually go out of my way to draft "cute" basketball players. That'd be ridiculous. Well, unless Iverson were still in the league. He's sort of my spirit animal. So my goal has always been to draft the best group of guys I can. And this year was no different.
This was my keeper league, which operates using an AUCTION format. This is different than the typical draft setup. In MOST leagues, the draft works as follows: Ten team league. Draft order is picked randomly. The first team drafts first (duh), usually the best player in the league (determined by his stats and experts opinions, etc.), then the second goes second and so on until the tenth team drafts tenth AND ELEVENTH - and then the ninth team drafts 12th and the eight drafts 13th, etc.. This is called a snake draft. There's nothing wrong with snake drafts and they work great for all fantasy sports. They are problematic, however, because sometimes, the difference between the top three best players and the fourth through 20th best player is severe, so the teams that lucked out with the top three picks get a huge advantage for no reason. This is SORT of true this year. I ended up with the third pick, as I said, in my other draft and was happy getting Chris Paul. Paul is great and, in fact, finished the last full season he played as the #1 fantasy player, but the first two picks this year were Kevin Durant and Lebron James. In that order, usually. Paul is slightly worse, statistically, than both Durant and Lebron. Nobody would take Paul over either of those guys. Ever. At the same time, at the 3 pick , I could have gone with Chris Paul or Dwyane Wade or Dirk Nowitzki or a handful of other guys. I would say that the 4 pick might be the hardest because Paul could STILL end up the #1 guy if he plays as well as we know he can but Dirk or Wade have a low shot at it. So the #4 pick has a greater chance of fucking you, essentially.
My ESPN league (my all-cute team) is a KEEPER league. We're pretty serious about it, so I'll only hit on the important rules - at the end of any given year each manager (what you call someone like me who "owns" a team) picks up to 5 "keepers" that remain on the team next year. Usually, after the year is over, all of the teams are emptied and we start all over again - in a keeper league, it's about maintaining your team and/or creating a legacy. I kept 5 players. Additionally, my ESPN league is an AUCTION league. Instead of drafting players based on an arbitrary draft order, managers NOMINATE individual available NBA players and they are BID on. For example, since I kept Kobe Bryant, he's unavailable for auction, so I choose Ron Artest as a player. The bidding starts at $1 and continues until no one is willing to match a bid. That amount becomes that players "salary" for the year. Each manager starts with $200 (FAKE) dollars - MINUS THE SALARIES OF THE PLAYERS HE KEPT.
One of the players I kept was Kobe and he was worth $50 (established from the previous year's draft) so I automatically have $50 less to play with from the start of the auction. Once you take into account my other four players, I ended up with roughly $100 dollars to draft with.
My keeper league does an incredible job of mimicking the NBA and although it can be tedious, it makes for a richer experience. This will be the third full season so we managers had to make decisions whether or not we wanted to sign our players to extended contracts. It works like this:
The first two years of a players contract remain the same. ie. I kept Kobe from his first year into his second season and his contract did not change - it was $50. At the beginning of the THIRD year, if you have players (like Kobe) who will be in their THIRD year, you must decide if you - A) want to keep them until the end of THAT season, at which point they will be released into the FA pool and eligible to be bid on the following year, in which case their salary DOES NOT increase. OR B) you want to SIGN them to a multi-year contract (ANY number of years 1-99), in which case the players salary IMMEDIATELY increases $4 per year. In my case with Kobe, I chose to keep him for ONE more year and release him at the end of the year, which kept his salary at $50. If I chose to sign him to a 2 year contract (this year and next year) he would IMMEDIATELY be valued at $54 dollars THIS year, and at $58 next year. Those totals would then be immediately subtracted from my starting auction bank. If I had a player that had a $1 salary and was in his third year (Brooke Lopez for example, who my friend Andrew has), I could have signed him to a 10 year contract, raising his 2010-11 salary to $5, his 2011-12 salary to $9, and each one thereafter $4 more. For a player that's actually WORTH $40, it's an excellent idea to lock up quality, low cost players for as long as possible.
First year players are designated as A players, second year as B players, third year players who are being released at the end of the year are Z players. Players kept for 1 year are designated as Y players, for 2 are X players, 3 is W etc all the way down the alphabet. Whenever a player is in their "Z" year, it is their final year of the contract. Oh yeah, and all player trades within the league, include their contracts. So if you signed a BAD contract, you CAN dump it off on another manager.
After that BRIEF (seriously) explanation of the league rules, here's what I ended up with: (all keepers will be the guys who AREN'T designated as "A".
The All-Cute Team
PG Rajon Rondo (Keeper - in his "U" year) - $17
SG Kobe Bryant - $50 - Z
SF Danny Granger - $42 - W
PF David Lee - $10 - U
C - Anthony Randolph - $15 - A
C - Andrew Bynum - $8 - A
G - Stephen Curry - $1 - B (kept from last year woohoo)
F - JR Smith - $3 - A
UTIL - Richard Hamilton - $16 - A
UTIL - MIke Miller - $4 - A (He's hurt for 3 months but quality quality guy)
BENCH - Brendan Haywood -$8 - A
BENCH - Andris Biedrins - $13 - A
BENCH -Thaddeus Young - $1 - A
If you do the math I actually screwed up and didn't spend $12. Its a tough thing because you try to save money for the good players at the end of the draft that nobody else saved for. It didn't work out quite the way I wanted. But I'm happy with my squad anyway. Bynum and Mike Miller are hurt so I'll need Biedrins to repeat his numbers from a few years ago and Haywood to step up and give me the boards and blocks that Bynum's absence requires. Also Anthony Randolph is unproven, but if he can stay on the court for 35 minutes, he GOT to be good for at least 8 boards and 2 blocks. The dude's a freak.
Season starts Wednesday. Booyeah.
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