Happy Martin Luther King Day to everybody. Wow, i've had a rather no-work, unproductive weekend, what with no classes on friday and monday holiday, but you know, who hasn't had one of those weekends, you know? We need them once in a while.
I was able to see the two conference championship games in the NFL, catch the Illini playing another terrible game and dropping to 1-5 in the Big Ten, have a reunion with my ASB ( Alternative Spring Break) group, watch some good movies in Mr. Brooks and Emperor's Club ( a really old one with kevin kline or something like that), play hold'em poker, catchphrase, check in on law school rankings, read some great literature ( in fact, 2007's best nonrequired reading was the title of the book), so i'd say even though academically things didn't move so fast the story of my life still trudged on.
Anyway, gonna fulfill my promises, or as triple H said tonight on RAW, "guaran- DAMN -tee", and follow up on rookie mistakes. I thought of a bunch since that last post.
First off, i think a rookie mistake in fantasy baseball is to draft too many pitchers in the first few rounds. My stance is to draft NO pitchers in the first 6 rounds unless they're absolute steals, but my stance is a little extreme. But still, pitchers yield the most risk on draft day because first off they pitch only one out of 5 games, but they get hurt a lot and skip starts, leavin them relatively unreliable, whereas the stud hitters will usually put up consistent numbers throughout the season.
I also think it's a rookie mistake to draft a 2nd-year player who had a great rookie season. There's been great rookie seasons all throughout the league, but by the 2nd year teams usually adjust to that player, and he's slowed down. The rookie would have to make a lot of adjustments to get back to that level he was playing at or better, and it's just not a gamble u wanna take. Sure, once in a while you'll draft a guy who explodes his first year and then is even better the 2nd year, but i'll take the guy who's had solid career averages anyday.
Another rookie mistake in fantasy hoops, as i alluded to earlier, is ignoring the "subliminal" categories or "non-sexy" categories like %'s and turnovers. Nobody likes these categories, as nobody's really watching people when the miss, markin it down when carmelo anthony travels or anything. It's unglorified and takes away from teh game experience. But it's important. In both rotisserie and head-to-head leagues in yahoo, there are 9 categories, each worth the same, of pts, rebs, asts, stls, 3PM, blks, FG%, FT%, and turnovers. Of these 9, the first 3 are the most watched over, as they're reported on espn first and show up in highlight reels and are perceived to be the most "reflective" of a player's performance for a particular game, but stls, blks, 3-pointers are also recorded. They're kind of like supplementary numbers in a real game, where one blk won't matter too much espeically if the offense gets it right back, or a 3-pointer where it's just one more point than a 2-pointer, but these categories show up on yahoo. And then we get to the REALLY dirty categories like FG%, FT%, and turnovers, things that are really hard to keep track of but yahoo! does a good job of updating all the time.
You have to be really careful not to be a rookie and just look at the first 3 power categories, or even just the first 6 intermediate categories. When determining a fantasy player's value, u gotta look at the complete picture, otherwise you're losing out. All things being equal, if a guy averaged 25 points but 3.2 turnvers vs. a guy who averaged 19 points but averaged just 2.0 turnovers, i'd take the latter. That 1.2 turnover difference trumps the 6 point scoring difference, in my opinion.
Actually, when you're assembling a team, scoring paradoxically becomes one of the LAST categories u concentrate on, cuz every fantasy players scores points of some magnitude, and usually it's a bonus factor that comes with a particular player's specialty. For example, rasheed wallace is known for his many-category contributions in that he averages more than a blk, a stl, and a 3 in a game, so u take those numbers with few turnvovers, but with that said he still averages 12 points a game or more, and u didn't really even consider that when u drafted him. Whereas if you just went after points, u get rip hamilton, a true scorer, u'd be missing out on several categories like blks and rebs that aren't just "packaged in" like scoring is. So keep that in mind.
Final rookie mistake to avoid:
Having someone dump a poltergeist on you in a trade. There's no real "1st-half" or "2nd-half" players in the NBA, at least not to the extent that baseball has guys who get really hot in the 2nd half, but there are guys who pack it in towards the end of the season. Guys who get hurt a lot are primary targets, like marcus camby, gerald wallace, and jermaine o'neal. The reason these guys are poltergeists is that they're like ghosts: really visible right now, but ready to disappear in a moment's notice. These guys can easily show up one day on the news wire as being out "indefinitely" or worse, like o'neal the other day, saying that "they might call it a season to repair his knee." These guys can be really really good when someone pushes them on you, but beware, cuz they'll disappear in a moment's notice.
-Fantasize on ( And don't make those rookie mistakes),
Robert Yan
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