Negation In Theory: My Rebuttal To The Sports Guy's Fantasy World

The Jedi has posted a response to Bill Simmons' latest and I have to say there's plenty of food for thought. As a longtime Simmons reader, I've always appreciated his style and influence on internet sportswriting, and I'll keep reading practically anything he publishes. But that being said, I've always suspected his "expertise" in fantasy basketball was more bravado than proven fact. We've seen him dominate clueless celebs in the NBA Cares celeb league, but what does it prove? Hats off to Bill and Matthew Berry for inviting challengers to apply for a league in the latest BS Report podcast, but now I just think it's time to call the man out. What started as a response on FBJ's post spiraled out of control and into a creature of its own. I could rail for hours against 10 team leagues and 15 man rosters, but I'll try to limit my thoughts to Bill's own suggestions...

1) Double-weighting for "obvious" categories kills a huge part of the strategy that having 9 cats brings to fantasy hoops.

Simmons:

"I'm all for more stat categories, but isn't something terribly wrong when points count the same as free throw percentage or three-pointers? How is that realistic? ... Give double weight to the points, rebounds and assists categories."

The argument at play here is from a similar line of reasoning as the one used to argue against counting TOs in those silly 8 category leagues. The less-informed fantasy geek will claim that we shouldn't include turnovers because it devalues the real life efforts of players who are actually good enough to play a lot of minutes therefore and carry the ball enough to lose it. The elegance of 9, equally-weighted categories are a huge part of what makes a fantasy basketball draft so important. While certainly there would eventually be ordered a new ranking of players from top to bottom of the league, it will also make draft decisions about a million times easier- when in doubt, pick the guy who shoots more. After all, Simmons objects to percentages mattering nearly as much as "real" stats like points, rebounds and assists.

"You know things are a little off when Andrei Kirilenko is 25 times more valuable in fantasy than in real life."

Really? So the solution is to adopt a system which values the second easiest scoring category to produce in throughout the entire sport of basketball? After all, making a basket is the single most commonly scored action in the sport other than simply committing the act of shooting for the basket. But when attempting to follow Simmons' rationale, his funny-funny Andrei Kirilenko joke is sort of dwarfed by the horror of a world in which Zach Randolph is valued significantly higher than Rasheed Wallace due solely to the fact that Z-Bo's 5 points and 4 rebounds eclipse Sheed's contributions in 3s and blocks. How much easier would fantasy basketball be if we just reverted back to points, boards and assists when evaluating players because of this inflated sense of false value? Not to double-up on the Knicks-as-Devil Terms thing, but that logic extrapolates Stephon Marbury's recent career per-46 averages into a top 5 fantasy point guard!

I'm sorry to have done that to you. My point is made.

2) A free agent "auction" system is a novel idea, and even if it was a good one, it would still be superfluous for most leagues.

As documented in Sam Walker's excellent book, Fantasyland, auction drafting is a really cool format that's lots of (time-consuming) fun. But unlike in fantasy baseball, where as many as 50% of the players you draft may well be dropped/traded multiple times by season's halfway point, or fantasy football, where pretty much the entire point of the sport is to draft a few good running backs and only look at the wire when Tom Brady needs surgery, fantasy basketball is special for the shared importance of both the draft and its free agency system.

I'll be the first to argue a case against "streaming" (using one or more roster spots for the constant adding/dropping of free agents from waivers in order to stack countable stats in a week.) But at the same time, I'll make that argument as a means of pointing out why you will more often than not be hurting your chances to win when you stream, not necessarily that the practice should be outlawed. Streaming is a viably strategy that should exist to allow players to compensate for a bad draft or bad luck. As Bill himself claimed, losing a franchise player can often spell one's doom:

"Unlike in football or baseball, you cannot survive an injury to a franchise player in fantasy hoops... With Wade out, my season was essentially over, all playoff hopes squashed."

I'm sorry, but Jose Calderon went undrafted in one of my leagues (I had to autodraft that one, otherwise I'd have had him in the draft) and something like almost half of ESPN and Yahoo leagues last season. And despite averaging over 5 assists from the bech, we've all heard countless stories of how he sat on the wire for nearly a month while TJ Ford started. And even if you couldn't get a good free agent by acumen and insight alone, last season offered a pretty good crew to run PG by platoon. No, you probably wouldn't win your league if your first round pick sits the season, but you can make the damned playoffs. If you're playing for seed, or even just for pride, that should make a difference. Unfortunately, Bill's suggestion precludes an ability to put strategic skills to use during a season, and instead says "let's just draft again for the playoffs!"

But perhaps the most obvious response would be to say that if you don't like infinite free agency, limit the maximum number of moves an owner can make or lock it up after a month. The mechanism exists in practically every league already. And while we're on the subject of inane and redundant ideas...

3) If you're not already requiring an active roster of PG, SG, SF, PF, C, and then a combination of Utility and Benched players, you're playing in a shitty league.

Yeah... Sorry.

4) Why extend the season and re-draft players when you can just shorten the season and achieve the same effect?

"Extend fantasy through the real NBA playoffs... The top four advance to the playoffs... keeping six players and filling out their rosters with players from the teams that didn't make it. No boomerang here, though; just the No. 1 team drafting first and every four picks after that."

You get almost exactly the same effect of preserving better statistical consistency for minutes and production, counteract coaches' decisions to rest players or players' easing off to stay fresh for the playoffs. But if you just shorten the fantasy season by two weeks, you get the best of this world as well as

5) Let's get our goals straight.

My reaction is probably got so visceral because I read this:

"But most of all, I love it because my idea gives the NBA the longest fantasy season of any sport—eight solid months—bringing us closer to our ultimate goal: playing fantasy 365 days a year. Yes, we can. Yes, we can."

Maybe we can, but no we shouldn't. See, Simmon's has two contradictory goals in this column. He claims that these suggestions are intended to help increase basketball's fantasy popularity to a level similar to baseball's and football's, but also to lengthen fantasy sports to a 365 day activity. Guess what? A huge part of fantasy football's popularity is that it is the easiest pretend sport to play, and I'd argue that's fact mostly because football's season is by far the shortest of all fantasy games. How many times have you heard people tell you they love football because "every game matters?" The solution isn't to alienate the population from that sentiment while trying to compensate with a "do-over" and return back to the security blanket of getting to pick new players who have been proven by a regular season run of value.

I'm not claiming that basketball should be exclusionary, but one of the reasons I love the game (and, I suspect, why Bill does too) is that it's the hardest and most sophisticated fantasy game of them all. We won't make it any more popular for the season being longer, nor should the goal be to make it a more "popular" attraction than football or baseball. Rather, we should strive to improve the game as best we can because offering a better product to those people who aren't playing it is the best way to get them to actually try it out.