What's the Deal with Fantasy Basketball?

It seems like every year fantasy sports keeps getting more popular. This is because there are more outlets to play fantasy sports on and they promote it more. Fantasy football has to be the most popular of all. I think this is because it’s the least time consuming sport to play. The games are only once a week so you only have to check your team once or twice to make moves and then set your lineups. Baseball is every day, but there seems to be many die hard baseball fans who want to play fantasy baseball. Basketball is a major sport, but I feel like Fantasy Basketball is a completely different story. I don’t have stats on how many people play Fantasy football, Fantasy Baseball, and Fantasy basketball every year, but the drop off to how many play fantasy basketball has to be big. I feel like not many people play fantasy basketball from doing Mock drafts, trying to find competitive managers for the GOI league, and the quality outlets to read and listen (podcasts) on Fantasy Basketball. These are the three reasons why I feel this way and it has been starting to bother me more and wonder why?

To prepare for this fantasy basketball season I wanted to practice in some mock drafts. As I started going into the Mock drafts I noticed more and more they were empty! Only if you went during the rush could you find a mock draft fill up with actual users and not the computer. TBO and myself tried to do a mock draft together and we had this problem. When I tired many times on my own I experienced this problem. I was surprised at the time to see this occur because I never saw anything like it for the hundreds and hundreds of fantasy football and fantasy baseball mock drafts I have done over the years.

Then I tried to find competitive players for this year’s GOI league. Last year we had a few managers who weren’t that competitive so we were trying to fix that problem this year. It was very hard to find people who were basketball fans that have played fantasy basketball before. Finally after a lot of work we found a good group of manager’s, but it was much harder than it should have been and harder than finding managers for other Fantasy Sports. Everyone I was asking who I knew was basketball fans said they didn’t want to because they never did it before; they don’t have time, or not good at it. This made me think it’s just too time consuming or to difficult compared to the other sports.

The last thing that me realize that fantasy basketball is further behind the other big sports in fantasy is the maturity level in coverage. There are hundreds of good fantasy sites for fantasy football and baseball with great coverage and analysis. You can go to ESPN, Yahoo, other sites, and blog’s and get great analysis. I don’t feel the same is true with fantasy basketball. Many of the articles I read I don’t find as informative or ground breaking as I learn in other sports. There are many podcast’s you can listen to for other fantasy sports, not for basketball. ESPN started a fantasy podcast on basketball this year. How could they not have one before? This podcast is one day a week!!! You can’t cover a sport properly with one day a week. This podcast is growing on me, and they make some good points, but it isn’t great. It is the best fantasy basketball podcast fix I can find though.

My first two points dealt with the lack of popularity people that play it. This point shows that the media and sports giants don’t even value fantasy basketball as much. This could go hand in hand with it not being as popular, but either way fantasy basketball needs to develop to the same level as fantasy football and baseball.

Do you agree with me that fantasy basketball feels much different than the other two major fantasy sports?