GOI Fantasy Basketball league

I thought the NBA lockout was going to last the entire season and the entire NBA season was going to be canceled. TBO and myself actually made a bet on this if we would have a season. I said there would be no season, and TBO said I was crazy so we had a Wendy's board wager on the line. He won and I had to pay up. So the NBA season has been back since Christmas and with that means fantasy basketball.

This is the third year of GOI fantasy basketball league. We didn't create the league right away because of the lockout, so we waited until the lockout was over and then scrambled to have it ready for the season. I tell you folks, I don't know how the NBA did it with free agency, training camps, exhibition games, and everything else. It was hard enough to create a league when your busy with work, find people who will be competitive, a draft time that works for everyone, figure out all the settings, and most important make everyone in a 13 team league happy! I don't know if we accomplished that last goal, but GOI has a 13 team, live auction rotisserie league.

The third annual GOI fantasy basketball league drafted on December 19th. This year in addition to having TBO and myself in the league, Adam "Sexy Rexy" Kaplan joined for his first year of fantasy basketball. So we have three of the four GOI authors. We did try and convince David "MVP" Eckstein to play, but all of our attempts were unsuccessful this year. Hopefully next year he will join us. TBO won the league last year so he is looking to repeat. I won two years ago, but fell to third place last year so I am looking to rebound and take back first place. Adam is trying to prove he knows enough about basketball to compete with us. Like in previous years, I will post updates about the leagues a few times throughout the season.

As I mentioned earlier, this was a auction league with a $300 budget I raised from the default of $200. The rationale for raising it was so managers wouldn't run out of money so quickly at the end, and have some money to spend in such a deep to league to make it fun. Even though I understood the logic that if you raise the budget, it just inflates the players values, that is exactly what happened. It did inflate the players values throughout the draft, but those who did wait and save, did have enough to spend and were able to buy people later in the draft when people were going for much more than $1 players, which was my concern. The inflation rate was about 33%.

Adam's strategy was to get Chris Paul and build around him. In addition to Paul he got Stoudemire, and Curry for a good core nucleus of stud's. He obviously went with a stars and scrubs approach. Here is the team he drafted:

TBO drafted a stud guard in Dwyane Wade and a Stud big guy in Blake Griffin. He also drafted good role players with a lot of upside in Brook Lopez, Luol Deng, Andrew Bynum, James Harden, Paul George, Gerald Henderson, and Derrick Favors. Sadly for him, Lopez is now out 4-6 weeks and Bynum missed the first 5 games of the season. He has a good core though and good depth. Here is how his draft looks:

My Team, Cubsfan4evr had a different approach from the other 2 teams. I don't have any big superstars. I went for more of a well balanced team trying to collect assets. My studs are Al Horford, Steve Nash, and Kevin Martin. These studs aren't on the same caliber of Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, Blake Griffin, and Amare Stoudemire, but I like my team. I have very good role players in Roy Hibbert, Gortat, Holiday, Turkoglu, Collison, Jennings, Blatche, and Frye. I have three players off to rough starts in Jennings, Blatche, and Frye, but if they pick it up by team will be unstoppable. Here is how my draft looks:

As you see I didn't spend all of my money, which I never seem to do in any auction..........but I am getting better with that.