Continued from [Site updates through Jan 4, 2008 (part 1 of 2)]

• Added a “Fantasy Tools” link to the site header. You can use this to quickly get our fantasy basketball tools.
• Created a “Multiplayer comparison tool” that is can be used for trade analysis, drafting, or just general team tweaking.  You’ll just have to see it and play with it to understand what you can do with it… trust me… you want to see it.
• Added a different background color to the “average” lines in grids that have multiple games stats.
• Added ‘opponent’ to the line grids. 
• Added a link directly to the nba schedule in the header bar of the nba section of the site. You no longer have to drill down through multiple pages to get there.
• Created a fantasy tools page (this one will get its own entry as well soon). Basically, it has links to all of our fantasy tools as well as a short description of each.
• Added a second grid to the “Distance from Average” player rater. The new grid actually lists the average of all players stats.

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We’ve been quite busy over the last few weeks getting some new tools rolled out and updating existing pages to make them more useful. Here’s the updates since the last listing. Keep the ideas coming!

• Updated league standings page so it will now not only show the wins / losses (standings), but the current ’seed’ of each team. This is simply their rank in the league.
• Updated league standings page so that when you go to the page it will show the current seasons standings. You can still review past seasons, but the default will now be the current.
• Updated view players so the top of the page matches the other pages. This just adds some consistency to minimize confusion.
• Created a statistical leaders page where the top players for each statistical category are listed. You can choose the daterange and positions you would like the calculations to be based upon.
• We put two new basketball player ranking applications out there:
• Player Rater - Distance from average [Standard Player Rater]
  Choose the stats and filters on which you want the system to rate the players. We will determine the average for all players and then put each player against those averages. The more they beat the average, the higher their rating.
• Player Rater - Battle Royale
  Choose the stats and filters on which you want the system to rate the players. Each player will compete with every other player. Whoever has the most overall wins for each stat will be rated the highest
• On league menu bar we now show the number of bids that are currently open in the league. This
  will help keep bids from “slipping through” because other owners were not aware (you no longer
  have to go all the way to the bid page to see if there are any bids in progress).
• Add ft%, fg%, 3p%, A/T to playerdetails page
• We now have player news for each player. If the players have a news item an icon shows up
  next to their name so the user knows to review the player’s details.
• Added a link to the boxscore (from a third party) to any “stat line” listings.
• Added a nba teams page to the nba section of the site. There are links to each team. Each
  team page has all of the teams players, a link to their depthchart, their team home on
  one or more external sites, and their team schedule. The schedule also includes which
  games are expected to be televised (nationally and locally).

[More updates will be posted in part 2 of 2]

Okay. First, these are not magic numbers like those to do with baseball. Nope, these are much more important magic numbers. These magic numbers tell you what will almost guarantee you a win in fantasy basketball. I was reading FantasyAddict the other day and came across an article titled Building a Better Squad that did a pretty good job of laying out what it will take to mostly guarantee a league championship. These goals are difficult to attain, but not impossible.  Here’s a portion of the article:

FG%                .470

FT%                .790

3s                     1.00 per game

Points               17.0 per game

Rebounds         7.0 per game

Assists              4.0 per game

Stl                    Between 1 and 2 per game

Blks                 Between .8 and 1.0 per game

Check your current and past leagues. Had your team posted these stats and done a good job maximizing game limits, I believe you would have finished first 9 times out of 10.

The article goes into a lot of depth about how the author came up with these numbers so you can see he didn’t just pull them out of thin air (or anywhere else for that matter). One thing to keep in mind is that these numbers are based on 8-cat roto leagues. However, I tested this against the teams in one of my current head-tohead leagues to see how the numbers would fair in that league. The first place team was pretty close to most of these, and reached on a few but not all (they failed on pts, reb, FG%). However, the ones that they came up short on they came up less short than everyone else. If I built a team that met these marks (or got close) then I would probably end up owning the league. I’m actually working towards this end now… this article did a great job giving me something to shoot for… sometimes you do better shooting for 17 pts per game than you would shooting for “as many points as possible”.

Tomorrow I will unveil the new tool at SignAndTrade specifically designed for allowing managers to do these kinds of customizable calculations quickly and painlessly.

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Every once in a while I have someone ask me what a handcuff is in the fantasy sports world. I never really have a good example for basketball… but I always do for football. For football I always use my Priest Holmes replaced by Larry Johnson example. I had, by far, the best team in my fantasy football league and one of the premier (if not THE premier) running backs. Then Holmes got hurt, Larry Johnson came in as his backup and I got beat in the playoffs by the guy that had Larry Johnson. There is never a good example like this in basketball (or atleast I can’t think of them). I can come up with hypotheticals all day, but a real example almost always escapes me.

However, this season, due to Carlos Boozer being hurt basically all year I had a great basketball example… Paul Millsap. Millsap has been doing an awesome job filling in for Boozer and was possibly giving Boozer a run for his job (since Boozer has been popping off at the mouth about opting out this summer). Unfortunately for all of those who did have Millsap he got hurt tonight. According to various reports it looked pretty bad. I hope he is not too bad, but at the same time I hope him being hurt causes Boozer to come back sooner (I have Boozer and was outbid for Millsap).  

Whoever has Carmello Anthony might want to start thinking about handcuffing someone to him. He’s out the next 3 games and maybe more. They don’t know if his elbow problem will respond to simple rest or not… sounds like a handcuff waiting to happen. Probably JR Smith is your guy here.

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