Slow Season

Hi all, sorry about the lack of updates. To be honest, after the Suns got eliminated from playoff contention, I just haven't been THAT interested in basketball. Hence the lack of updates. I guess I'm what Shaq really despises, and that's a frontrunner. At least Shaq knows what he's talking about;-)

Anyhoo... lets see what's been going on in the month or so since my last post. Well, I managed to get out to Vegas on the weekend of the 28th. Tried out my "Friday Lines" on the Saturday games and placed a $10 bet on every spread and over/under (with exception of the DET/WAS game since that was Gil's first game back and I had no idea what to expect from him or the Wiz). 14 NBA bets total. Overall, I pretty much split all my NBA bets, which I guess is typical, since the odds are designed to be 50/50 by Vegas. What little profit I did make, I made from the March Madness games. $40 on Oklahoma over Syracuse and $20 on UConn over Purdue. Yay! I dunno... I made money betting on what I know the least (college bball) while I barely broke even on what I follow the most (NBA)... not sure if that's a good thing or not. Maybe I'm just full of hot air ;-)

On the fantasy front... I missed out on the playoffs in all three of my CBS leagues. Ah wells. It was worth a try. It was definitely different from the Yahoo experience and I'm pretty sure I WON'T be returning to CBS in the fall.

On the Yahoo fantasy front though... I was AWESOME. I was in three leagues total and I finished 1st in my keeper league, 1st in my expert league, and 3rd in my public league.

My Keeper team was just stacked. It wasn't really fair at all. I had Paul as a keeper and was able to snag Kidd and Terry late in the draft and also managed to steal Lee and Harrington off waivers (for the brief couple days they were on there at the beginning of the season). Towards the end of the season, one of the other guys straight up dropped Amare (even though we're a keeper league) and I was able to pick him up for free... who I then parlayed to one of the other teams already out of contention for Turkoglu. Yay me!

My expert league I'm especially proud of. I've already wrote a lot about that league and my team in my previous post... but suffice to say that I had a disaster of a draft and rebuilt my team completely throughout the season and was able to secure one of the last playoff spots during the last week of the season. Then through lots (and I emphasize LOTS) of timely pickups, I was able to secure the 1st place by beating the 1st and 3rd regular season teams.

I'm just throwing this out there cuz the last week in my expert league, the guy I was beating got a little chippy about it, but I'm not ashamed to say that I exploited the whole add/drop strategy to win my expert league. Yahoo has an option to limit max moves per week and/or max per season and I do advise commissioners out there to set them. FWIW, I have a max 4 moves per week limit in my keeper league. But IF there's no move limit, then I see no problem making as many moves as necessary to secure the win. While this is just a game, you should still try everything you can within the rules to win. And the strategy is available to all teams. The point is to be COMPETITIVE, right? Else why bother even playing?

Well, that's all I got for now. My posts will probably be sparse throughout the playoffs (baring some crazy play by the Blazers). Though expect some more posts around the draft lottery (May 19th) and leading up to the draft (June 25th). I love the draft and it's probably my second favorite day of the year (behind Christmas).

Oh and one early draft tidbit... Ricky Rubio is declaring for the draft. I bet he goes 2nd overall in the draft. The Suns have a 1.1% chance (.005 at 1st pick, .006 at 2nd pick) at landing the top 2 picks in the draft... that's better than the real lottery, right?

And finally, here's a couple playoff youtubes to make up for the past few weeks of inactivity.

TNT 2009 Playoff Promo - Game of Kings



Cavaliers 2009 Playoff Promo - Proposal