Author: admin

The NBA season starts next week, so it’s a time of excitement, Stanford football sucking notwithstanding. Despite school really destroying me so far this quarter, right now is what Colin calls the most wonderful time of the year: you drafted your team, and you’re honeymooning before your players start getting injured and sucking and breaking your heart.

The crew for the real league:

1. (8) Dirk Nowitzki
2. (13) Pau Gasol
3. (28) Joe Johnson
4. (33) David Lee
5. (48) Ben Gordon
6. (53) Ray Allen
7. (68) John Salmons
8. (73) Jameer Nelson
9. (88) O.J. Mayo
10. (93) Jason Thompson
11. (108) Raymond Felton
12. (113) Mario Chalmers
13. (128) Jamario Moon

I’m not terribly thrilled with the team, since Calvin stoleses Deron Williams from right under my nose (plus like 4 other players… argh), and I think Dirk and Pau will both do worse this year than last. I’m also beginning to feel like I drafted David Lee and Ben Gordon too early. Looks like if everything goes well, I have strength in 5 categories, but will be punting a few categories as well. We’ll see how the model 2.0 does overall. Also, Jamario Moon’s already been dropped for DJ Augustin, but I just realized I’m missing depth in the SF and C positions (which I guess happens more often than not). Anyone want to trade for OJ Mayo?

So I mainly joined a public league to get the position eligibility of players, but I figured I might as well draft. This is what I got for a 12-player, standard 9-category head-to-head league. This is using the results from the model 2.0, which has a lot of simulations of random teams and basically a +/- on the probability of a specific player winning each category compared to all other teams.

Doing a live draft was kind of difficult because of the 90-second time limit. I think I tend to take a little longer than that trying to put together all the numbers. Overall, I don’t think I have a bad team, although things kind of went downhill fast after Camby. I hope Anthony Randolph actually does something this year. I guess the same goes for all the other players after my 5th pick. In my idealized fantasy world, I should be able to take threes, points, assists, and steals fairly easily, and be competitive in free throw %, rebounds, and blocks. Which leaves me dying in field goal % and turnovers.

1.         (2)        LeBron James
2.         (23)      Joe Johnson
3.         (26)      Kevin Martin
4.         (47)      David Lee
5.         (50)      Marcus Camby
6.         (71)      Anthony Randolph
7.         (74)      Jason Terry
8.         (95)      Mike Conley
9.         (98)      Francisco Garcia
10.       (119)    Ramon Sessions
11.       (122)    Danilo Gallinari
12.       (143)    Antonio McDyess
13.       (146)    Delonte West

Of course, the real draft is soon. Even though I took out a student loan, I still don’t really want to go to Vegas.

Summer is nearly over now, and with its end comes new hopes and trepidations.

• Looks like my desktop’s power supply finally completely died on me. It started having issues over a year ago, but now I think it’s gone for good. I guess about 4 years isn’t such a bad run. I’m not really lamenting its loss, though, because…
• I splurged and bought the new Core i5, along with a motherboard and RAM. Now I can finally fill up this P182 case I’ve had sitting empty for over a year. I’m pretty excited, and look forward to the week of cursing when nothing works properly.
• Vegas trip in under a month for fantasy basketball draft. I really need to get the model running, but the demise of my desktop might put a damper on things.
• Updated resume is coming together now. Still need to tweak a bunch of things. I hope the job market isn’t horrendous.
• G.G. missing the last few days. I really need to work on pique and chaine turns at some point, but I get too dizzy.