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Why Are My Teams So Terrible?

Man, my teams stink this year.

I used to be so good at this game. I was in two leagues a year in the mid-1990s, and generally competed for the title with my then-nemesis Mike Canter in both of them, and only occasionally falling behind someone else.

Now, I'm in four leagues, including one of the aforementioned ones, and my team is terrible in all four.

Two are head-to-head leagues, one is a rotisserie league, and the other is a points-based league. In the Anti-Nowhere League, I'm in seventh out of ten teams. That's my best league. In my long-running Gheorghe Muresan league, I'm in 14th out of 20 teams. Oh, and freaking Canter is in first. I can't stand it.

Like I said, I used to be really good. Seriously. I worked hard on my projections. I had cool (ok, geeky) spreadsheets. I'd come into draft night as the man to beat. In a league that went 120 players deep, I knew the top 200, just in case. I bought the USA Today every Tuesday and did the stats by hand.

Wait, what was that last one? Yes, this was before the internet did all the work. Before you could get every last bit of stats just by clicking on your player's names. Before the RotoWire notes got added as a nice little icon on your team page. When you might carry a guy for a week or two before you'd even realize he was hurt.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man (I'm still just 38, though my wife often calls me "Mr. Wilson" when I scowl at the kid going by on a skateboard outside my house. And just by knowing what that reference means dates me quite a bit), kids today have it so much easier. You don't have to crunch the stats. You don't have to search high and wide for free agents - any stat-keeping service worth its salt will give you the list of top free agents and make it easy to search for anything you want. Even trades are easier - just send an email through the league and someone can reject your trade just as easily. And they can do so because they see that their guy averages 4.5 more fantasy points per game over the last 14 days than your guys does, rather than just saying "I'm pretty sure Larry Nance for Chris Mullin isn't a fair deal."

All those little advantages I had were long gone. I couldn't even be an intimidating presence on draft night, since seemingly no one does basketball drafts face-to-face anymore. At this point, if I even have enough time during the 30 seconds between draft picks, I can make little comments and hit "Send", and no one will even respond.

So how can I combat these losses of advantages?

Work, and lots of it.

Well, and luck.

No more can you go into your league's online draft and wing it based on someone else's rankings. You still need to crunch the numbers and do your own rankings. Have your sleepers ready (but don't go too early). Know the position battles on NBA teams where you can exploit things. And during the season, particularly early (it's not too late!) you need to be scouring the the free agent lists and picking up hot players and dumping your unproductive ones. Don't keep holding onto Courtney Lee if there's someone better out there. And there definitely is.

Oh, and last but not least, don't join a league with Mike Canter.

Comments

By: Scott Pianowski
On: 11/28/2009 3:30:00 PM		 I definitely agree with you, the explosion of fantasy on the internet definitely hurts the EV of the winning player, in all sports.
 
By: schoenke
On: 11/30/2009 1:50:00 PM		 Fantasy in general has moved from an exercise in information gathering to get an edge ten years ago to a focus on what stats and scouting info best project player performance. And as we've seen from any NBA Draft, that's much more difficult than to do than beat someone to the free agent wire because they heard a guy got hurt.

But also remember top poker players lose early in tournaments plenty of times. Luck happens.
 
By: The Professor
On: 11/30/2009 2:10:00 PM		 For me personally, my downtrend in team quality can be traced directly to when I started writing for Rotowire. Then another dip after I got married, another after I graduated and got a job, and a double nose-dive for the two kids. Essentially, my teams went from getting constant attention/feedback as I spent hours each day crunching numbers/sending trade offers to today, where if I'm lucky I remember to set my line-up every day and I essentially go 99% off my draft.

In other words, it's not really all that shocking to me that many of my fantasy teams suck these days.
 
By: Kenn Ruby
On: 11/30/2009 7:51:00 PM		 I respect all three of your guys, so it makes me feel better I'm not alone. I'm still good at baseball because I have exactly one team and spend months preparing. I'm still good at football (some years), because the maintenance is easy and sometimes I get lucky and my guys stay healthy. Basketball is just a total crapshoot for me these days, emphasis on the crap. That used to be my best sport.
 
By: rceisner
On: 12/1/2009 8:20:00 AM		 The lack of a DL/IR in most fantasy bball leagues hurts me. If one of your early baseball picks gets hurt for a few months, you can just stash him on the DL and recoup some counting stats via the waiver wire. The DL spot disappeared in many of my bball leagues the past few years, making it hard to replace studs.
 
By: The Professor
On: 12/1/2009 8:42:00 AM		 Agree with you on that one. I've got several leagues that have been hit by injury to guys I can't drop, and with shallow benches that just leaves me with several empty slots. That is a quick way to get your team into the basement.
 

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