Welcome To The Next Level

Welcome, content-starved fantasy NBA basketball enthusiasts! Your long search has come to an end!

Now that you're here, let's talk about your team for a minute...

THE PAST

You've participated in fantasy leagues before, and you're probably pretty good at them... But there's always that guy who seems to know a little bit more than you do a week before you even hear the news. And he's the guy who walks away with the league title.

You've probably noticed that there isn't nearly enough fantasy basketball content available to keep your team ahead of the curve.

The Internet is loaded with fantasy baseball content. You can probably find no less than five large media outlets that offer you daily player updates on injuries and values for every player in the MLB universe--for a fee, of course. Add to that the number of obscure professional and personal websites offering free insight and humor related to fantasy baseball, and you've got information overload before you even hit your draft.

But Basketball seems to be different story...

THE PRESENT

Even ESPN, the Microsoft of the sports media world, gives fantasy basketball the cold shoulder. Out of the Box, originally a daily tour of the boxscores for baseball, has become a watered-down, weekly, shell of its former self for the basketball season. Pay ESPN's Insider fee and you're privy to articles that will tell you what you already knew--that your fourth round pick has been a disappointment--but don't tell you what to do about it.

They offer you a Player Rater (Version 2.0!!), but still haven't addressed its obvious limitations. For instance, did you know that both the ESPN Player Rater and the Yahoo Player Rater do not take into account quantity of shots taken when they compute relative values for FG% and FT%? It's true... That means that a .545 FG from Kelvin Cato (on about 5 shots per game) looks better to a Player Rater than Carlos Boozer's .526 (on about 12.5 shots per game). This is the kind of flaw that has Kelvin Cato checking in at a cool #71 by average, while Boozer limps into the top 100 at #92.

If you're willing to trade me Boozer for Cato, we need to get in a league together real soon...

What's wrong with this picture? Shouldn't you be able to trust your Player Raters? Are they not infallible?

Are you the guy who's wondering why your team is floundering when you've got a roster that includes Kobe Bryant, Steve Francis, Yao Ming, RJ and Carmelo Anthony?

Welcome, friend, you've come to the right place.

Player Raters tell us some valuable things--Shawn Marion really is that good, folks--but they give an incomplete and distorted picture of what it's going to take to win your league.

And if you have a Yahoo! fantasy team and are trying to win based on ESPN content, good luck: ESPN's player rater doesn't factor in turnovers--your league standings do. Trust me.

Because ESPN leagues don't care about turnovers, their columnists don't either, and this really distorts the players they recommend for your team, and the ones they write off as busts. The people at ESPN are the kinds of people who continue to devastate fantasy teams every year by recommending people like Baron Davis, Shaquille O'Neal, and... god forbid that you took this guy before the tenth round... the dreaded, dreaded Carmelo Anthony.

So what are you left with when the cool, clean objectivity of the Player Rater fails you?

THE FUTURE

You need quality insight and analysis that looks--literally--"Outside the Box" to find out which players contribute to a winning squad and which players cripple it, to give timely playing time and injury updates, and to make accurate calls about the keepers and pretenders that matter in your league. And you need it more than once a week, or whenever ESPN can get around to it.

You need insight that's intelligent, and that isn't afraid to challenge convention, and you need to get it from someone you can trust. What does ESPN offer you?

Well, when it's basketball season, you can forget about the both headlines and headliners (goodbye Rob Neyer, so long Peter Gammons; hello... Greg Anthony?) when it's time to read the rare updates that they throw to us like so many table scraps. Just when you thought it couldn't get any nerdier, look, now, as Eric Karabell is replaced by red-faced eighth grader Kevin Rounce as guest columnist.

What you need is not a troupe of geeks and adolescents who, while dismissing for weeks the contributions of guys like Marko Jaric and Damon Jones, will tell you that it might be time to give Rick Brunson a shot, to ride the Ricky Davis train, or to drop Wally Szczerbiak for Eddie Griffin (whoops). You can trust me: I will never, ever tell you to ride the Ricky Davis train.

What you need is not the "old school" opinions of people who have played real basketball, like Walt "Clyde" Frazier, who will tell you how that even though Iverson makes about 39% of his shots on a given year, he's valuable because he's able to "create his own shot." That's great, I guess, but winning a fantasy title is a lot like winning an NBA championship--if you're going to let a guy who makes 39% of his shots take 25 of them a game, you probably shouldn't be in charge.

No, friends, what you need is right here. I'm the Dime Dropper. I'm here to drop them dimes...

Here, you'll find advice on which players to pick up, which players to drop, and which players to keep an eye on, and which player to avoid. Here, you'll find out who the establishment overrates and who it underrates. You'll find out who to buy low and who to sell high. You will learn to respect the turnover. You'll get this insight with an occasionally acerbic wit.

And in the end, you'll win your league.

Welcome.

The Dime Dropper