A thousand apoligies to all those who check in on this site for I have not blogged in forever and even worse broke my promise to update you on my team the King of Klutch coming from my favorite/obsession league Saus Town. The Yahoo! league, which I created, got the name Saus Town because that is the town which holds my friends' and my favorite basketball courts. I lived in the city from '89 - '98 and grew up playing ball on those courts more days than not.
Anyway, enough remeniscing and onto my team. Last time I checked in I was 55 - 22 and currently I am 78 - 38 - 1, 3.5 games up on the nearest competition. Five weeks ago I suffered a 2 -7 loss to the second placed team, mostly because his squad was healthy and playing well and mine was banged up and struggling. I'm a little bit worried about him because he beat me in one of my strongest categories, assists, by 70. My point guards were either hurt or cold that week and I accumulated just shy of 100 assists. It surprised me at the time because my team's league ranking is second overall in assists, but I just checked and he's number one...by a lot. That might be a good cat to punt if I meet him in the finals because surely over that ten game period he would either come out on top easily or I would stream for assists, at the cost of other cats, and still come up short. You see, I put a limit on the amount of players that can be streamed in a given week during the playoffs. That limit is seven, one per day. This gives an advantage to the managers who had done a better job building up their teams throughout the season.
For those of you who may have forgot, streaming is the strategy of adding and dropping players in massive quantities in order to compile higher stats. It can be done by anyone but few actually take good advantage. In six of the nine categories the stats are cumulative. So obviously the less games your team plays, the less chance you have to accumulate numbers. In the end this little stipulation I added will probably hurt me more than anyone else because I am twice as active as the next closest guy. I check the league usually twice a day, minimally.
The good news for me is that in about all the other cats other than assists, my team either trumps the number two team, Kaman Your Face, or barely edges him out. So that's good enough for me. Looks like I should trade a point guard or two and add guys to better myself in other cats. Like threes.
A few days ago one of my best players, Michael Redd, suffered a season ending injury, the first one to a major star in the league that occurred during the season. Redd was a huge source of threes for me. Out fo the 578 three-pointers my team has hit, he hit 70 of them, while only playing 33 of a possible 47 games prior to the injury. Upon hearing of his downfall, I rushed to add Milwaukee's backup point guard, Ramon Sessions, who was at the top of my Watch List anyway, purely for his massive potential.
Massive potential for a combo guard + season ending injury to the star shooting guard = huge recipe for success. And so far it's working out. In the two games since Redd went down Sessions is averaging 35 minutes a game and 17 points, 3.5 rebounds, 2.5 assists and two steals. He's also shooting 48 percent and 80 percent from the field and the line respectively. The one down part is with his zero three-pointers made, he's averaging about two less than Redd was.
The league is pretty active for a free one. Ten out of the 12 people who started in the league still check in on it on a regular basis, a rarity in this game.
Believe it or not, in a league just that active there have been ZERO trades so far this season. Jeeze. I've never seen that. I'm pushing hard now to unload a point guard other than Bibby for a shooting guard on the upswing. I've been offering up two for ones because there's a guy chilling on the wire that would be the perfect replacement for myself.
The King of Klutch (Red for injured)
G: Mike Bibby, T.J. Ford, Beno Udrih, Ramon Sessions, Francisco Garcia
F: LeBron James, Rashard Lewis, David West, Thaddeus Young, Boris Diaw
C: Mehmet Okur, Andrew Bogut, Samuel Dalembert, Jason Thompson
