The premise of Fantasy Basketball leagues is that you’re the general manager of an NBA team and you’re tasked to put together a roster of players that’ll take you to the NBA finals. You’re allowed to draft actual players in the NBA and based on their real time performances in the league you’re given statistics that add up to points. The more points you have the “better” your team is, and thus your spot in the league commensurately increases.
Fantasy Basketball makes watching games a little bit more exciting, if not a little confusing. The players you draft into your fantasy team will actually be playing in different NBA teams, so you may come across games where your players team are actually playing against each other in real life. This leads to situations where I’m cheering for both sides of a game, or even worse, situations where one of my players gets shot off in the face of another of my players and I’m left with a bemused look on my face wondering whether or not I should cheer.
It also leads to untimely shouts of joy after events that normally do not call for such an outburst. In basketball, you usually cheer a good fadeaway or a dunk (or as quinito henson would say, “dunk shot”), but since the league I’m playing in gives more points to assists, rebounds or steals, I quite often find myself reacting to a very minor assist in the most deafening fashion.
I find that my obsession with managing budgets also puts me in good stead, since you’re given $300 at the start of my league to spend on players, and constant retooling is necessary in order to get the most bang for your buck. I have spent many nights up until way past my normal bedtime crunching numbers, trying to get the best value proposition for my team. I made a few missteps in the beginning, but I think my team, the Lower Antipolo Lakers, is finally starting to gain some ground, and I’m currently third in my local league of 8 players, 274th in a larger league of 1896 GMs, and 2516th in the global league of god knows how many people.
