The Dropping Dimes team, along with some of our blogging friends, contributed to a pre-season magazine put out by Sports Eye Publications. Part of the magazine was a mock draft, which was done through e-mail. Momentum quickly swelled to make this draft a league, and I was the only one that suggested not to, voicing concerns about how much people would contribute to a league that was not one of their main ones. People wanted it to happen to the point that there was mention of finding someone else to manage my team.

Somewhat reluctantly I joined since we were already doing the draft. Plus, it was a chance to check out a league from by NBA.com and their Ultimate Fantasy Commisioner. Well, good thing I stuck around because the finals featured a match-up between myself and fellow Dime dropper, Brandon Haraway.

My concerns about league participation proved to be prophetic, as seven of the ten teams made less than ten transactions all year in a no-limit league, with three teams making no moves at all for the entire year. Brandon finished the regular season in first place, one game ahead of my team. This would prove to be the difference, because our final ended in a 4-4 tie, and for some stupid reason, NBA.com uses regular season winning percentage as the tie-breaker. I know this will sound like sour grapes, but I’m sorry, this is a piss-poor rule. The appeal of a head-to-head league is that any one team can knock off another team in any given week. There’s no way our regular season record should impact a playoff and especially championship match-up. The tie-breaking system should have involved something directly tied to our current match-up.

This was a weekly lineup league that ran Sunday to Saturday. Another unfortunate part of this site is that as in Yahoo the last match-ups run about a week and a half. However, there was no opportunity to adjust my lineup one week after the match-up started. So I had to deal with my main guys like Kevin Martin and LeBron James putting up zeros. Granted, this rule affects everyone and Brandon had some untimely DNPs to deal with too. Yahoo lets you adjust your lineup on the designated day of your league. It would have been nice for us to be given the opportunity to make some moves in a race to the title.

Still, I don’t want to take anything away from Brandon. Let’s just say in this particular league, Dropping Dimes represented and finished one and two. Here is Brandon’s roster from the finals:

PG: Steve Nash
SG: Richard Hamilton
G: Jose Calderon
SF: Rashard Lewis
PF: Antawn Jamison
F: Chris Bosh
C: Samuel Dalembert
C: Zydrunas Ilgauskas
Util: Manu Ginobili

Brandon’s team won rebounds (271-239), assists (180-151), blocks (23-22), and FT% (.764-.743). My team won points (662-542), steals (58-46), FG% (.482-.435), and treys (53-35). Yahoo uses points as the first tie-breaker which means I would have won instead of Brandon. It was that close. I cannot feel too bitter for losing to a team with Canadian faves like Nash and CB4, so that takes away from the sting just a little.

I liked the Ultimate Fantasy Commisioner for its free stat-tracker and customizable options, but their illogical tie-breaking rules have me hesitant to join up with them next year.

Nice job, Brandon!

Peace.