Archive for the 'Insane ideas' Category

As an announcer, Mark Jackson sure loves to repeat himself. Whether it's "Mama there goes that man," "Hand down, man down," or my personal favorite, "Grown man move" (clip unavailable), Jackson's canned go-to phrases are a staple of any ESPN broadcast -- especially when cutting to a commercial break, serving to punctuate an important replay with, well, words that have lost all meaning.

Recently, though, Jackson's been repeating another comment he began to make during Rajon Rondo's triple-double vs. Cleveland two weeks ago. Here's a variation from Saturday night:

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That's right, it's time once again to pay tribute to the fine journeymen of the Basketball League of Amazing Benchwarmers, one of the finest fictional basketball institutions founded in late April of 2010. For those who have no clue what this is, it's a fantasy league I put together that's named after the legendary Uwe Blab... In a nutshell, BLAB takes some choice scrubs from the past and gives them their own 6-team league, headlined by team captains Greg Kite, Larry Krystkowiak, Kevin Duckworth, Kurt Rambis, Joe Wolf, and Paul Mokeski. The season is 30 games per team, and outcomes are determined by the career Win Shares per 48 min. of the players on each roster (randomized using the players' seasonal standard deviations of offensive and defensive WS/48). The top 3 teams in the league table make the playoffs, with the eventual winner taking home the prestigious Uwe Blab Championship Trophy.

The last time we checked in with BLAB, the Joe Wolf-led Lone Wolfs were 8-2, sparked by the outstanding play of Mario Elie, as well as Chris Gatling off the bench. However, the Krystkowiak Special Ks were hot on their trail, just a game back at 7-3, and Team Mokeski was 2 games behind at 6-2. That was 10 games ago; here are the results since then:

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The horror...

"Former NBA All-Star Antoine Walker is eyeing an NBA comeback. Louisville coach Rick Pitino says Walker will work out with several [Louisville] Cardinals during the next few weeks. Walker hasn't played in the NBA since 2008 and has suffered legal and financial woes since stepping away from the game ... Pitino, who coached Walker at Kentucky in the 1990s, said he also hopes Walker will talk to his players about the temptations that come with life as a professional."

A select few in the annals of the game will be elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, but those who don't make the cut shouldn't despair. If you compiled great conventional stats on losing teams, or powered many a fantasy league championship despite never quite getting over the hump in the real NBA playoffs, this idea is for you...

The premise: create a Hall of Fame for the best fantasy basketball players of all time. The requirements:

1. Only stats compiled from 1990 to the present are considered, because fantasy hoops was not really a mainstream activity until the nineties.
2. Players must have played at least 5 years as a fantasy starter in a 12-team league (or similar) from 1990-present.
3. The player must be retired and/or out of basketball in 2010 (no current players allowed).
4. Only consider fantasy value in standard league setups -- i.e., 12 teams, 8 categories, roto, head-to-head, or basic points. In other words, no super-shallow or deep leagues, and no exotic scoring systems.
5. Players are ineligible if they have more than a remote chance of making the real Basketball Hall of Fame.

To be enshrined, players must receive at least 75% of the vote; those with 5% or fewer will be dropped from future elections. Here's the inaugural ballot (voting will close in 1 week):

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16 years later, music historians generally look back at 1994 as a time of major changes to the cultural landscape -- the death of Kurt Cobain, the arrest of Tupac Shakur, Green Day breaking through into the mainstream, etc. They also consider it the end of the so-called "Golden Age of Hip-Hop", the genre's most innovative and artistically-fulfilling era. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1994 also marked the release of B-Ball's Best Kept Secret, a "compilation album released by Epic Records that featured NBA players performing songs with hip hop artists". With the likes of Brian Shaw, Dana Barros, and Jason Kidd on the mic, is this the album that led to the Golden Age's end? Or was it merely the final ray of brilliance in the Era? You be the judge:

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Yesterday, I outlined the setup for a fantasy league of sorts -- the Basketball League of Amazing Benchwarmers (or BLAB, after the indomitable Uwe Blab). In a nutshell, BLAB takes some choice scrubs from the past and gives them their own 6-team league, headlined by team captains Greg Kite, Larry Krystkowiak, Kevin Duckworth, Kurt Rambis, Joe Wolf, and Paul Mokeski. The season is 30 games per team, and outcomes are determined by the career Win Shares per 48 min. of the players on each roster (randomized a bit using the players' seasonal standard deviations of offensive and defensive WS/48). The top 3 teams in the league table make the playoffs, with the eventual winner taking home the prestigious Uwe Blab Championship Trophy.

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In case you missed it earlier this week, on Sunday I posted a link to a blog that paid tribute to 5 semi-random 1980s journeymen with surprisingly devoted followings on Facebook. A friend passed the link to me with a question about which additional players I'd like to see homages to, so I opened up the question to the readers here at BBR. And you responded with a lot of great names, to the point that one commenter suggested I create a team of these forgotten non-stars. But I want to take this tribute one step further -- I want to create an entire ficitional league out of these guys, and call it "BLAB", short for the Basketball League of Amazing Benchwarmers (Uwe Blab didn't make any of the rosters, but we obviously needed to immortalize him somehow). Here are the initial rules I laid out for the league:

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the final round of the WhatIfSports Most Dominant Playoff Tournament, featuring the 1993 Chicago Bulls, the 5th seed in Pool B, and the 2005 San Antonio Spurs, the #9 seed in Pool A. The Bulls got here by beating the dominant 1996 incarnation of themselves in a grueling 7-game series that pitted Jordan vs. Jordan, with the 29-year-old MJ coming out on top. On the other side of the bracket, the Spurs cruised past the 2009 Lakers, holding Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, & Lamar Odom to a combined 39 points in the 5th and deciding game of their semifinal series. So now, without further ado, it's time for these two great clubs to battle for the title of 2010 Most Dominant Playoff Tournament Champion...

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Most Dominant Playoff Tournament: Round 4

Results from the Tournament's Final Four, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

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Pools A & D, Round 3
Pools B & C, Round 3

Results from the 4rd round of the tournament, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

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