FridaY CLeaninG

a few sporting odds and ends:

• we know we went out on a “limb” when we boldly predicted Micheal Owen would be hurt by Oct. 1st.  But to get injured the day before Oct. 1 was pure class!
• our predictions for the NHL we not scientifically done but some thought did go into them… still working on a post to xplain…

Weekend Fantasy Moves

Yahoo Football:

HUGE battle this weekend as our 7-2 team takes on the second place team that is 6-2-1. First place is on the line and we rolled the dice Thursday night inserting Denver’s WR Brandon Marshall over St. Louis’ Torry Holt and Minnesota’s Bernard Berrian. We’ll update you on Tuesday how the move went.

Yahoo Hockey:

Mathieu Schneider is under-performing for a power-play specialist D-man in Atlanta and now nursing an injury.  Zubov is coming off the IR and is a fantasy stud when healthy. We were actually surprised Sergei Zubov was available in one of our leagues!

Yahoo Basketball:

Massive moves to sure up the teams, We’ve allowed for the draft dust to settle and some time for the league to get moving. There’s still a lot out on the free agent markets so we tried to pick up what we could while we still could.  All these moves are upgrades IMHO.

• ^{Added Rudy Fernandez (Por – PG,SG) – Dropped Rafer Alston (Hou – PG)}
• ^{Added Luis Scola (Hou – PF,C) – Dropped Matt Barnes (Pho – SF)}
• ^{Added Nate Robinson (NY – PG,SG) – Dropped Earl Watson (OKC – PG)}
• ^{Added Gilbert ArenasINJ (Was – PG) – Dropped Antonio McDyess (Den – PF)}

• ^{Added Zaza Pachulia (Atl – PF,C) – Dropped Rasho NesterovicINJ (Ind – C)}

• ^{Added Kyle Lowry (Mem – PG,SG) – Dropped Stephon Marbury (NY – PG)}

Fantasy Nascar Wrap

The season’s end is 2 races away and our 2 teams running in various Yahoo NASCAR leagues can already see the finish line. Team 1’s mantra was to play the traditional card. Picking drivers that had historically done well at certain races and at certain times of the year. Team 2 was to effort to play more of the hot hand. To try and pick who’s on a streak and stick with that driver until someone else got hotter. The results are in and Team 1 is ahead of Team 2 by an approx. 200 points. Which simply translates to about a race ahead. Meaning Team 1 could not start any drivers in the last race and still take the title between the 2.

In our leagues both teams have flirted with running in the middle of the pack but in the last few weeks have faded into the bottom third. In one of our more competitive leagues, Team 2 is 1000 points off the league which in some ways seems a lot. But if you view it race by race over the course of a 40 race season, isn’t much at all (25 points/race). The wildcard in this season was the introduction of the Car of Tomorrow (CoT). Some teams were quick off the block with the CoT, which played to Team 2’s advantage but as the final results show, in the end the historical teams prevailed.

The relatively poor season from Tony Stewart and the rise of Carl Edwards were definite highlights to trying to keep “track” of the racing news. Like most things in fantasy sports, if we weren’t involved in fantasy teams would we even be following these related story lines that closely? In our case, not really. Admittedly NASCAR is not our forte and in our 4 years of doing this, we’ve never won a league. Though we’ve been competitive in all years and looking back this one has turned out to be the same. Next year we’ll try to employ slightly tweaked version of our mantra’s for the 2 teams.  We’ll use what we’ve learned this past year from both how our teams performed and by what we saw from the others ahead of us. Here’s to hoping for the checkered flag next year!