NBAmmkay

The Bad Basketball League - Opening Night/Starting Over

The Bad Basketball League is the inverse of a regular fantasy league: players get rewarded for doing bad things. We love to watch people suffer and it’s about time we get rewarded for it. Find out how the league scoring system works here, get league updates on NBAmmkay.tumblr.com, and snoop around the actual Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Basketball league here.

Opening night was very revealing… that our scoring system sucks.

Eric, who didn’t set his pre-draft rankings, had a team of all-stars and got the most points of the night. Kobe got him something like 118 fantasy points, which clearly shouldn’t be.

As a reminder, here’s the scoring categories that I posted in the first post in this series:

Where I think we went wrong was not punishing players enough for missed shots. If a guy takes 30 shots and makes 15 of them, under this system, he’d get 22.5 fantasy points just from FGA and FGM. Last time I checked, 50% is a solid field goal percentage and not bad at all.

What I did to fix this is a made a made field goal a bigger detriment, and I give players 1 point for every minute they’re in. With this, a player gets -37.5 fantasy points from FGA and FGM, but if they play 35 minutes and do that, that earns them -2.5 fantasy points. I also gave them -1 fantasy point for every point they score, so assuming this player scored 30 points, they’d have earned -32.5 points for their scoring. Not only is 30 points on 50% shooting not bad, it’s hella good, so the punishment makes sense here.

There were a few other changes made as well. Here’s the new/improved Bad Basketball scoring system:

After adjusting the scoring, I cut all the numbers in half so there wouldn’t be people scoring in the 100s on particularly bad/good nights, and I tinkered with a few other things.

Under the new system, Lamar Odom was last night’s most profitable player with an astounding 55.25 fantasy points, due to his two technicals, one ejection, 1-6 shooting, 2 turnovers and 4 fouls. Steph Curry’s 2-12 shooting at 5 turnovers haunted him as well, giving him 31.5 fantasy points.

Brendan Haywood got 34 fantasy points in 14 minutes, on 0-2 shooting, 3 rebounds, 2 turnovers and 4 fouls. This is the kind of night I had in mind when I conceived this league.

On the other end of the spectrum, LeBron was the night’s worst player, his monster night getting him -86 fantasy points. Rondo earned himself -85 and Luol Deng got -54.25.

Unfortunately, nobody gets credit for the poor performances of Lamar or Haywood because of the faulty scoring system. What this league is going to do is start over: we’re resetting the draft, changing the scoring system from the nonsensical old one to the vastly improved new one, giving everybody a few days to set their pre-draft rankings and starting the league over again on the dawn of the new year, January 1.

A night of games gave me to opportunity to see how the scoring would work out and what needed to be adjusted, to this resetting of the league was almost expected… well, no: I was still surprised/disappointed in myself when I saw Kobe’s 100+ fantasy points. This league was designed so I could watch him suffer in the free agent pool.