5) The Flash In The Pan aka Linsanity

By 2011 I was in my Fantasy basketball groove. I had four first-place trophies on my virtual mantle and could probably regurgitate stats of a second string point guard at will (there was a time when Chris Duhon was getting double digit assists, true story). I lovingly caressed my stat tracker apps on my phone and iPad and kept my eyes out on Twitter for any breaking news about a particular player. So when one Sunday folks started talking about some guy named Jeremy Lin on The Knicks going off I ran to the waiver wire to put in my claim. I had been sitting on Baron Davis in hopes that he’d come back but that was a reach. So on March 31st at 10:05 pm I dumped Baron Davis and picked up Lin. I rode that Linsanity wave until the wheels fell off. And they did.  Lin injured his knee in a game against the Pistons. The Pistons.  The Knicks playoff hopes were gone as were my Fantasy team’s.

4) The Rookie Hype aka Ryan Mathews

In 2010 I drafted the San Diego Chargers rookie Running Back thinking that he was going to fill the void left by LaDainian Tomlinson’s departure. BOY was I wrong. That season Mathews only rushed for 678 yards and 7 touchdowns. My team the 9th Wonders (sorry Pat) finished a dismal 7-7.

3) The Disappearing All-Star aka LeBron James

In Fantasy Basketball having a stat stuffer like LeBron James on your squad is a gift that keeps on giving. One player gives you points, assists, steals, rebounds, etc while not giving you too many garbage stats like turnovers or a horrible field goal percentage. Depending on the way your league is set up King James is almost always going to be the first pick (second only to Kevin Durant). However, the problem with having someone of James’ caliber throughout the regular season is that when playoff time comes in Fantasy, coaches are resting their super stars in the real world to prepare for the real life playoff runs. So remember that time Greg Popovich sat the San Antonio starters against the Heat, pissed off the fans and got fined? Imagine that happening EVERY FANTASY SEASON like clockwork and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.  The only thing you could do was draft star players on bad teams who wouldn’t make the playoffs but would still play for pride. But how many John Walls are there?  And can they stay healthy?

2) The Injured super star aka Al Horford

The only thing worse than a disappearing super star late in the season is losing a high draft pick to injury near the start. No matter how many bench players you grab off waivers, or how good the person who steps in MIGHT be, nothing is going to replace the production of a first round pick. In fantasy basketball, as in real basketball, there is a dearth of great players at the Center position that can score and rebound with efficiency. There are a lot of turnover prone, rebounding bricklayers with ham hands in the league to pick from to fill some stats, but you’ll probably need two pick-ups to replace someone of Tim Duncan’s caliber. So in 2011 when I drafted Al Horford in the third round (after LeBron and Rajon Rondo) I was ready to sit back and let the stats pile up. Unfortunately, he tore his pectoral muscle in January and was out for the rest of the Fantasy season.

Oh, incase you were wondering who else I had on my bench that year at the center spot, it was Brook Lopez, who I’d been hanging on to as a back up incase he returned from broken foot he sustained in preseason. He did come back, dropping 38 points on the Dallas Mavericks in one game, but then injured his right ankle after only 5 games and was shut down for the season.

Injuries had become such a common part of the Fantasy landscape that I’d taken to naming my teams “RUN DNP” for all of the “did not plays” my squad would rack up.

1) Tough Luck aka Tom Brady and Randy Moss

While I was not a personal victim of this last scenario it is one of the most deflating moments in Fantasy Football history that I can recall. In 2007 Tom Brady and Randy Moss were putting up record numbers during the Patriots historic unbeaten streak. They stomped on real life opponents and were decimating fantasy teams across the web. Managers practically coasted into the playoffs on the back of Brady’s 4800 passing yards and 50 TDs. Moss caught almost half of those TDs, so the championships were all but conceded to anyone smart enough to draft this tandem.

But on December 16th 2007 things changed. The Patriots ended up beating the Jets 20 to 10 but Tom Brady put up an anemic 140 passing yards with no TDs and Moss only caught 76 yards worth of passes. All of New England’s offense came from special teams and the kicker. While this was the second to last week of the regular season and the Patriots would remain unbeaten, this was SMACK DAB in the middle of the Fantasy Football playoffs! The timing couldn’t have been worse. You could hear the collective crash of TVs and laptops being thrown against the walls as someone who was almost counting their winnings got bounced to the consolation tournament.

Then there is the kind of bad luck where your fantasy player effs up off the field…like this…

Scenarios like this were too common in Fantasy Sports and it just started taking the fun out of it. Sure a little bit of bad luck is part of the sport but in real life athletes get paid even when they’re injured or play like ass. We just get headaches and blurred vision from staring at rows and rows of stats. So I took a break and it felt GREAT.

For the first time in years I watched the games I actually wanted to see and gave a rats ass about how many solo tackles London Fletcher had. I wasn’t listening to sports radio for injury reports or combing through depth charts. I was just a fan.

This season my goal is to click my mouse on over to Stub Hub to buy some tickets and actually attend a game. How is that for fantasy?

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