The 2022-2023 season of the Sheikh Gucci Fantasy League has come to a close. That's 7 seasons completed. As we now move on to the offseason I want to start establishing Retrospectives from the team manager point of view. These are meant to be more personal views of how the season went, lessons learned, and hopes for the future. As the current champion (sounds good to say) I wanted to go first:
Retrospective:
Early in the season not wanting to wait on The Klaw and Zion to heal up, I made a trade that at the time I honestly thought was one I would regret. Trading the aforementioned to BG 4Hunnit for Tatum. Who knew that Tatum was going to get his head right in the offseason and emerge as an MVP candidate level player, or more importantly - that Zion would Re-injure and Kawhi would continue to spend most of his season riding pine (sorry Burhan!)
While this trade likely gets most attention, the truth is there was a second trade I made amidst my losing streak that really changed my team around. On Nov 21st, after having traded away Mitchel Robinson for peanuts, I traded Myles Turner and Buddy Hield for 3 role players - Spencer Dinwiddie, Mikal Bridges, and Jonas Valenciunas. This trade wasn't a big deal when I initially made it, but eventually Spencer Dinwiddie and Mikal Bridges would both join the nets and be tasked with replacing the production of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. This vaulted the two players from role players to fantasy stars.
In the NBA they constantly talk about the playoffs being a new season, completely detached from the regular season. Small sample size for me - but I'd say in fantasy that sentiment holds true (for me at least, would love to hear what others have felt). Just in general it seemed like when the playoffs kicked off a lot of team dynamics changed. I had already been fighting for my life to end the season, constantly looking to the waiver wire to replace my abysmal depth. In the playoffs my weakness of not having a consistently producing roster became a strength. While other teams were being forced to carry players who were hurt or sitting out because their production was needed in future rounds, i was able to discard players left and right, picking up waiver players that were benefitting from the same stars that my opponents had to sit.
But in all honesty - the idea of "skill" for me ends there. Don't get me wrong - I tried to make due effort. I tried to do some research, think about waiver players in the context of what their teams were doing, trying to discern what was a blip vs what was a trend. But it was a crapshoot - it was all guessing - educated guessing - but just slightly more nuanced then throwing darts at a dart board.
"The fallacy of skill" or "What is luck?":
I'm still a bit shocked at how this all played out, I feel a bit undeserving, just someone caught in the whirlwind of numbers, grasping on to whatever I could and hoping that I'd land safely...and I did - on top of the mountain I had wanted to climb.
And honestly - during the month of Ramadan and as a Muslim - this feels familiar. In life, no matter how much we want to talk about skills and training and preparation and all things that have to do with our ego, the truth of the matter is we control so very little. "Luck" matters so much. I've felt this way about Fantasy since the start, and I often found myself frustrated by people who overtly criticized a team's moves and tried to label who was a bad fantasy player and who were the good ones - because in Fantasy, more than maybe in anything else we do, there is very little in our control. We choose players based on some sense of logic and then hope that the players play out the season the way we expect them to. Very rarely do they ever. It all comes back to this idea of "luck".
"Luck" - Derrick Rose was an insanely gifted athlete with a strong will and off the charts instincts - he put in countless hours in the gym and working hard and developing his skill, enough so that he became the youngest MVP in the league - and then a random pop in his knee took all his success and all his skills and all his "luck" and tossed it out the window.
"Luck" - Muhammed Ali is regarded as arguably the greatest boxer of all time. The definition of ego and a man of absolutely unshakeable resolve and confidence. He spent his entire life telling his opponents, telling his fans, telling the media, telling whoever would listed that he was the greatest. Then he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. The only boxer (at his level) to be diagnosed with the disease at the time and since. This led to one of my favorite Muhammed Ali quotes of all time:
“He gave me this illness to remind me that I am not number one; He is.”
"Luck" - an 8th seed with a losing record and being the only playoff team to have a negative point differential (Pts Scored For vs Pts Scored Against) wins a championship.
The idea that "I won" sounds great, but if I were to be honest, it's more that I was allowed to win. A lot of random events took place that resulted in my final results, and while I'd like to pretend that I knew Spencer and Mikal were going to become fantasy super stars, or that Zion would be injured again and the Klaw would only play a quarter of his games - I didn't. No one did.
All I did was try. I tried to make the right moves, I tried to predict what could happen, and more importantly, I tried to have fun. I feel like that's important to highlight, because I feel like it's an overlooked criteria of a good team.
We all (mostly) agree that the Ghney bros are probably the best team managers in our league- but I contend a big reason for that is that they don't take things so seriously that they forget to have fun. Year after year if there is anyone who is willing to make trades with me, it's the Ghney bros. Sometimes it works out for them, sometimes it doesn't. But as long as the trade seems even they're open to it. They don't dwell on the good or bad afterwards, they just play with their new hand. Contrast that with so many others who are looking for home runs and one sided trades and historically in our league things haven't worked out for the individuals who play that way.
Doug dropped Dearon Fox this year, a 45+ fpt player and main driver for the very successful sacramento kings, lost on a mistake. He never once cried about it, shrugging off the mistake and the jabs he received from other league managers. He was in the finals and a player short of winning the entire thing. I feel like there's correlation here. It doesn't mean to play without caution or simply carelessly, but sometimes we get so enamored with chasing victory that we forget that our control on anything our team is doing (good or bad) is lacking.
So if I could have any real advice to share from this season, it would probably be to have fun and do your best. Cliche terms that sound like they're what would be written on a participation trophy, but for competitive individuals it's a difficult concept to grasp and one that becomes fairly rewarding.
And what does the Future Hold?
This is my first foray into the playoff...and the finals... and winning a championship - so it's all new to me. And I understand if others don't agree with my stance - but as I now begin to put this season in the rear view mirror, I just want to re-iterate two points. First - Effort trumps ego Any day because effort is what brings "luck". Second - This was a lot of fun, the randomness of the playoffs, the whirlwind of keeping up DNPs, and the bliss of winning a chip. So it's probably a good time to pull a Bill Murray and retire:
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