Dwight Howard and the Houston Rockets' NBA Championship Hopes - by Sam Smith

The following is a contribution by guest blogger Sam Smith.

Ever since Dwight Howard played out the end of his 1st part of his career with the Orlando Magic, he has been under a microscope. He was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, and he had a subpar season for the one year he was there. Now, he is starting his 2nd season with the Houston Rockets. People in fantasy basketball love his start, and he is the major reason why this team looks like a legitimate NBA championship contender.

Howard struggled in the last few years mainly due to some nagging injuries. It is still very early in the year, but it looks as though Howard is finally healthy enough to play the minutes he wants to. He is a force on both sides of the floor, and he can make up for a lot of deficiencies the Rockets might have in general.

Other than Howard, this team is not particularly dominant on defense. He shuts down the paint, and that really gives the rest of the team a lot more confidence knowing that they have some security.

In the Western Conference, every contender looks slightly vulnerable. Oklahoma City is really hurting with injuries, San Antonio is a year older and the Los Angeles Clippers are pretty inconsistent. The door might be opening for a team like Houston to put their hat in the ring.

A few years ago, Howard led a pretty mediocre Orlando Magic team to the NBA Finals. This team is better than that Magic team, but they do know that the Western Conference is extremely loaded. With Howard playing like his former Defensive Player of the Year, Houston might just be ready to take the next step. He is certainly solidifying himself as the top center in the NBA once again with his strong start to the season.

Fantasy Basketball - A New Take

I've played the standard fantasy basketball games, with and without little tweaks, and I've generally found it to be unexciting. I don't know if it's owed to the nature of basketball, where statistics are accumulated in great numbers every game, or if it's because I'm not a huge basketball fan, or some other explanation, but it seems like fantasy basketball is an unnecessary exercise.

So this year, I decided to go beyond the "little tweaks," and create a wholly original basketball league. The frame of the league will be a standard rotisserie head-to-head setup, where each owner plays against just one other owner each week. The teams accumulate statistics, and the team with more of each tracked statistic gains one win; the other team gets one loss. So, if in a league with standard settings team A has more points, rebounds, three-pointers, assists, steals, and blocks, team B has better cumulative field goal and free throw percentages, and they have exactly the same number of turnovers, team A will get 6-2-1 added to their season record, and team B will get 2-6-1 added to theirs. It's a little convoluted, and I'm generally not in favor of this system.

BUT, I've made wholesale changes from the standard scoring system, and I think it might just create a pretty fun fantasy basketball system. We keep the framework, as I said, where it's rotisserie head-to-head. However, we use only one category: points. Percentages don't matter, assists don't matter, turnovers don't matter. The only thing that matters is pure, bulk points. Chris Paul and Marcus Camby get dropped dramatically in this system, and pure scorers like Jamal Crawford and Richard Jefferson get a bump.

Certainly I don't have to explain that this system is simpler; it takes a nine-category system and changes it to a one-category system. It's easier to evaluate talent, because you're not looking at whether or not a player's scoring and rebounds will counteract a poor free throw percentage (Dwight Howard), or sacrificing scoring to pick up a spread of other statistics (Shane Battier). It's straightforward and unsophisticated.

Are there problems with a system like this? Of course. Its simplicity results in far fewer opportunities for strategy. And the default rankings will be somewhat useless when it comes to draft day. But the standard system, which has plenty of strategy integrated, hasn't been entertaining to me. So why the hell not try something else?

There are a couple of positives about this bizarre setup:

• You don't find yourself rooting for strange things, like wanting your opponents' players to score, because you don't want him to get assists.
• It's easy to track when your players are doing well, and easy to root for them when you're watching the games.
• Likewise, it's easy to track/root against your opponents' performances.
• People who show up for the draft have a decided advantage over those who skip out, as you're able to evaluate players solely based on their point production.
  

You want in, you say? Well, I'd be delighted to have you in my crazy league. Here's the information:

League ID: 115478
Password: points

Hoop it up!