SFR Power Rankings

Week 7

I try to keep the Power Rankings as entertaining as possible.  One thing about writing comedy is that it's really hard to
know if its any good or not.  Jokes are like farts, in two very important ways.  First, it's always a very different
experience for the author than it is for the audience.  And second, the very best of them tend to pop right out of your
ass without any forthought, and very little effort.  If you're straining to write a joke, or to rip off a fart, something,
somewhere, somehow, has gone wrong.

But this week's Power Rankings are going to be a bit different.  This week, I'm going to get a bit more in depth of my
analysis on each individual team... and I'm not going to edit, or pull punches.

1) Matt.  Matt began this season with a team that was probably the best last season, and was more or less intact from
where he left off last spring.  He has - one through five or so - the best team I've ever seen anyone build up.  That
having been said, he has a collection of guys who range from reliable as all getout, to downright terrifyingly
unreliable.  His squad hasn't been remotely close to fully healthy yet this season, but looking at the names on that
page, it's almost hard to imagine a full calendar month when all of those guys are healthy and ready to go at the same
time.  I think Matt did a stellar job of salvaging value from Steph, although how much help Dipo will provide remains
to be seen.  At the very least, the team is still a marvel.  Matt is a pretty basic manager.  He drafted a great team, and
only tends to trade if an injury or some other calamity has left him imbalanced in some way.  His focus comes in fits,
and can range from Matt being among the least engaged manager, to being more hyper-focused than anyone.

2) I don't think there's a clear cut second place team, but at the moment, I'm going to say it's Kevin.  Kevin beat
up on a lot of people last year with Harden, who at one point in time last season when Chris Paul was injured, was
averaging 60 fantasy points over L30.  Kevin seemed spooked by the arrival of Russell Westbrook in Houston, so he
kind of blew things up.  I don't think Kevin is as potent as he was last March/April, but I do still think he probably has
the best chance of any of us of toppling Matt this season.  In all the years I've played with Kevin, I've always seen him
as steady-handed and practical... but this season, I've seen a rare note of impulsiveness from him at times.

3) Joel surprised many of us last season by making a credible run at the championship.  This season, he's a bit deeper,
though you could be forgiven for having failed to notice it.  He hasn't been fully healthy yet.  Steph is a long term
stash for Joel, but long term stashes occupy your IR, which means little nagging injuries to star players put you in the
position of having to enter into matchups down a man or two.  And that's exactly what Joel has been through most of
this season; struggling to beat certain teams who he should handily defeat, but barely scraping past them because
they're at full strength and he's not.  That may or may not plague him all season, only time will tell.  What we don't
need time to tell us, is whether or not the one remaining weakness Joel has brought with him from his sucky years will
continue to be an issue; over-spending on the wire.
4) Brian inherited a pretty decent team last season.  Then he made a couple of downright bone-headed trades in an
effort to pick up games.  But by last spring, he had figured out the complexities of this seemingly simple format well
enough to contend for the title.  This season, he's doing a version of what I did last season, which is to rebuild at least
a good portion of his team each week, custom-tailored for that week.  If Boston has four games and one of them i one
of them is the Thursday night TNT game, you can gaurantee Brian will add a Celtic or two that week.  If the 76ers
have a crappy schedule next week, he'll try to unload his 76ers a few days ahead of time.  The danger in playing this
way is that eventually, you're going to be in a position where you need people to cooperate with you, and they won't,
because some tiny detail in a trade doesn't suit them, so the seemingly trivial thing you need is denied, and it costs you
sixty points over the weekend, and you lose.  Thus far, it seems to me that Brian has managed to find trading partners
who won't make him pay a premium that factors in the short term value of the points they're dealing away that week. 
If Brian can continue the mercurial trick of gaining overall long-term value while in the process of trading for extra
games, he could pass Joel and Kevin and make a credible run at Matt.  But if people wise up and start forcing him to
actually pay for the extra points he's picking up in the short term, Brian may find out that musical chairs, as a baseline
strategy, can only carry you so far.
5) Andrew started off with a team that hadn't been curated all that well.  London had Lebron, Ayton, Siakim, and
Whiteside.  But things fell off a cliff pretty fast after that.  Andrew employed a scorched earth strategy with the roster
- Bron was traded for depth, the draft picks were traded for win-now pieces, and anyone who isn't producing
consistently in the present is sent packing.  For the first few weeks of the season, even while Andrew was busy
toppling Kevin and pushing Joel to the edge, I didn't think he actually had the horses to make a real run this season. 
But, that's changed recently.  I don't think *this particular* squad can contend, but I do think he's now got the
necessary horses to swing the right trades, and if history has taught us anything, it's that Andrew can pull that sort of
thing off.  For now, I've still got him in the "pain in the ass to match up with, but ultimately very beatable" category. 
But I 100 percent expect him to jump into the "oh shit, oh fuck, how did he do that" category at some point before the
playoffs begin.  I've got him at 5 compared to Kevin's 2, but there's not a lot of real estate between them.  In many
ways, seeing what he'll end up doing is one of the more fascinating subplots of this season.  Accross the board, Drew's
ability is respected, even feared.  But we've never seen him have to come from so far behind, and it's going to be fun
to watch him try to jump some of the hurdles in front of him.

7) Hammer has always been up and down in Bball.  Two years ago, he made the play-in, and if not for an ill-
timed injury to Porzingis, he might have advanced to the semis.  Last season, Zach sputtered to a lowly finish.  At the
beginning of this season, I looked at Zach's roster, and saw a lost team.  He had only a scant collection of win-now
pieces, with no clear rebuild pieces.  That's not what I see now.  What I see now is a middle of the pack, respectable
team, with a few heavy punchers and a couple of interesting project players.  Zach has a chance to make the play-in,
and there's reason for optimism about his future.
I'll put the final three teams in no particular order, since it's really splitting hairs to rank rebuilds.  

As for Wes, I think Wes understood that trading Kawhi for Zion was a punt.  At the time, I thought he was foolish to
include Lauri in that trade, but at the quarter-season mark of the NBA, it seems pretty clear I was wrong about that. 
Wes has quietly built up a squad that you have to put at least some effort into beating, and once he adds Zion and
healthy KD, he's going to win some matches, and he's positioned well for the future.

We all talk alot about "re-builds", and the word is thrown around alot.  That having been said, there's only one "true"
way to rebuild, and it's to embrace sucking in the short term.  When you see a stud get injured, you run out and buy
him for three quarters on the dollar.  If someone gets suspended for 25 games, you pounce on his desperate manager. 
It's not fun to go into every week without having much if any chance at winning, but Doug has fully embraced the
process of building his way back to contention, and there's no denying that he's got some very key players in the vault.

And finally, as for myself... we'll see.  I think at one point in early August, I had a team that could have probably
contended for the championship.  I badly miscalcuated a single trade I made with Joel, and probably sunk my season
on it.  I overpaid by a long shot for Giannis, but quickly realized the breadth and depth of my mistake, and undid
maybe 80 percent of the damage by winding it back in subsequent trades.  What I have now is a fairly balanced
collection of guys who can hit a bit harder than some may think, and my record isn't a great representation of where
my squad really stands in the pecking order.  That having been said, there's no denying that I'm missing some key
ingredients, low on cash, and have already lost my draft pick.  None of these are encouraging signs of a rebuild.  From
here my plan is to see how I perform over the next few weeks, and decide from there.  If I can pull my way back to
500, I'll try for the play-in and take my chances.  If I can't, I'll probably have to embrace the suck as Doug has done,
and start piecing together some "win next season" players.