I don’t know if we’ll ever do this again, but if we do I think it would be better if we knew our draft position before we make our list.

Posted by Midge on 10/28/2023 3:44:00 PM (view original):
I don’t know if we’ll ever do this again, but if we do I think it would be better if we knew our draft position before we make our list.

Defeats the entire point.

Posted by benhoidal on 10/28/2023 12:42:00 PM (view original):

Posted by berkelon on 10/28/2023 11:08:00 AM (view original):
This theme reminds me of scattergories. Lots and lots of luck. Makes me wonder a bit why it's included if we're trying to figure out the best of WIS, but, like scattergories, it's a gas.

Completely disagree about the luck part.

We'll have to agree to disagree, then. It's fun, and the lists certainly allow for the best players to go to the best governors, but who you get position-wise is definitely a bit of a crapshoot, and obviously based largely on luck. Rob said last time he was playing he had Derek Harper at SF. Was that just bad list management on his part? If there is some deep-*** theory about how to manage your list so you can game the system, great, but that's a bit like scattegories imo. It would be cool if we could do an autodraft that offered some degree of intelligence about roster building, the way the old yahoo fantasy auto-draft used to work 20 years ago. It would make sure you didn't get 6 centers, etc. But that's probably a pain in the arse to figure out. I still think it's fun, so no complaints.

Posted by berkelon on 10/28/2023 5:00:00 PM (view original):

Posted by benhoidal on 10/28/2023 12:42:00 PM (view original):

Posted by berkelon on 10/28/2023 11:08:00 AM (view original):
This theme reminds me of scattergories. Lots and lots of luck. Makes me wonder a bit why it's included if we're trying to figure out the best of WIS, but, like scattergories, it's a gas.

Completely disagree about the luck part.

We'll have to agree to disagree, then. It's fun, and the lists certainly allow for the best players to go to the best governors, but who you get position-wise is definitely a bit of a crapshoot, and obviously based largely on luck. Rob said last time he was playing he had Derek Harper at SF. Was that just bad list management on his part? If there is some deep-*** theory about how to manage your list so you can game the system, great, but that's a bit like scattegories imo. It would be cool if we could do an autodraft that offered some degree of intelligence about roster building, the way the old yahoo fantasy auto-draft used to work 20 years ago. It would make sure you didn't get 6 centers, etc. But that's probably a pain in the arse to figure out. I still think it's fun, so no complaints.

Rob said last time he was playing he had Derek Harper at SF. Was that just bad list management on his part?

- Yes

There would be no way to effectively manage the position groups because players aren’t static year to year and the code has no way of know which seasons you are going to use… even you don’t know until you see the outcome. On top of that most players can play a variety of positions.

Posted by robusk on 10/28/2023 5:04:00 PM (view original):
There would be no way to effectively manage the position groups because players aren’t static year to year and the code has no way of know which seasons you are going to use… even you don’t know until you see the outcome. On top of that most players can play a variety of positions.

Makes sense.

I definitely spent a lot more time considering positional flexibility, creating “chunks” based on how many people usually get drafted and de-emphasizing specialists this time around.

Posted by robusk on 10/28/2023 5:07:00 PM (view original):
I definitely spent a lot more time considering positional flexibility, creating “chunks” based on how many people usually get drafted and de-emphasizing specialists this time around.

That makes a lot of sense, and yet you could have easily gotten screwed anyway, no?

Posted by berkelon on 10/28/2023 5:15:00 PM (view original):

Posted by robusk on 10/28/2023 5:07:00 PM (view original):
I definitely spent a lot more time considering positional flexibility, creating “chunks” based on how many people usually get drafted and de-emphasizing specialists this time around.

That makes a lot of sense, and yet you could have easily gotten screwed anyway, no?

I mean, I don't love my draft as is, it is super expensive and fairly lopsided in certain ways. I will have obvious warts although everyone should. I think I had enough guardrails in place to prevent anything too gnarly though.

There are some garbage *** things about scattegories I hate. For one, in this format no one is going to end up with something like LeBron, Durant, Giannis after one round while another teams ends up with zero players through sure luck. That is the most annoying thing where you can have two owners of equal skill submit similarly diverse lists with a mix of obscure and good players and one gets canceled out based on the whims of someone else and the other gets scot free. Best case scenario since it is a draft as still only getting one player per round.

Second, scattegories dilutes the pool. Two people put in for the same player and they get removed from the pool, that keeps happening, until the effective pool at the end is a much worse group of players. Which I am all for, I love playing small caps and stuff like that, but not when different teams have different pools of very different talent sets to pull from. This still distributes a player per tier per team even if the position / usage mix requires some juggling.

I tried to make a list where my players played multiple positions and I also wanted players with multiple useable seasons so if I needed to use that $3 million season instead of that $7 million season I could make the money work and I end up with five guards. Oh well.

Posted by Midge on 10/28/2023 5:32:00 PM (view original):
I tried to make a list where my players played multiple positions and I also wanted players with multiple useable seasons so if I needed to use that $3 million season instead of that $7 million season I could make the money work and I end up with five guards. Oh well.

What’s wrong with 5 guards? I have 6.


I think this league more than other is a measure of how you can rate players in a vacuum. Every other draft you get to look at your team and figure out which player fits perfectly.

Personally, I think it should be a BOWIS staple. I’m sure I’ll get enough opposition on that that it won’t happen, but to me it’s clearly better than any of the other options that were proposed when we started this thing.

It will be very interesting to see what the winner comes up with for league number six next season.

Magic
Derrick White / Aaron Gordon
Elton Brand
Bobby Jones / Poeltl
DJ


Little low on usage and threes & I had to sacrifice some of my guys best seasons to stay under the cap, but I love my defense and like the mix of guys I got giving me a little bit of everything. Finding good higher usage backups for Magic and Brand is proving difficult however, but I love the challenge these unorthodox leagues bring.

Thanks for getting everything done and putting up with mine and everybody else's mistakes, robusk. You da man.

Posted by benhoidal on 10/28/2023 5:55:00 PM (view original):

Posted by Midge on 10/28/2023 5:32:00 PM (view original):
I tried to make a list where my players played multiple positions and I also wanted players with multiple useable seasons so if I needed to use that $3 million season instead of that $7 million season I could make the money work and I end up with five guards. Oh well.

What’s wrong with 5 guards? I have 6.


I think this league more than other is a measure of how you can rate players in a vacuum. Every other draft you get to look at your team and figure out which player fits perfectly.

Personally, I think it should be a BOWIS staple. I’m sure I’ll get enough opposition on that that it won’t happen, but to me it’s clearly better than any of the other options that were proposed when we started this thing.

But if you look at how the governors ranked the players, it's not really a vacuum. If you treat it like a vacuum (which I think is the spirit of the theme) you run the risk of getting somewhat jobbed by the randomness of the positions you pull. If you try to finesse the vacuum, it takes some of the chance out of the equation, but you also lose some of the purity of the 1-168 ranking (which was the primary appeal to me of this theme, at least in theory). I'm really not unhappy with the theme, I swear. Now I'll move on to the business of trying to figure out how to win as many games as possible with this squad, which I actually like a bit, but which I'll undoubtedly just barely mismange to a slightly disappointing finish...

And big thanks for all the hard work! It is very appreciated, and I love these leagues!

Posted by berkelon on 10/28/2023 10:02:00 PM (view original):

Posted by benhoidal on 10/28/2023 5:55:00 PM (view original):

Posted by Midge on 10/28/2023 5:32:00 PM (view original):
I tried to make a list where my players played multiple positions and I also wanted players with multiple useable seasons so if I needed to use that $3 million season instead of that $7 million season I could make the money work and I end up with five guards. Oh well.

What’s wrong with 5 guards? I have 6.


I think this league more than other is a measure of how you can rate players in a vacuum. Every other draft you get to look at your team and figure out which player fits perfectly.

Personally, I think it should be a BOWIS staple. I’m sure I’ll get enough opposition on that that it won’t happen, but to me it’s clearly better than any of the other options that were proposed when we started this thing.

But if you look at how the governors ranked the players, it's not really a vacuum. If you treat it like a vacuum (which I think is the spirit of the theme) you run the risk of getting somewhat jobbed by the randomness of the positions you pull. If you try to finesse the vacuum, it takes some of the chance out of the equation, but you also lose some of the purity of the 1-168 ranking (which was the primary appeal to me of this theme, at least in theory). I'm really not unhappy with the theme, I swear. Now I'll move on to the business of trying to figure out how to win as many games as possible with this squad, which I actually like a bit, but which I'll undoubtedly just barely mismange to a slightly disappointing finish...

And big thanks for all the hard work! It is very appreciated, and I love these leagues!

I agree that it’s not really a vacuum. I think if we did this again too many people would just look at the lists of the 3-4 users who do the best this season and basically copy their lists. I actually think that lists should not be public. Rob should be the only one to see all the lists. No one else’s list is ever going to influence his own list.