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I've had some requests from our veteran players about starting up a National Fantasy Basketball Championship and have considered it in the last year. Honestly, I know that market is much smaller than football and baseball, but there's an opportunity to run a good game here and I'm interested. Fantasy Sports Magazine ran a special basketball/hockey issue each year through 2000 before ending that, but this year we are doing a fantasy basketball magazine for NBA.com and my desire to do a high-stakes basketball contest has picked up again.

Here's some thoughts and I'm looking for feedback from anyone who is interested:

1) Price: Between $500 and $750 per team. Someone help me here. Is $650 a fair medium? $700 better or too much? Payouts will be 75% of entry fees in prizes.

2) Draft: We would host live online drafts, so you wouldn't need to go anywhere if that suits your schedule better. However, I am leaning toward also renting space in Las Vegas on Saturday, Oct. 29th for those who would like to do a live draft. So we'd have a combination of live drafters and online drafters (separate leagues though, depending on the numbers) all going off at the same time.

3) Date: Saturday, Oct. 29th. 1 p.m. EST

4) Online Site: It's not affordable to create a separate NFBBC site and STATS doesn't have a basketball commissioner product yet. So I would contract with Allstar Stats to run the individual leagues and the overall contest and we'd be hosted there. There would be individual league message boards there and I'd create a spot here for the main NFBBC Message Board. It's not ideal, but suitable for the first year.

5) Format: 12 teams, 8-10 categories, Rotisserie format. We'd pay out league prizes and an overall prize just like we do in the National Fantasy Baseball Championship. If we got 60 teams, we could have something around a $3,000 league prize, $1,200 for 2nd, $500 for third and $5,000 overall prize depending on the entry fee. Again, it would be a start.

6) Scoring: Rotisserie format using categories like total points, blocked shots, rebounds, steals, assists, field goal percentage, free throws made and three-pointers made. Should we add FT% or anything else?

7) Serpentine draft for 12-14 rounds and you start 10 players each week. We can finalize those numbers later as I don't have the rules done yet. We'll also have a $1,000 FAAB for in-season free agents using blind bidding process.

That's it for now. Any and all feedback is welcome. The concept of a live draft/online draft is kind of appealing. This would be a labor of love for all of us as the stakes aren't too high for making money or spending money! But I'd need to see the interest first.

Again, just looking for feedback on this and then we could try word-of-mouth advertising to see what kind of interest is out there. Thanks everyone.

Greg, it's a fantastic idea--and one that I've been pushing on you for over a year now! With NBA labor peace for at least the next few years, this is the perfect time to get this rolling.

My thoughts:

(1) I would start at $500 to generate interest. Many people have never played fantasy basketball, and you don't want to price them out of the market. If the interest is there, you can create additional leagues for higher prices and prizes.

(2) I like the live draft location idea, but here's a thought: why not use basketball as an opportunity to experiment with a new market? How does New Orleans for Halloween weekend sound to everyone?

(3) Draft date -- that's the right weekend to do it, as the season kicks off a few days after that. Saturday makes as much sense as any other day.

(4) To those who haven't used it, AllStar Stats has a quality product (much better than Stats, IMO) that will serve our needs well. I'm glad that Rich Pike came through for you.

(5) 12 team leagues with roto format is good. I like the overall prize, too.

(6) The 8 scoring categories you mentioned (pts, reb, asst, blk, stl, fg%, ft made, 3pt made) are probably the standard ones. In the past, I've used turnovers and ft% as well. I could go either way on including these last two.

(7) FAAB is great (and I know AllStar has this option). I assume we would be using weekly starting lineups for these leagues. Using a definitive source for positions is key -- some sites list a player as PF, while others list the same player as a F/C, and still more might list the player as a C. I would recommend we follow the AllStar Stats position listings, whatever they may be.

Greg, nice job in putting this together. I know you have a million other things going on right now, but this is the right time to get started on this. Waiting until late September/early October was a big problem last year -- let's keep our fingers crossed that this can be a successful and fun venture...

I agree on all. Dyv mentioned that Chicago would be a more centralized location and I'm fine with that or New Orleans or Las Vegas or even New York. Honestly, I'm not married to any location as my goal is to give whoever wants to do this live a chance to also have some fun. Would you pay a $500 entry fee for a contest and then $300+ for an airline ticket? Probably not, but if the idea is to have some fun with the getaway you might.

Chicago, New Orleans, Las Vegas, anything is fine with me. Most would probably do the online draft, but this could be fun.

Honestly, I'm talking to some web sites about working with me on this project so that this isn't just a Krause Publications production. Maybe this becomes an industry-wide event, promoted by a lot of companies that benefit from it. I'm not trying to get rich with this idea, just trying to create another potential event/contest. It has merit, but this is small potatoes compared to everything else we do here.

Keep the talk going and we'll see where this leads us.

Did I hear satellites? :rolleyes:

I would be in for this Greg. Date sounds fine with me. I have to be selfish and prefer the location to be as close to NY as possible. It is the Mecca of Basketball. But Chicago doesn't sound that bad either. Scoring format sounds good as well. I agree to attract interest maybe we should start with 500. But that is my 2 cents.

I think the satellite draft might get a better participation for basketball. There are alot of basketball fans out there..... but fantasy basketball owners are hard to come by. I think $500 is a good starting point for this event. KoQ I love New Orleans as a spot for a potential for a future draft..my wife and I love it there. The convention center is huge and the casino is right there.Keep me up to date Greg !!!

I think a lot of people are in football mode right now, and not thinking about basketball. I'll bet the interest picks up in a couple of weeks as people want to get involved in the next big thing.

Thanks guys. I'm still moving forward with this, but yes it's on the backburner right now. I think I may just go with an all online draft this year and get feedback from everyone on where the ideal draft spot would be for 2006 if we do a combination of live and online drafts. Right now this is doable if I just start out slow and pay out good league prizes and overall prizes. Could be fun.

Just read this and I'm not sure I'd play but a few comments...

I think the future of fantasy sports is points based leagues, not roto. Points allow head-to-head play while roto does not. Any scoring formula could be used and such leagues have been going on for some time on free sites like Yahoo.

Basketball rosters would typically be:

PG, SG, C, SF, PF and some number of flex players like PG/SG, SF/PF and Utility.

Scoring could start as total points for the year but weekly head-to-head would have a lot more interest and be more complicated as the need to juggle different schedules with your bench players would be critical.

Originally posted by JerseyPaul:
I think the future of fantasy sports is points based leagues, not roto. Points allow head-to-head play while roto does not. Any scoring formula could be used and such leagues have been going on for some time on free sites like Yahoo. I've played both formats -- either one would be okay with me, as there are benefits to each.