Blockhead on fantasy leagues

By Blockhead » Blockhead discusses fantasy basketball leagues, the vice that allows him to shame his friends with stats and shame himself in front of his girlfriend.

For the last seven years or so, I have been playing fantasy basketball online. This means, come basketball season every year, I become a crazy person with one focus, that focus being to beat all my asshole friends in a game of chance. It's basically glorified gambling. Sure, the buy in is between $50 to $200. This could mean over $1000 dollars to the lucky winner. But when you do the math for the amount of work put in to maintaining a competitive fantasy basketball team, that's about negative 48 cents an hour.

The funny thing about this is that I'm in no other way an addictive person. I'm not even that competitive when I play real sports. Something about the want to humiliate those I'm close to seems to be the driving force behind it. But, there is so much more to fantasy basketball than just humiliation and low level gambling. On the positive side of things, I now know more about every half-assed basketball player in the NBA than I ever need to. This opens the doors for many great inside jokes amongst my fellow fantasy nerd friends. Also, when you win a close battle (every week you go head to head with a new person), it's truly satisfying. Almost as if you had actually coached your team to victory.

On the down side, I now no longer root for teams. I mean, sure, I want the Knicks to win (LOL at that actually happening), but fantasy sports has changed how I watch, and therefore, enjoy sports. Nowadays, I root for who ever is on my team. So, if the Knicks are playing the Milwaukee Bucks, and I have a player on the Bucks, you best believe I'm cheering that motherfucker on the whole game. Every rebound. Every assist. Cursing at him for every missed free throw. Basically, fantasy basketball has turned me into a couch version of a shitty little league dad trying to relive his former glory through his child.

Also, this has led me to watch games and teams I would never even think about watching normally. While this could be looked upon as a positive, I have a few New Jersey Nets on my team and, thus, I have pretty much seen every game played this season by the worst team ever in basketball history. Not a good look.  Worse than all that, though, is explaining this obsession to people who don't understand it or give a shit about it. Primarily: Girls. To be more exact: girlfriends.

My girlfriend is a pretty understanding person. Her tolerance thresholds are far beyond most. But she looks at me like I'm crazy when I'm staring at "Stattracker" (every fantasy nerds best friend and worst enemy), screaming, "Gimmie a fucking break Yi! Hit a fucking shot for once in your stupid fucking life!!" She'll occasionally throw me a bone with "how's your team doing?," but I know this is a courtesy question and if I were to ever answer her honestly, she'd probably break up with me before I could wrap up my 45-minute monologue on "how my team is doing."

So, yeah, fantasy basketball. Reading this, it sounds pretty awful. But, much like heroin, you don't really know 'till you try it (I'm kidding). I'd recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in basketball and lots of free time. Anyone else? I hear dungeons and dragons is off the hook.

Posted on April 15, 2010. More on: block head, fantasy basketball