Twice as meaningless: Successfully running your girlfriend's fantasy team

Your author is hard-pressed to think of something that can cause an immediate loss of interest quite like hearing about someone's fantasy team. Having friends and co-workers recite their rosters with no real purpose other than to gloat about conquering leagues you're not involved in seems quite banal and pointless, no?

That said, the author knows full well that you the dear reader probably also couldn't give two shits about whatever fantasy team he's gone and created after so many years of taking that road less traveled where non-participation seemed cooler. Now the author has multiple fantasy teams, and while he tries mightily not to bring those into the other posts here on BMC that you might actually read, every once in a while, if for no other purpose than to help him remember who he had on such teams in a given year, he likes to keep a recorded entry of how he's done.

This is one of those times. Your non-interest in the remainder of this post is understood.

As it turned out, the Fantasy Basketball league finally garnered some real interest from ™. While I don't believe I ever disclosed this in a previous update, after drafting her initial roster—and securing the only two players she really wanted—she left the whole roster management responsibility to me. Seeing as roughly half the league never made these adjustments after that draft day, just doing that alone should be good enough to win. And so throughout most of the year, this arrangement never really presented any real issues.

But now that the end of the fantasy league's regular season is concluding and we're entering the playoffs portion of the schedule, I took the liberty of approving a trade between ™'s team and my own without ever really consulting her about what I was doing to her roster. Now, this trade needed to be approved by the league's administrator—who is also basically the only other person really still active in this league anymore—so the deal couldn't be totally lopsided. Anyway, judge for yourself who got the better end of this one:

Those of you familiar with this segment know that just like I got Michael Turner first with all three of my fantasy football leagues, I've landed Chris Paul first in both basketball drafts. And while it was sort of funny that this trade was approved on the same day this happened, I should point out that over the past two weeks Paul is averaging 182.2 fantasy points per game—second-best in the league.

™ promptly went back to not really caring all that much, but the point of that trade for me was more to bulk up on the number of games played. So give those Boston and Phoenix players with a dozen games over the three weeks of the playoffs as opposed to Paul or Rodney Stuckney's nine games in the same span. I don't know if this strategy will really work, but I doubled down on it by getting another trade approved a week later—with another team:

I'll post that giant list of all the roster moves made in the final post of the season, but for now, here's how the regular season standings looked:

So I finished in second for the year, but I enter the playoffs having won 12 weeks in a row. And somewhat ironically, the first week of the playoffs is entirely comprised of four rematches from the final week of the regular season:

As you can see, I'm off to a good start to this opening round after one night, but be sure to take a look at the scoreboard over on the right showing the results from the previous week. Going into the playoffs, ™ had the week's highest-scoring team and I was second.

I'd say nobody really cares, but somebody other than myself just might if I end up meeting her in the Championship.