The Beginning

EXPECTATIONS
To be an active, alert, aware owner. I know football gets us overwhelmed, but we need good enthusiastic owners for this to work. Even if your team is the Hawks 2004, you have to be active on the wire, active everywhere to pull your team out of the doldrums. That's the only way we can play a keeper league. It's the worst when the bottom six teams in a league give up in January. If you're a quitter, quit now. "Wedding Crasher Rule #76: No excuses. Play like a champion."

MONEY
No cash prize, but this can be discussed. We typically play for a ring each year. We could do a trophy but none of us see each other, so really, I'm not sure how exciting this would be. I'd propose gifts such as "3 McFarlane figures" of your championship team for winning, etc. Something rather than nothing. To be discussed.

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KEEPERS
All players on the roster at the end of the year (before the keeper roster lock befoer the playoffs) will be on the roster for 3 years. Meaning there's no re-draft of current players except every three years.

ROSTERS
Full rosters will consist of 15 men. Note the lack of a season ending IR spot. If it's worth it to keep an injured guy, it's on your own dime.

SCORING
9 Non-weighted categories. PTS, AST, REB, STL, BLK, 3PT, FG%, FT%, TO
Each week you compete across all nine Head-to-Head and whoever wins the most categories that week receives a win.

LINEUPS
Play 10 men each week. No positional limits or minimums.
We set lineups weekly (Monday).

TRADES and WAIVERS
No waiver pickup limit, it'll be done in reverse order of the standings for each new transaction period. Waiver order resets weekly. All players cut from a roster hit waivers for 2 days. Then they become Free Agents. Any unaffiliated player is already a Free Agent.

Trades will be reviewed by the commissioners and only overturned if it seems terribly wrong. Otherwise, trade away.

Trade and waiver deadline will be decided when I set up the league (currently 3/12 for trades, 3/19 for waivers).

PLAYOFFS
The top 4 teams from each conference enter the playoffs. Top seeds have tie-breaker advantage should the scoring for the week come up even.

The final Championship Week is (possibly) more than seven days. Traditionally, the scoring goes more than the allotted seven days to make up for the last few days of the NBA regular season.

(amended from:) Top 3 teams from each conference make the playoffs. Start date for playoffs is unsure. First place team in each conference gets a bye.

The championship round will consist of (very likely) more than just one week. It usually goes about 1.5-2 weeks for some reason, just b/c of the NBA season. This also has the side effect of making the championship round a tad longer.


TOILET BOWL
To determine next year's draft order, we'll have a Toilet Bowl. The last and second-to-last place teams will duke it out for the #1 pick in the next year's draft (during the first week of our playoffs). The winner of that game gets the #1 pick, the loser gets #2. During that same week, the third-to-last and fourth-to-last teams play for picks #3 and #4. The fifth-to-last and sixth-to-last teams play each other for the #5 and #6 picks. Sounds confusing, it's not. It's incentive for every team to play competitively all year, even to just win their next year's draft pick.

ROSTER LOCK
Before our fantasy playoffs each year, we'll need to institute a roster lock. The purpose is two-fold. One, it lets the playoff contestants add/drop for their playoff run without ruining their keeper roster. Two, people can't snipe players this year for next year. Like grabbing a young guy just as the playoffs start to suddenly make him (or her) part of your keeper core. See, "Trades and Waivers" for lock time.

OWNERS - 6 East, 6 West.
East - Alvin, Brian, Eric A, Jose, Oliver, Reno.
West - Jon, Evan, Roger, Ping, Eric L, Trieu.