We have now set the draft date and time for the 30th September at 10pm AEST, and not long after, the first trade was accepted!

Firstly, thanks to everyone who replied to me about the draft date. 18 coaches gave some input, and there was overwhelming support for the 30th, however unfortunately ElBonz will most probably not be able to make it live.

Out of all that replied, ElBonz was the only one that could not make it on the 30th; and one other said that they preferred a weekend but could still make it on a Thursday evening. Yesterday I sent an email out to all that were happy with the 30th and asked if everyone could also attend on the 23rd if we had it that day, however 2 people out of the first few that replied could not do the 23rd, so i decided to stick with what we first planned, and go with the 30th. Also, as pointed out by Steve, the Grand Final Footy Show is on the 23rd September, so it probably wouldnt be a good night for us on that factor alone.

So at the time of writing this, we have approximately 17 days, 4 hours and 7 minutes to go until our draft begins!


***  Now, the next thing i want to organise is the conferences.

As some of you have realised, the league is set up into two conferences. Originally they were called East and West, and then changed to Fez conference and not fez conference after Fez had complained about being in the West ... Then I changed them to A and B. In my opinion, the names are not so important, however we can choose names for them so we may as well discuss it in the comments.

** What is important, is who is in each conference. This is important because, contrary to what i first thought, Im pretty sure the top 4 teams from each conference make the playoffs, as distinct from the top 8 teams in the league.

At the moment the first 10 teams that i sent invites to are in one conference and the other 10 are in the other. We can leave it at that, however Im interested to know what everyone thinks is the fairest way to divide the teams.

Maybe it would be best to leave it as it is.

Maybe we could have the teams with top 10 draft picks together in one conference.

Maybe divide everyone the same way a tennis draw etc is seeded, based on draft order.

What does everyone think?

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And as I mentioned above, our first accepted trade has occurred earlier today.

More on this, and other news over the break...

<!--more-->As most of you have probably seen in your emails, Walesy and myself have traded some picks:

My 1st Round (19th Overall), 7th Round (139th Overall) &amp; 12th Round (222nd Overall) ,  for his 2nd Round (35th Overall), 3rd Round (46th Overall) &amp; 13th Round (246th Overall).

Hard to know to whos advantage it will be, however I do know it felt weird hitting the accept button to get rid of my 1st pick! And Ive noticed that Walesy is already shopping around that round 1 pick that I traded to him. Good luck to you mate.

I can see that there are a few others in the trade market as well. We are set up well, in that we have this site to be in touch easily with everyone in our league, which makes it easier to propose general trade ideas out there. But for those that want to make a firm offer, you do it over the ESPN site.

I have posted the details before, but for those that are still unsure of the process, click on the following link for instructions: <a title="trading instructions" href="http://games.espn.go.com/fba/resources/help/faq?name=how-do-i-propose-accept-a-trade" target="_blank">http://games.espn.go.com/fba/resources/help/faq?name=how-do-i-propose-accept-a-trade[/url]. It doesnt specifically talk about trading draft picks, however the process is exactly the same, just substitute the word player for draft pick.

And to cancel/reject a trade, you navigate to your My Team page. Just underneath where the draft countdown is displayed, there are two grey boxes with open buttons on the right hand side of them. If you click on the open button in the Your Pending Moves box, it will open up and next to the trade you want to reject/cancel you press the relevant button. I hope that makes sense. If you try to follow these instructions, it will probably be self explanatory after the first step or two.

While im on the links, here is a list of all the FAQs about ESPN fantasy BBall:  <a title="FAQ" href="http://games.espn.go.com/fba/content?page=fbarulesfaq2011" target="_blank">http://games.espn.go.com/fba/content?page=fbarulesfaq2011[/url].

And here is a link to last weeks post where there is heaps of info about our league specifically: <a title="too serious nba" href="http://tooserious.net/?p=1902" target="_blank">http://tooserious.net/?p=1902[/url].

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Now thats about it for this week. Next week I will go into more detail about the draft and especially the Pre-Draft Player Rankings list.

Happy trading!  And please let me know what you all think about the conferences in the comment section below. Specifically, the names of them and how we divide the teams up. Thanks!