All invites have now been accepted and we now have a full league of 20 teams!

Thanks to everyone for their help with everything so far. We have the draft order and scoring system all sorted now (details of these will be over the break). Both of these aspects will heavily influence the type of players we will be scouting to recruit in the draft, so I am really happy we have them out of the way.

If anyone wants to know anything particular about the league setup, just ask,
but the most important aspects are as follows:

As you all know, there are 20 teams in the league.

Every team plays each other once and once only. Each match goes for 1 week, and the first Game Week is the first week of the NBA regular season.

8 teams qualify for the playoffs.  In the event of two or more teams finishing on the same overall record, the team with the higher total points for for the season will qualify ahead of the other/s. Each playoff match also goes for a week which means the Grand Final will be on the final week of the NBA regular season. In the playoffs the home team (team with better regular season record) will get a 1 point head start.

There is a 3 day waiver period for free agents. (meaning noone can aquire a free agent for the 1st 3 days they are a free agent) Everyone is only able to acquire a maximum of 5 free agents each game week.

There is a 2 day period after each trade is agreed on where other coaches can veto the trade (a min of 4 coaches need to reject the trade for it to be canceled).

Once again, please ask if there is anything else you need to know.

Now the next thing we need to organise is the date of the draft...   more on this over the break ... <!--more-->

We will be having a live draft, however not everyone (or anyone for that matter) is required to attend. I think the more people that actually participate in the draft, the more fun it will be, so well try to set up a date and time that suits most people.

The draft will be using a snake system where pick one of 1st round gets last pick in 2nd round, and 1st pick again in round 3 etc. I propose that we set the timelimit for each pick to be 30sec so that we can anticipate the whole thing taking less than 2 hours.

The NBA season starts on the October 26th. I propose that we do the draft at least a week before that date to give us time to finalise our roster with trades, free agents etc, before the season kicks off.

Another thing to note is daylight savings starts at the end of September, so it may even be easier to organise before then because of the time diff between Victoria and USA.

However, I am open to any date from earliest available (16th September) until the 19th October. And it needs to be between 8am and 12:45am US ESTime. So that means we can only do the draft between 10pm and 2:45pm vic time (if we do it in September). And if we wait until October then we can only do it between 11pm and 3:45pm vic time.

I am presuming that most people will not be able to attend on weekdays during the day, and most likely would prefer not to do it on a weekend. So that leaves either early in the morn before work/school (not likely), or 10pm (vic time) on a weeknight if in September, or 11pm (vic time) if in October.

So I am proposing that we have the draft on Thursday 30th September, at 10pm AEST.  How does that sound? Ill send out an email tonight with this info and see if it suits most people.

If we wait until October we will need to start the draft at 11pm AEST, and it may not finish until 1am. Unless we have it on a weekend where we could be more flexible with times. I think its best to have it as close to the beginning of season as possible, that is why im proposing the last day before daylight savings begins.

Now here is the draft order:

1.   . Danny10

2.   . Chris88
3.   . Cameron
4.   . Steve
5.   . DaBombers
6.   . Walesy
7.   . Jasmine
8.   . Owen
9.   . Karlos
10. . HEAVER!
11. . ElBonz
12. . Ruddy
13. . FZilla
14. . Micka
15. . Fez
16. . Fudge
17. . Doobs
18. . Under Achievers
19. . anthak
20. . Stowie

and please note you can trade picks with people, see here for instructions:  http://games.espn.go.com/fba/resources/help/faq?name=how-do-i-propose-accept-a-trade

also, if anyone is interested in reading up about the draft, have a look here:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://games.espn.go.com/fba/resources/help/content?name=drafts-live-online">http://games.espn.go.com/fba/resources/help/content?name=drafts-live-online[/url]

And if you want to, you can do a mock draft here (unfortunately, we havent been able to find a 20 team mock draft as yet):<a rel="nofollow" href="http://games.espn.go.com/fba/mockdraftlobby"> http://games.espn.go.com/fba/mockdraftlobby[/url], choose the snake version.

And the scoring system we have come up with is as follows:

Points (PTS),1
Blocks (BLK),4
Steals (STL),4
Assists (AST),3
Offensive Rebounds (OREB),2
Defensive Rebounds (DREB),1
Ejections (EJ),-10
Flagrant Fouls (FF),-4
Personal Fouls (PF),-1
Technical Fouls (TF),-3
Turnovers (TO),-3
Disqualifications (DQ),-5
Field Goals Made (FGM),1
Free Throws Made (FTM),1
Three Pointers Made (3PM),2
Field Goals Missed (FGMI),-1
Free Throws Missed (FTMI),-2
Three Pointers Missed (3PMI),-1
Double Doubles (DD),6
Triple Doubles (TD),11
Quadruple Doubles (QD),20
Team Wins (TW),1

And to break down the shooting, it effectively works like this:

*if you shoot
50% FG’s then you will score 1 point for every point made = 2 points for a dunk.
40% 3pt then you will score 1 point for every point scored = 3 points per basket.
66.67% Ft’s then you will score 1 point for every point scored = 1 point per FT made

* you will start scoring negatives when you are:
below 25% for both FG’s and 3pt’s
and below 50% for FT’s.

*and the better someone shoots the more points they get for their baskets in all 3 categories.

anyway, thats more then enough for this week. Happy chatting. It will be good to have an entry near the top of the page again.