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Drive to the FinalsOh, Detroit. You can never make it easy for me, can you? The Pistons lose Game 1, thereby handing over home court advantage to the Heat. This is good for the Experts collectively as Brad Friedman picked Tayshaun Prince. Personally, I picked Antoine Walker. Looks like I need to re-evaluate things and start considering Pistons.
Jeff Dengate and the Experts are picking Raja Bell today. He expects the Mavs to sweep, so he is using our remaining Suns now. Similarly to the Prince pick, I can't argue with it if the Mavs go in and win tonight. However, the difference here is that we have limited players to pick from. In fact, we only have five players combined from the Mavs and Suns who average over a 15.0 PRA.
So, unless this is a four-game series, why mess around? Mavs are at home, pick the best Mavs player now. Save our Suns for home Suns games. In the end, it probably won't matter much. We'll pick the same players during this series, just on different days. I'd simply like to maximize any advantage we may have by picking players in home games.
I'm just saying.
If you haven't noticed, the Experts are currently in the 98th percentile, ranked 378th out of 32,000 or so. Pretty nice, right? And considering that many of the teams currently near the top of the leaderboard got to their position by wrecklessly picking top players regardless of team early, I feel good about the possibilities.
How cool would it be if the experts won the car? Not cool for you, but it would be plenty cool for us. Not easy to split a car between five people, but we'd figure something out. I don't think Friedman is old enough to have a driver's license, so that's one less person to worry about. It pays to be smart.
Granted, NBA employees aren't eligible to win said prize. Might be true. But, you can bet we'll gloat. We'll brag. We won't let you forget who won this thing. And just when you thought we were done, we'll gloat and brag some more.
And gloat and brag.
Before we start filling out the makeshift plaque to be hung on my wall in place of the car I had hoped to park in a special place in the NBA parking lot, I decided to do a little research. Do we have a shot? First, I collected the data of the top five teams. I'd look at more, but that takes time, people. What I did was track which players everyone has picked and what we all have left to choose from.
We're sitting pretty with 988 points, but that happens to be 107 points below the overall leader. We do have an advantage over the leader and the rest of the top five, however, in that we have only used six of the players currently playing. Let's take a look:
| Team | SEA CATS | ballin427 | bbbbillups | stal437 | Krunch Time | Experts |
| Phoenix | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 |
| Dallas | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| Detroit | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| Miami | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Total | 9 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 9 | 6 |
Oh, yeah! You're going down! Why you people decided to pick Pistons and Heat players early is beyond me. Your problem, not ours. Because we're going to win.
Errr.... maybe not. Next I listed the players available to each participant in order from best PRA to worst. At a minimum, there will be 11 more picks to be made. At most, there will be 20. The more, the better for us. Now, I realize that depending on how each series goes, we may not use every player from that top 11 to 20, but it is a starting point.
Finally, the moment of truth. How many points will each of us have when this thing is said and done? I took numbers for 20 more picks and numbers for 11. While we earned more points than the rest of these losers, it will be us who does the losing.
| SEA CATS | ballin427 | bbbbillups | stal437 | Krunch Time | Experts | |
| Top 20 | 348 | 355 | 388 | 367 | 333 | 402 |
| Current Total | 1088 | 1084 | 1075 | 1072 | 1069 | 981 |
| Projected Total for 20 picks | 1436 | 1439 | 1463 | 1439 | 1402 | 1383 |
| Top 11 | 249 | 248 | 272 | 251 | 234 | 275 |
| Projected Total for 11 picks | 1337 | 1332 | 1347 | 1323 | 1303 | 1256 |
Ok, so the experts aren't going to win. But we're going to crack the top 100. Maybe the top 50. And we won't let you forget about it.
