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By John Cregan, www.TalentedMrRoto.com
"Playing for Keeps" will provide fantasy hoops advice from a keeper league perspective each week.
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Feb. 8: 
Allow me to predicate what I'm about to say with the fact that I, first, and above all things, will go to great lengths to promote the spread of keeper leagues within the world of fantasy basketball. If I had my druthers, the majority of us would be toiling in the fast lane, thinking in three-year increments rather than just three weeks.
But you have to do it right.
Keeper leagues come and go. It's a part of life. People move. Babies are born. People suffer drastic changes of priority. Wives have you served papers for divorce. Hey...it happens.
So, as a result, I usually find myself looking to join a new keeper league every year or so. From year to year, I find myself owning between 6-8 fantasy hoops teams, and I like at least half of them to be keeper leagues. I predominantly use the non-keeper leagues to draft players I normally wouldn't as a way of keeping track of as many players as possible (so that I might better serve you).
Occasionally, I will get a blind invitation to join a keeper league. This happened again a week or so ago when I received an email from a very nice fellow looking to start a competitive league. I had a hole in my schedule. And I always am looking to encourage formation of keeper leagues. so I bit and joined.
Then I found out the following -
1. The draft had already occurred the week before and I was taking over someone else's poorly drafted team.
and -
2. The keeper rules had not been established.
Now, I can deal with item one. In a keeper league - and this is the point of a keeper league - even bad teams can still maintain interest by building for next season, when they might be able to exact revenge on their fellow owners (albeit in a friendly, non-violent manner). So, point me to the keeper rules, give me the emails of the other owners, and I will happily start building for a better tomorrow.
However, when there are no keeper rules, and you wait until after the draft to figure them out, things get dicey.
Why? Because the teams that are in first or second at that point will get greedy. The first and foremost rule of establishing a keeper league must be to have your keeper rules firmly and inscrutably affixed before your draft.
The keeper rules in this particular situation that had been discussed but not agreed upon were my least favorite. The idea under debate was that a team simply keeps any 3 players it wants to keep before the next draft.
That’s Sub-Narcoleptic
Just keeping your top 2-4 players year in, year out makes for a dull league. The thing makes a keeper league really sing is having a system to incentivize losing teams to pay attention even after their season is lost.
Leagues like this tend to resemble fascist states. Two or three owners greedily lap up the top 10% of talent, and refuse to relinquish them. They sit high atop their standings for leagues on end, refusing to cede control for fear of sending their inflated sense of self into the gutter.
Thomas Malthus would never join one of these leagues.
Because if I have LeBron, Yao, and Dirk, I'm never, ever letting those guys go. Until they retire. And maybe even beyond that. And that's not fun for other owners. On the other hand, you should have a way to keep your favorite players - as long as you're willing to pay the price.
It comes down to this - all players should have a tangible value affixed to them that will have ramifications on future drafts.
It can be a dollar value or a draft pick, but the dichotomy between the player's price versus what their actual output entails is the key to making things really interesting.
If you're a losing team, you should be making deals for low-priced/high-valued keepers. If you're a winning team, you should be trading low-priced/high-valued players for the best players possible in order to put away the competition and win now.
In this case, there was chaos because there wasn’t a rationale to making deals. And it was making the some of the preternaturally cranky owners downright hostile. (This is another important aspect to joining a keeper league – the personalities of everyone involved. I don’t like the types of owners that seem hyper-combative and abusive. I get enough of that in my actual life.) So I politely declined the invitation. And I wish the owner, a nice, sober-minded fellow, all the best in maintaining a league with several fussbudgets. I use the word “fussbudget” because I’m about to discuss budgets in greater detail.
I get lots of emails asking how to set up keeper leagues. I usually make two suggestions -
1. Auction Keeper League
This is really the way to go. This way, every team will eventually get a shot at every player. It's complicated, but it's worth it. This system is based on the original rotisserie baseball. You have an allotted amount of cash to spend on a certain amount of players. If you want to keep that player, you'll eventually have to make a decision whether or not to sign him to a long-term deal.
This is where things get exciting. For instance, I drafted Dwyane Wade as a rookie. When the time came, I reupped him for three additional years. It's been a great ride. But at the end of this season, his contract ends, and he'll go back into next year's pool. Conversely, I added two years onto Kirilenko's deal, and am counting the hours until that contract expires at season's end.
I could get really specific, but I have to keep these columns relatively short. Let’s just say I like this –
Fifteen man rosters.
You start 10 (4 Forwards, 4 Guards, 2 Centers. It’s up to you if you want to get fancy with SFs and PGs).
You get $150 budget (I like this because it roughly averages out to $10 per player, which is pretty close to the average player value in classic roto baseball.)
You get a Free Agent budget of $100 for the season. Whatever you bid on a player is his salary.
2. Slotted Value League
Here, a value is assigned by slotting a player based on what round they were drafted in. Say I got Biedrins in the 13th round. That means I can keep him next year for just my 13th round pick. That could be a lot more valuable than, say, a 2nd round Kirilenko. Say I end up making several deals and end up with multiple picks in the same round - than I only get to keep one player from that round.
Another version of this is assigning a dollar value depending on when a player goes in the draft. This works nicely as well. I like this because it still ascribes to the salary cap method.
How Many Should I Keep?
If you're playing with a valuation system, I like to keep five. You don't have to keep five, it just means no more than five.
How Long Should I Get To Keep Them?
As I described earlier, you should eventually have to decide whether or not you sign a player to a longterm deal. I feel this is another essential aspect - that the longer you keep a player, the more you have to give up for him. There should be risk involved - namely, you should have to keep that player's deal on the books for the length of the deal, regardless of whether he remains on your team or not.
But even if you sign a player for the maximum amount your league allows, I think you shouldn't be able to keep that player for longer than four to five years. That way, everyone will eventually get a shot at any player they want.
Again, in the end, the key is setting up a mechanism that keeps everyone involved no matter his or her place in the standings. It also allows for myriad trade scenarios, because there are more variables involved.
One of the things that always puzzles me is how owners can say keeper leagues are overly-complicated, then join leagues with daily transactions and 12-15 categories. I would rather trade that type of competition for a keeper league with weekly transactions and standard categories. It’s less busywork, and more longterm-planning-type work.
But that’s just my opinion…
John Cregan is a fantasy expert for www.TalentedMrRoto.com, which features free advice, news, stats and analysis for all fantasy sports. It was nominated for four FSTA awards, including best site. Contact him at g5yp@TalentedMrRoto.com.
The views expressed by www.TalentedMrRoto.com represent only the views of the writers; they do not represent the views of the NBA or any NBA team.
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