Fantasy Vindication?

It's taken me a while to muster enough courage to revisit one of the saddest moments in my life, but I think I may have finally come to grips with my trauma. Let me frame the event for you: I am sitting with a group of friends as our fantasy basketball draft begins. I have the third pick, and I am excited, yet nervous.

(Side note: For the draft in my other league, earlier in the week, I had overslept and had the first 8 rounds autodrafted by the time I rolled out of bed. I had the fifth pick, and the friendly Yahoo draft machine chose Shawn Marion, which was ok by me.)

Back to the draft at hand.

My buddies choose KG and Kobe, with the 1st and 2nd pick, respectively. I'm on the clock with 1:30 to choose, and I start sweating. Now, I know you two or three faithful readers out there are screaming "LEBRON! PICK HIM! HE'S RANKED FIRST OVERALL IN MANY MOCK DRAFTS! CHOOSE THE KING." But for some reason, whether it was the subconscious memory of my previous draft result, or the instructive whisper in my left ear (since denied by the culprit by the way), I chose the Matrix.

And promptly uppercutted myself in the face with seething remorse and fury.

Why did I do it? I guess at the time I didn't believe all the Lebron hype for the upcoming season. His TOs aren't great, his FT% is crappy, his FG% is average, and he doesn't shoot that many 3s or play too much defense. Now imagine my growing agony as LBJ proceeds to put up 31-8-8 in November, with 2 steals, 1.5 blocks and 1.5 3s per game. All while Marion puts up worse numbers across the board except for a few more rebounds and fewer TOs. To boot, someone apparently starts guarding Shawn very aggressively at the charity stripe, causing him to actually shoot worse than the oft maligned Lebron. What utter Godcockery.

But on the last, fateful day of November (close enough). The Chosen One goes down with a sprained finger than inexplicably sidelines him for about 6 games (which is, oh, 7% of the season). And the Matrix starts doing Matrix-y things. He starts shooting .880 from the line and averaging 2+ steals and 2.5 blocks a game. All while Lebron's team, which is ironically named "the Matrixxx," falls to last in the standings (and I move into second).

Sweet vengeance! Well more like vindication, but I just wanted to show you all that last video. Anyway, I know that I'll have to recant this post in a few days when Lebron drops 50, but at least I get to gloat in the meantime...

- WAW