Friends in fast breaks,

There was a great bump in comments last week, let's keep that energy up! It's a long SZN, so the more chatty we are the more fun it'll be all-around

Turkey - Eaten. Naps - Taken. Points - Scored. Surviving - Done.

MAKE YOUR WEEK 6 PICKS

• Walking Bucket Wilt OAD >>
• VC's Knees Survivor >>
• Pick deadline: 4pm PT Friday (12/2)

We didn't mess around over the holiday weekend, taking care of business in the kitchen and on the court. It was a bounce-back week for us in OAD, as we hit a big slump last week. The tryptophan didn't slow us down, with us posting some of our best numbers of the young SZN. In Survivor, we pushed on through with only a handful of small losses and.

There are three more weeks until our very first prize winners are crowned for OAD Interval 1. It's still anyone's game! The points will keep piling up for the Overall prize, but we start a fresh Interval on Dec 23rd.

ONE-AND-DONE RECAP

Weekly Standings | Player Performance | Overall Standings

Backup Picks

• 17 of our pickable players didn't play, and 8 of those got at least one pick
• In total, 65 picks were on those 8 DNPs, with the vast majority coming from Embiid (43 picks) and Lillard (11)
• Most of those pickers had a backup that DID play, leaving an unfortunate 8 double DNPs that receive zero points this week
• Reminder - the Injury report is now linked near the top of the picking page, it can't fix last minute DNPs, but it's a very quick basic line of defense!

Results

• 11 of our picked players scored 30+ points
• Our top performers, with 44 points each, were T. Young (35 picks) and J. Grant (2)
  • There was a conscious effort to pick on HOU's defense with T. Young which was clearly a great call
  • Then there's the incredible call on J. Grant, who had another stellar performance with D. Lillard sidelined
• Our other big scorers: D. Murray (39 pts, 0 picks!), G. Antetokounmpo (38, 10), B. Adebayo (38, 1), K. Durant (36, 21), S. Curry (36, 40)
• We averaged 28.6 points per pick this week
  • The "average" player selected scored 23.1 points this week
  • Our top 4 picks all scored more than 30+ points, with the worst high pick performance still reeling in 21 points
• Shouting out some Moxie picks: J. Grant (44 pts, 2 picks) and B. Adebayo (38, 1)
• Calling out a big performer we DIDN'T pick: D. Murray (39 points)
  • Apparently HOU can be picked on by MORE than one good player at a time pretty easily - HOU still got the W though!
• Some of the worst weekly performers: R. Westbrook (3pts, 1 pick), B. Ingram (8, 3), T. Herro (11, 2), Z. Williamson (14, 5)

Standings Check
We have prizes for Overall points, as well as most points scored over three different Intervals (First 8 weeks, middle 8 weeks, and final 7 weeks). There's something to play for all SZN!

• Reminder: Overall and the First Interval are effectively the same right now
• @Bigrv51 takes the lead after five weeks, their 185 points equivalent to 37 points per pick
• We still have 74 players averaging 30 points per pick so far, let's see how long that holds

Team SZN Performance

• We were back with a vengeance this week, @Merf, StatCzar, and I rode T. Young to 44 points while @TheCommish pulled in 27 with Z. Lavine
• Overall, I've still got our best placement at 53rd
• Reminder: We play along for fun and pride, we can't win anything

SURVIVOR RECAP

Weekly Standings | Game Outcomes

Results

• We entered the week with 71 players and exited with 60, an 84.5% survival rate (same as last week) 
• We were HEAVY on PHX (vs DET) to the tune of 49 picks
  • DET was in terrible shape, missing four big name players (Cunningham, Bey, Stewart, and Ivey)
  • This game LOOKED lop-sided, with PHX as the huge favorites
  • But PHX, wanting things to be interesting, shot a blistering 24.1% from 3 and 65.4% from the freethrow line
  • They traded the lead back and forth for the first 30 minutes, and then PHX only managed about a 5 point lead the rest of the way
  • It wasn't edge-of-your-seat exciting. Moreso, disappoint-your-face-off annoying that PHX couldn't play better
• Our other "multi-pick" games were mildly more interesting
• BOS (vs SAC) had 7 pickers, and at least looked competitive for three quarters. Then BOS remembered they're supposed to be elite and absolutely crushed the fourth quarter
• ATL (@ HOU) had 6 pickers and was our most damaging loss this week
  • ATL was absolutely crushing HOU in the third quarter, when T. Young and D. Murray started a bit of show-boating and trash-talking which lead to a small dust-up and some technical fouls on both sides
  • That's when the tide started turning, as HOU wore down ATL's lead in the fourth and then put the game away
  • Without Capela on the inside, ATL was useless on the boards to the tune of both an ABSURD +31 rebound differential and a +35 second chance point differential in HOU's favor

Team SZN Performance

• @TheCommish survived on the PHX pile-up, but I was crushed under the EXTREME incompetency of MIN losing to a depleted CHA, so long Survivor pals 👋
• Reminder: we play along for fun and pride, we can't win anything

Yours in hoops,
The GM