Fantasy basketball – How to improve your roster after the All-Star break

As the dust from a seismic NBA trade deadline settles, tell yourself the season is nearly 3/4 done. And that the means to make meaningful changes to your fantasy franchises are narrowing.

To strategically re-align for the stretch run, there’s only one place to start. Take an extended gander at the NBA standings, and ask yourself: “who’s tanking?” (And then right after that: “in two weeks… who else will be tanking?”) Packing it in. Playing for ping-pong balls.

“Tanking” is an ugly word. As a Sam Hinkie devotee, I prefer the more brandable, “Processing.”

(With these post-deadline Sixers, we are in the endgame of O.G. Processing. Safety tip: if these Sixers win it all, lock up your wedding crystal because the resulting mass high-pitched squeal of “I TOLD YOU SO!” coming from sleep=deprived analytic acolytes coast-to-coast will be ear-shattering. And yes, that will be me hitting high D over C#.)

I respect The Process. As a real-life teambuilding ethos… and as a late-season fantasy gamechanger. Refusing to Process, falling back on the annual bromide of “we play to win,” defiantly promising your fanbase to “never tank?” That gets you generational mediocrity. Picking 10th for 10 years in a row. You know who hasn’t won 50 games since the Carter administration? A team that just pledged last week for the one-gazillionth time to “never tank”: your Washington Wizards.

Selective, strategic tanking is how you transform the fortunes of a moribund franchise. And in the NBA, where a single player can change everything, short-term tanking is essential. It’s how you get Tim Duncan. Kevin Durant. Darko Milicic. (Okay, so it’s not foolproof.)

In the wake of the institution of the Play-In Tournament (the NBA’s version of Squid Game), some analysts proclaim that tanking is kaput. That along with shifting the lottery odds to give the three worst teams an equal chance at winning, the NBA has disenfranchised The Process.

The Process lives. The Play-In and new Lottery odds merely…