I said i would put this up for a vote during last year so here it goes.
Rule Proposal
Anti Tanking rule:
A GM shall not play inferior players over stronger players in an attempt to maximize draft position and shall be punishable by a warning for the first offense, a draft pick penalty of one spot for second offense, two draft pick spot penalty upon third offense and banishment upon 4th offense.
1. Intentionally take a player (Player X) out of the starting lineup on the day of a game in favor of another player (Player 1) ranked 100 (per yahoo avg points per game over the previous 30 days) spots or more below player X.
Note: not placing a better player into ones starting lineup in place of an inferior player falls within inactivity rather than tanking.
Note two: regardless of future trades involving this pick, the draft pick penalties remain attached
Perhaps we could run this more like the "no cut" list in some leagues.
e.g. a top-100 fantasy player (average points) cannot be benched except for another top-100 player. It would be very hard to police all the way down the chain, but this would make roughly the top half of fantasy starters in a 20 team league "must starts". It would be permitted to interpret top-100 to mean the past 30 days or some other reasonable measure of average points.
Warning followed by points penalty of 50 points per day in violation?
Points penalty = points added to your total for draft position calculations
Who will think of Byennie -- when even he won't think of himself?
?
that's a lotta math you gotta be doing every night brother.
From past practice here is how I see this going if you don't look at it every night:
It's January.... Team A is bored and looks at Team B's roster and notices a top 80 player has been on the bench. Rather than letting you know he posts on the msg board. (or maybe he lets you know, you warn Team B). Either way Team B gets p---ed... makes 5 posts about why that top 80 guy was on the bench... Accuses Team A of being the one who's really tanking b/c he doesn't have a player in the top 100 on his team, and throws in that Team C hasn't started Player Y all season even though he's ranked 200 he's averageing 40 pppg in his last 2 games.
Ad infinitum.I'll echo YH... this is fantasy basketball. I'd keep it as simple as possible.
I sorta stopped caring about teams tanking b/c the great thing about a league this big/deep is they'll never amass enough talent to compete. "Have fun finishing 18, 20, 19, 18, 20 then 8th (woo!). You'd have to hit on every pick (only THE walker wiggle does that) and get lucky with some other pickups to even imprve to 8th.
FWIW, we had a problem 2 years ago with players sitting healthy guys and soft tanking -- wehre in a h2h league sitting a healthy top 100 player 2x a week could cost you 20 wins or so over a season.
We added a games played audit at the ASB and end of season. Basically all I had to do was run 1 calculation 2x a year and that was it. (Games played IRL (via Basketball Reference) - Games Played in fantasy (via Yahoo Team Log)).
We didn't have that problem this year. Those teams at the bottom continue to be... but they're not sitting active players anymore. If they traded them cool.... again they'll probably continue to be in 18th, 19th place for years.
You can't legislate GMs to (a) know what they're doing or (b) care about finishing higher than last.