If you are a sports enthusiast, you know all the cliches in winning and losing. This week’s catchphrase has to be “you can’t win them all.”
Before tip-off on week six of The Bubble fantasy season, 4 Penn Plaza was one of three undefeated teams. When the final buzzer sounded, only two left, and we were no longer a part of that group.
The worse thing about this loss was our opponent, Caldwell-Pope Mobile, is a personal friend and fellow league manager in our hockey, football, and baseball fantasy leagues. Our head-to-head matchups are always epic, with bragging rights on the line every time we lock up. We recently eliminated his team in football playoffs, and it was only fitting that he took away our bid for a perfect season.
The original projections pegged us for a 67.27 loss; however, the final score was quite different from even the experts predicted. Mobile jumped out to an early 267.10-172.20 and never looked back, trashing us by 184.90 points, just 117.63 more than they were supposed to.
We failed to meet our projections for the fourth time this season, with this week resulting in our first loss. Mobile came just 2.84 points away from their total while we missed the mark by 113.67 points.
Week six marked the first time that we trailed every day of the matchup. We outdid ourselves from week three, where we trailed Monday to Friday and rallied on the weekend to steal the victory. Our streak of winning every Saturday and Sunday of the season came to an end in this matchup since we never lead for a single second.
4 Penn Plaza averaged the second lowest daily point total on the season, 184.90, outside of week one when we scored 151.97. The daily deficit finished at 149.60 points, with Monday being the lowest, 94.90, and Saturday being the widest at 212.60.
Despite losing for the first time, our overall team numbers didn’t change from the previous week. We remain the best team in the league in regards to rebounds and blocks. After that, we held onto the second spot in both steals and turnovers while finishing the week at the seventh-best team in points scored and eighth-best in assists.
Regarding category wins and losses, we remain undefeated in rebounds and sport a 5-1-0 record in steals and blocks. Our worse numbers are in points scored, where we sit two games under 0.500 at 2-4-0.
With another week of action in the books, not a whole lot has changed regarding the standings. Only two teams remain undefeated now, while two teams haven’t put together a win. The only shuffle occurred in the fifth and sixth seeds where The Sauce Squad leapfrogged Mamba Mentality.
Ricardo’s Team, our opponent in week seven, is tops in the league with a perfect 6-0-0 record and almost 10,000 points scored. Ka’Wine & Dine is hot on their tail but falls a few hundred points short of claiming the first seed. It should be an interesting matchup when those two teams meet in week nine.
4 Penn Plaza lost their matchup by 184.90 points, so the 50.50 points we left on the bench would have done little to no damage to the final outcome.
The NBA had a boatload of games on January 27, and we had to make game-time decisions on who stayed in the lineup and who didn’t. Of course, someone ended up not playing their game, which meant we could have substituted either DeVincezo or Lopez into their spot but missed that opportunity.
 163.40 points |
 34.00 points |
Anthony Davis (Los Angeles) led our team in scoring for the second time this season with 163.40 points. Davis collected 72 points, 32 rebounds, 16 assists, 5 steals, 6 blocks, and 4 turnovers.
On the flip side, Donte DiVincenzo was our worse starter with just 34.00 points. The Milwaukee Bucks guard only notched 18 points, five rebounds, four assists, two blocks, with two turnovers.
As this week’s matchup progressed, we noticed that the deficit grew wider and wider with each passing day. In an attempt to salvage the situation, we made a fury of roster moves before the weekend in hopes of cutting into our opponent’s lead.
One of the first moves we made was cutting Bobby Portis from Milwaukee. It occurred to us that we employed three Bucks players, which is never a recipe for success. Having too many players from one team can really hurt you, so we sacrificed the last player from the team we acquired.
Elfrid Payton (New York) had a solid run of games where he was averaging 25 points a night. However, all good things must come to an end, and after a bunch of games in single digits, it was time to cut our losses. In his place, we grabbed JaMychal Green, who had back to back games on January 29th and 30th.
Green was then cut for Cody Zeller, who (Charolette) has recently stepped up his game and is scoring over 30 points a night. We tried our best to find players with good matchups on the last days and substituted them accordingly.
These moves didn’t help us win or lower the deficit, but you can’t blame management for making moves on the fly to keep the undefeated streak alive.
Weekly Move Total: 3/4
Season Move Total: 8/50
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