Since the conclusion of the last NBA season, we have experienced the global
phenomenon that is The Odyssey in cinemas (excuse me – in IMAX). Because
apparently the story of one man enduring a very long and disastrous journey home
from war demands to be seen on a screen approximately the size of Ithaca.
At its heart, Homer’s Odyssey is exactly that: Odysseus attempting to return home
after the Trojan War. What should be a relatively straightforward voyage instead
becomes a decade-long exercise in patience, strategy, misfortune and
circumstances spectacularly beyond his control. He survives monsters and
shipwrecks, navigates the whims of gods and repeatedly gets close to home only for
another obstacle to emerge.
It all feels strangely familiar.
Your Fantasy Basketball Odyssey
There are fantasy basketball seasons that feel less like playing a game and more
like trying to get home from Troy. We spend the offseason poring over rankings and
projections, identifying players we think the market has mispriced and constructing
elaborate plans for draft night. Then we spend six months navigating whatever the
basketball gods decide to throw at us.
There is something almost Homeric about the work fantasy basketball managers will put into
gaining the smallest advantage. We monitor a struggling player for weeks, convinced
his shooting will regress towards the mean, biding our time before floating the
carefully constructed buy-low offer. We get knocked back. We wait. Another 4-of-17
night arrives. Eventually the other manager cracks and we congratulate ourselves on
having “won” a trade.
Three days later, our new pride and joy player grabs his hamstring.
For all the parallels with Homer, perhaps the most appropriate connection to Greek
mythology comes from another hero of the Trojan War. Achilles was the great warrior
with the singular vulnerability that could bring him undone. Thousands of years later,
his name remains attached to the body part that seems determined to ruin NBA
seasons with increasing regularity.
There is probably a joke in there, but soft tissue injuries in the NBA are a sad state of
affairs.
The Best Ability Is Becoming Availability
Fantasy basketball has always involved injuries. Anyone who has played long
enough can recite a list of teams destroyed by them, usually with the solemnity of
someone reading names from a war memorial. But availability increasingly feels less
like one variable in player evaluation and more like one of the defining variables of
the modern fantasy game.
According to injury analyst and certified athletic trainer Jeff Stotts, NBA players
missed 6,779 games through injury or illness during the 2024–25 regular season.
That total had surpassed 6,000 only once previously in his tracking — during the
pandemic-affected 2021–22 season. By January 2026, players had already missed
3,185 games, approximately eight per cent more than at the corresponding point of
the previous season.
The 65-game threshold provides another striking illustration. Only 86 players met the
NBA’s 65-game awards-eligibility threshold during the 2025–26 season. Awards
eligibility isn’t identical to simply appearing in 65 games because of minutes
requirements and exemptions, but Basketball Reference lists 582 players who
appeared in at least one regular-season game. Those 86 represent roughly 14.8 per
cent of the player pool. That’s around one in seven players.
For a game in which the best ability is so often availability, that’s a confronting
statistic.
And before we’ve even played meaningful basketball in 2026–27, the injury report is
already required reading. Jusuf Nurkić, a potentially rewarding selection outside the
top 100, is gone for around a month. Coby White enters the season with a calf strain.
Brandon Ingram’s return to La-La Land with the Clippers has been delayed by a
partially torn Achilles. Even LeBron James, whose longevity has spent two decades
making the normal rules of ageing seem optional, has sciatica and chronic arthritis in
his left foot complicating his Philadelphia debut. The injuries are mounting up quickly.
We know the risks. We study injury histories and convince ourselves we’ve built
sufficient durability into our rosters. Then the healthy player we selected because he
doesn’t have an injury history lands on someone’s foot and misses six weeks, while
the bloke we avoided because he was “too risky” plays 74 games.
There are limits to how much control we actually have.
Which brings us to another Greek story.
The Boulder
Sisyphus was a king renowned for his cunning and repeated attempts to outwit the
gods and even death itself. Clever, stubborn, and seemingly convinced he could find
an edge in every situation, he would have been an absolute nightmare in trade
negotiations.
Eventually, the gods had enough. Sisyphus was condemned to push an enormous
boulder up a hill. Every time he approached the summit, the rock would escape him
and roll back down, leaving him to descend after it and begin again.
Every October, fantasy basketball managers put their hands on the boulder.
We draft, trade, work the waiver wire, and spend months inching the boulder that is
our team higher. Maybe you’ve built the strongest roster in the league. Maybe you’re
in the playoffs. Then comes the late scratch, the rolled ankle, or the star who has
been available all season being shut down precisely when you need them.
Truth is, for all but one manager, the boulder eventually rolls back down.
The cruel joke is that it rolls back down for the champion too. They get a little longer
at the summit, the championship, the money and the opportunity to become
completely unbearable in the group chat, but next October their roster disappears
along with everyone else’s in redraft leagues. ADPs reset. New players emerge. Old
players decline.
The rock is waiting at the bottom again.
And voluntarily, inexplicably, we put our hands back on it.
One Must Imagine the Fantasy Basketball Manager Happy
In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus used the story to examine
the absurd: broadly, the collision between our desire for meaning and order and a
world that guarantees neither (already sounding like fantasy sports, right? Alby was
clearly ahead of his time).
Sisyphus knows the rock will fall. There is no final push that permanently completes
his task. Yet Camus arrives at his famous conclusion: “One must imagine Sisyphus
happy.” The absence of a permanent destination doesn’t make the journey itself
meaningless. Meaning can exist in the struggle.
Which is an admittedly ridiculous amount of existential philosophy to bring to a
conversation about streaming a backup centre on a Wednesday.
But it gets remarkably close to why we keep playing fantasy basketball.
We say we play to win, and of course we do. But in a 12-team league, eleven
managers don’t win every year. If victory were the only thing providing meaning,
most of us should have abandoned this hobby years ago.
Instead, the reward is scattered all the way up the hill: finding the breakout before
everyone else, pulling off the trade you’ve worked on for weeks, turning a waiver
pickup into a season-long contributor, beating the manager who’s been talking
rubbish since October, and occasionally looking back at your own draft board in
February and wondering what possible information you thought you possessed four
months earlier.
If we ever actually solved fantasy basketball, I suspect we’d ruin it.
I was reminded of that this year by a fantasy league that almost didn’t happen.
When We Doing Draft Order, Commish?
More than a decade ago, I inherited the role of commissioner of a fantasy basketball
league on what was supposed to be a temporary basis. The temporary part has
lasted more than ten years.
By the way, Teddy, the job remains yours whenever you want it back.
This year, for the first time, I seriously considered folding the league. I’m already in
more fantasy leagues than any sensible adult probably needs, and a couple of
managers were understandably tight cash-wise when the conversation turned to
upping the ante. If they pulled out, I’d need replacements, probably mates of mates,
and suddenly keeping the league alive felt more like administration than fun.
I play in other leagues with some of the guys anyway. Perhaps this one had simply
run its course. It could quietly sail off into the night after more than a decade of
drafts, trades, arguments and questionable managerial decisions.
More than anything, I didn’t want to push the boulder up the hill again.
Then my phone went off.
Another Matt (one of my favourite rivals and one of the blokes who makes the league
what it is) had fired a message into the group chat:
“When we are doing draft order, Commish?”
Naturally, he’d added the @ mention. It wasn’t enough to ask. The commissioner
needed to be summoned.
By the time I saw it, others had joined in. The sentiment had been echoed, and the
trash talk had started. We didn’t have a draft order. Nobody had selected a player or
won a matchup.
And yet the league had already started.
I’d been looking at the league through the work required to keep it running, organising
people, replacing managers, collecting money and arranging the draft.
I’d been staring at the boulder. What I’d forgotten was everyone pushing it with me.
Fantasy basketball gives us an excuse to remain in each other’s orbit. It creates
rivalries that become running jokes, trades that get brought up years later, terrible
draft picks that become part of a manager’s mythology and a group chat that
suddenly wakes up when somebody asks the first question about next season.
The injuries will come. Somebody’s contender will be destroyed by them. Somebody
will lose a playoff matchup by a single category and spend the offseason replaying
the one decision that might have changed it. Eleven of us will ultimately watch the
boulder roll back down the hill.
Then, sometime later, someone will send a message.
“When we doing draft order, Commish?”
And we’ll start pushing again.
Why Do We Do This S**t to Ourselves?
Maybe that’s the answer.
Odysseus spends The Odyssey trying desperately to get home. Sisyphus can never
finish his journey. And we, as fantasy managers, occupy some strange territory
between them: forever trying to reach the destination while knowing that, even if we
get there, we’ll be sent back to the beginning next season.
But there is one significant difference between us and Sisyphus.
Nobody is making us push the boulder.
We choose it. We know the injuries are coming. We know our projections could be
off. We know there will be nights when we question why we’ve allowed the
performance of a backup point-forward in Sacramento (shout out to Ben Simmons)
to affect our emotional well-being. And we know most of us won’t win.
Still, every year, we come back.
Perhaps Camus was right. Perhaps we don’t need the rock to remain at the summit
to justify pushing it there. Perhaps the journey of drafts, trades, waiver claims,
victories, mistakes, arguments and, most importantly, the people doing it alongside
us was the point all along.
So, as we prepare to put our hands back on the boulder for another season, it feels
appropriate to leave the ancient Greeks and French existentialism behind and turn to
one of the great thinkers of the modern age.
“No question about it, I’m ready to get hurt again.”
——- Michael Scott from The Office.
Welcome to the 2026–27 NBA fantasy basketball season.
We are ready to be hurt again, too.
