Week 1 "Victory" + Streakness

So I managed to squeeze out a victory in Week 1, thanks in part to Westbrook's late flurry of steals last night. The boost in steals sealed the deal for me at 5-4, which isn't pretty but a win nonetheless. Or so I thought.

When I logged in this morning, I noticed that I was in 6th place, one game behind the leader. Much to my dismay, Yahoo counts the total cats that you've won/lost, as opposed to actual weekly opponents that you defeat/are defeated by (similar to fantasy football). As a result, three teams who finished 6-3 and one team that won 5-3-1 are all above me and another guy at 5-4. I'm not even sure why the other 5-4 guy is fifth and I'm sixth. I looked through Yahoo's explanation on tiebreakers and it doesn't exactly say so I'm thinking the first week tiebreakers are decided by random coin flips. I'll definitely need to keep an eye on this as the season goes on.

But back to the Week 1 victory. After one week, my team's strengths and weaknesses have already begun to materialize. In order from strongest to weakest strengths and weakest to strongest weakness:

Strengths
FG
AST
STL
TO
REB
FT

Weaknesses
3's
PTS
BLK

My strengths are pretty on par with what I thought they would be, though I am a little surprised by how strong I am in STL. The biggest surprise is probably my weakness in BLK, though I finished ranked 9th in the league but only six back from the team in 1st. So I'm thinking blocks is more a cat that's somewhere in the middle of a strength and a weakness (streakness, anyone?).

For this week, I'm going up against a team that's strong in 3's, FT and maybe TO's. He looks pretty weak in every other category so I think I might have a shot to take this down 6-3. However, he has 45 player games this week compared to my 40, though he also has Redd and Chandler, who are both banged up. So when it's all said and done, we probably will end up playing roughly an equal number of player games this week. To be honest, the greatest concern right now is that I've got a number of players with questionable PT at this point:

Anthony Carter

By now, I'm sure you've heard about the AI/Billups trade. The biggest loser in the trade has to be Carter, as he will likely be relegated to Billups' backup unless Karl decides to get creative and start Billups at PG and Carter at SG, which doesn't make sense given that JR Smith is on the bench right now. I proposed a few borderline ridiclous trades to some teams to see if anyone might still have faith in Carter. The chances are slim but it's worth a shot before I dump Carter to the waiver wire.

Amir Johnson

He put up a stinker in his last game due to the fact that he was in foul trouble for most of the game. His inconsistent minutes worries me, especially if he continues his fouling ways. However, with McDyess shipped off to Denver, there's a chance that Amir will see an increase in minutes moving forward.

Darrell Arthur

He only got 13 minutes in his last time out. In looking at the box scores, my guess is Warrick played well and Ivaroni decided to ride the hot hand. This is slightly troubling because if Warrick can keep it up, I don't see Arthur getting too much playing time at either the SF or PF spot.

Ronnie Brewer

Kyle Korver has been cutting into his playing time so far and it doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon. The good news is that Korver has a wrist injury right now so Brewer should get more minutes in the short term.