A love letter to Zach LaVine

This is my first season playing fantasy basketball. With my interest in the NFL dwindling and the Celtics becoming really fun to watch, I’ve had a natural progression to the NBA and I figured adding a fantasy basketball team to my repertoire would be the next logical step. It just so happened that a friend of mine was looking for a new owner in his keeper league and so, here we are.

My knowledge of the NBA is good, but by no means extensive which made drafting my team mildly exciting. (The league actually needed two new owners so they took the two teams, made all the players free agents and myself and the other owner had a draft to build our keepers.) First I went with the big names that I knew would get me a lot of points, guys like DeMar DeRozan, Rudy Gobert, DeAndre Jordan, and Jrue Holiday. I took a couple of fliers on guys like Andrew Wiggins (hoping the TimberwolvesBulls would trade Jimmy Butler which hasn’t happened yet), De’Aaron Fox and John Collins (get healthy buddy!). One of my last picks was Zach LaVine.

I knew LaVine, knew that he was a hyper athletic guard who could put up points but was by no stretch of the imagine elite. Well, let me just say that LaVine is elite in my eyes.

LaVine has started this season a fantasy monster, posting six 25+ fantasy point outputs and going over 30 points twice. Currently—as of Tuesday November 6th that is (I have to get used to posting the exact date in basketball articles since there are so many games)—LaVine is sixth in points per game (27.9), seventh in field goal attempts per game (19.5), fifth in free throw attempts per game (8.3) and fifth in minutes per game (35.6). Basically, he’s playing a shit ton of minutes and scoring a shit ton of buckets.

I fully recognize that LaVine’s workload will likely take a big downturn when Lauri Markkanen gets healthy and returns to the starting lineup. The offense won’t solely be LaVine any more and I don’t think his level of production will continue.

But for now, for these beautiful, glorious opening weeks, it’s been a sheer joy to watch Zach LaVine torch defenses with filthy crossovers and disgusting dunks and just score bucket after bucket after bucket.

I, and my fantasy team, would just like to say thank you Zach.