🏆 My Favorite Team Won A 'Ship

In this week's P.O. Box:

The Denver Nuggets won their first NBA Championship on Monday night after 38 playoff appearances and I didn’t feel a thing.

I grew up in Denver rooting for the Nuggets. Their upset as a No. 8 seed over the No. 1 ranked SuperSonics in 1994 was legitimately a highlight of my youth. My parents wouldn’t let me stay up for the games, so I had watch them all on VHS tape delay after school the next day.

The next year my parents took us to watch a game at McNichols Sports Arena (later the Pepsi Center, now apparently “Ball Arena”—seriously just learned that for the first time right now, gross).

We waited after the game in the parking lot to meet the players (in retrospect, the fact that you could ever do this is incredible) and my 6’5” Dad tossed me on his shoulders and put me eye-level with Dikembe Mutombo, who signed a pennant for me, along with some of the other Denver legends on that team (Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Antonio McDyess, and LaPhonso Ellis).

I even sweated the Nuggets 2009 trip to the Western Conference Finals as a recent college graduate who had let annoying SoCal Laker fans restoke the flames of my traditional fandom. I went to Game 6 at the Pepsi Center, only to watch Kobe and Gasol surgically dismantle an overmatched Nuggets squad and squash our Finals dream.

But when the Nuggets made it back to the finals this year, I didn’t feel anything.

Hell, I didn’t even watch a second of the Finals. My silence prompted a text from an old high school buddy:

Part of it is just due to being busy. I’m flying by the seat of my pants, trying to stream 150 drafts and spend every other second with April, who amazingly just turned 6 months the other day. If I had an infinite amount of time, I would have loved to tap in for a few Finals games.

But the real culprit is that some combination of growing up and gambling/playing fantasy sports has completely desensitized me to whatever joys come from rooting for the team in the city you were born.

I’m not even one of those people who look down on hardcore fans. I honestly find it endearing when Liam goes full homer on the Bills, or Rudman on the Patriots.

But sadly I fear that ship has sailed for me. Unless April becomes a diehard Patriots fan or something, which now that I say it…shit…

Fantasy Life dropped its new, entirely free BEST BALL HUB this week and it’s a pretty slick companion tool for anyone drafting more than a handful of teams on Underdog this summer.

You can quickly review your exposures across all the different contests, track your build types, monitor your playoff stacks, and even analyze the player combos in your portfolio—like how I apparently need to draft some more Marvin Mims/Quentin Johnston teams…

I made a tutorial video on how to use the tool if you want a quick primer:

And I also wrote up a piece on why I think it’s important to monitor your exposures and treat your best ball action like a portfolio if you are drafting a bunch of teams.

📺 BBM4 Drafts: #46 Best Ball After Dark w/ Chris Gee, #47 & #48 Best Ball Breakfast, #49 & #50 Splash Play, #51 The Club (+ Underdog Cardio Club), #52 w/ Kerrane, #53 w/ Siegele, #54 Swolecast (+ 4 TE mission), #55 LOLz, #56 Best Ball After Dark w/ Gretch

🎭️ 2 Star WRs stir up drama. The enemy speaks kindly & holds a knife. Also hopped on the Fantasy Life podcast with Kendall to discuss the WR news and how it might impact ADP.

🐑 The Athletic has too much power of fantasy players. You sheep.

💡 Best Ball Tips. #25: The Skeleton Key Team In 2023.

🎡 The Ben Gretch Randomizer. A few drinks were had:

🚢 A night run with Leone. Ran a 5K on Wednesday night during a draft on Ship Chasing. I got cranky.

📺️ The Badge Bros hit 1K. Had fun hopping on with the Badge Bros to push them to 1k subs, share my favorite I Think You Should Leave sketches, and talk a little best ball game theory, naturally.

I don’t have much reading time these days, but I just finished David Grann’s wild new book, The Wager. which follows the story of a ship wrecked British Navy ship in the 1700s.

I’ve never been so thankful to be a best ball streamer in his basement than I was while reading about these poor dudes enduring frostbite, scurvy, typhus, rancid meat, worm-infested biscuits and all kinds of other atrocities while trying to stay alive off the shores of Patagonia.

Last year I read one of his other books Killers of the Flower Moon, which I also highly recommend.

Both stories are being turned into movies directed by Scorsese and headlined by DiCaprio. Killers comes out later this year and looks phenomenal:

No streams until Monday. Have a Happy Father’s Day…

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