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I have had a number of nice invites to join various fantasy leagues. I have turned them all down. The reason is that I am too competitive. I lose sleep. I fixate on winning. It takes too much time. (I am of the opinion that I am not capable of being good at both parenting and fantasy basketball. I'm probably very capable, however, of being mediocre at both, which is what I'm trying to avoid.)



But that doesn't mean I don't think about sleepers sometimes. So, for the record, these are some players who I would have on the "buy" list:

• Kevin Martin: He's about to be a starter full-time for a coach who loves him, and when he has been a starter in the past he has put up numbers. And he's undoubtedly cheap now.
• Dwight Howard: He's no secret, but I think now is pretty much your last chance to get him at non-premium prices.
• Fred Jones: Toronto is aiming to be Phoenix North, which means everyone should have improved numbers. Jones is a player I have always liked who has marinated long enough and is ready for some good burn.
• Martell Webster: If he's starting and shooting, he'll be scoring. He's a big percentage of Portland's perimeter offense.
• Marcus Banks: Look at what happens to everyone else when they start playing next to Steve Nash.
• Leandro Barbosa: Same as above, only now he's an even bigger part of the team.
  
  
• Rajon Rondo: He'll be cheap, he'll play a lot, and he has been putting up big preseason numbers.
  
  
• Darko Milicic: I'm not the first person to have this idea. But, you, know, he's not getting worse.

UPDATE: TrueHoop reader Colen Christensen sent an e-mail with some valuable news for fantasy basketball players:

I have done some research (for what it's worth I have a Ph.D. in psychology and a minor in statistics) and when it comes to predicting a player's value in fantasy basketball, minutes played per game is more important than production per minute. Most people focus on last year's production per game - this is helpful, but doesn't really tell us how much a person will produce when given decent minutes. Hollinger seems to have done some ground-breaking work in calculating production per minute, but in his most recent book, he disdained predicting how many minutes per game players would play per game, implying that it was up to the whims of the coaches (as I recall). Be that at is it may, if there was some way to predict how many minutes per game each player was likely to obtain during the season, that would be extremely useful information when it comes to predicting a player's performance over the season.

He went to recommend that I say how much different players will play this season. I plead the Hollinger on that one, to be honest. I mean, there are certain players who you hear coaches like and will be counting on a lot but I only have a few stories like that, and they're practically all reflected in the list above. But I think it's a helpful bit of news all the same--go for the long-minutes guy!--and if I get any more news about someone due for a bump in minutes, I'll pass it along piecemeal.