The Sunday Paper

Drew Kim’s best player scored 36 points. This would normally be encouraging. Unfortunately, the player did so from the bench, where the points were decorative.

Kim started a flex option who scored 5.8. The difference between them was 30.2, more than double the 12.2-point margin by which the Auto-Draft Survivors lost to Marcus Green’s Sunday Scaries. There are complicated lineup mistakes involving weather, late injury reports and unknowable coaching decisions. This was not one of those. This was a banana peel placed carefully in one’s own hallway.

Green deserves credit for a balanced lineup and for resisting the urge to interfere with it. Five Scaries cleared 15 points. His quarterback was efficient, his receivers were useful and nobody forced him to explain why the correct player was holding a clipboard.

The Survivors fell to 1–3, but the roster is better than the record. That is the optimistic reading. The less optimistic reading is that the roster has been trying to tell its manager this for four weeks.

Kim can recover. He has enough talent to climb the standings and enough bench scoring to terrify everyone, including himself. The first corrective measure is simple: when a player is projected to touch the ball twenty times, consider allowing him onto the field.