The first and only WNBA dynasty in FOFC history
 

I realize this will appeal to like eight people, but I've wanted to do it ever since I managed to successfully do a women's college basketball dynasty with FBCB.

Right now, I'm just simming far enough ahead to able to normalize the league and get going. But I have a college league fast-simming to generate draft classes for me ahead of my where my WNBA league is.

Eventually, I might wade into the waters of my college league so we can follow a woman from high school recruit to the WNBA, but for now, just want to get it started first.

Not really sure what we'll do with this, other than playing it by ear. So stay tuned.

So for clerical purposes, here's my setup so far. We have two conferences of eight teams each. Four teams in each make the playoffs.

I envision expansion down the road, but I haven't really fleshed out how that's going to look.


I started letting my D1 league generate players for a while. Now I'm letting my D3 league do it for a while on fast-sim (where it doesn't generate box scores or stats, so it goes faster...I just want classes) and then I'll do the same with D1 and D2 at different times, so we have a cross-section of players showing up from different schools. Just keeps it interesting for me, honestly.

I'm playing on Hard Cap only. The cap is set $1,330,676 and all of the teams regardless of city will always be in a small market. I sort of like the juxtaposition of not being able to pay huge salaries, though I haven't really begun to dive into the universe yet.

While I was purging the db of men the game stocked initially (I don't have the patience to build a woman file right now. Maybe someday...) I ran with a 1 game season so it'd get done faster with no playoffs. Now that we have all women on teams, I have set the league to a 40-game schedule and all of the playoff rounds are current best-of-three.

The highest paid player in the league at the moment was a HS player named Aubrey Yost ($413,483) who went straight to the league (I enabled that in my universe for now...) and she's just been killing.

Oldest looking 32 year old I've ever seen. :D

I started super early on purpose, because I wanted to sim far far ahead and purge any memory of the fact that the league started with dudes.

I probably won't really begin "playing" in earnest until the 70s or so.

I switched the league to a soft cap, though, because I found teams weren't keeping their stars or people were taking unnecessary paycuts. So the luxury tax threshold is $2.6 million and I have a mid-level exception $50,000 and a low-level exception at $25,000.

Oh I know. I just found it hilarious that the college game is 3833 and the wnba thing is early 1900s.

Oh yeah, that's weird. I think it's probably because I didn't import them from the same year. It's back to the future (tm)

In 1942, I expanded to Nashville with a team called the Tennessee Smokies and to Colorado Springs with the Colorado Peaks. We'll eventually get to 20 teams, I've already simmed ten years from that last expansion.

1954 All-Star Game

I have applied modifiers that increase scoring, because well..I like scoring.

I'm going to take over the league in the late 60s or something with an expansion team. Here's a recent player I found running through the history. Great name.

Can't decide whether she's a Hall of Famer or not:

HOF or not, she's a cannonball. (5'6", 200?!)

Damn yeah. I didn't even notice that. What happened is, my FBCB file modify heights, but doesn't modify weights. So they still end up with NBA weight, but not NBA height.

Here's the current HOF. I put her in. She was top 10 in points and had six rings.

In 1971, expanding by two. Philadelphia and Portland (OR) are being added.

Here are the champs up to now

Seems every team has won at least one title

I have D3 players feeding the league all the way up through 1980, then we'll switch to my D1 league's players.

Post-expansion league alignment. I'm taking over the Philadelphia franchise as GM.

I sort of have two parallel stories going on at once. I have an FBCB NCAA women's league going that's a feeder for this league. I also have a D3 league that feeds this one, but that one I've stopped using starting in 1980 in favor of the D1 league because it might be easier to read this with schools you recognize.

I think I'm going to play Starting Ten, the NCAA game that we created last year and expanded this year in my NCAA dynasty, because it'll be a good way to track players. Instead of ten, I might go with five since it's just me playing.

Right now, I've got William & Mary being actually good. They've moved to the American (AAC) thanks to their recent success, but can't seem to get over the hump when the post-season comes. After a few years, I've sorta gotten attached to seeing them get over the hump.

In the WNBA, I'm going to be the expansion GM of the Philadelphia franchise. So that's where we're at.

Ok, so the Philadelphia Fury have the 4th overall pick in the draft. We'll have to hire a coach, assistants and then I need to do the expansion draft.

Ok, here's the first head coach in Fury history. He was an assistant last year on the Western Conference champion Colorado Peaks.

Not exactly sure how to go about this expansion draft. I think it'll merely be a game of best available talent? Not sure I want to load up on overpriced veterans who can't help us anyway and then get stuck with their contracts.

We'll do this thing the "right" and build from the ground up. Really just need to see what kind of talent is in there.

Here was Portland's top pick in the expansion draft

Ok, so after looking at the draft pool, my thought was to go with youth and talent over experience. I figure this way, if we do it right our team grows together and we fill in the blanks with veterans as needed.

So with that, here's our picks:


For my next pick, I wanted a point guard. I had to choose between Rachael Dunham, a 9-year vet who played for Houston last year. She had a PER of 15.1 averaging 11.1 MPG last year.

The alternative is 21-year old Miranda Albanese who played for Connecticut. Well she barely played. The former 2nd rounder seems to have potential, but I'm not entirely convinced that it's worth passing over on Dunham even though the latter pick would be way cheaper.

So in the end, I go with Dunham.

Ok, so here's our post-expansion draft roster. Next up is the amateur draft.

Ok, so the salary cap right now is at $19,637,650 and the Luxury tax threshold is $33,516,121.

I've turned inflation off for now, I'd like salaries to remain here for a while and we're still playing with a soft cap, so I'm not playing with full finances and not sure that I ever will be.

We've got $14,434,186 in cap room, 2nd behind the other expansion team Portland.

The mid-level exception is $661,493 and the low exception is $330,762.

1971 DRAFT
It looks like I'm either going to try to move up in the draft or move down. The best three players are pretty definitive and so, I'm not sure I want to bother with taking the 4th best player on the board. She might be useful, but if I can package that pick for other assets, it might work best for us. So I'm going to shop the pick and see what I can get for it.

What's cool is the possibility of four-team trades. No idea how to work these out yet -- like I need to evaluate the player base a bit more -- but I like the possibility.

I could literally sit and orchestrate trades all day. It required me to move some draft pick pieces, but I wanted to really set us up well. I'm not sure I'm done tinkering yet.

This deal was done originally with three, but I felt like I was taking back too much salary. You could argue I gave up too much, ditching future picks the way I did, but this year's 1st rounder wasn't doing much for us. I guess losing out on the 1sts for the next two years just means we have to be good or else, we'll end up like the Knicks of the WNBA for a while here.

But I'm convinced the Philly faithful want a winner straight up.

So anyway, here's the damage from the final trade.

In case you found that as confusing as I did, the bottom line is, we've traded all of our picks for the next three years including this season. I didn't think this year's draft was worth a damn and I'm gambling that I can build a winner so that we won't need to deal with draft picks anyway. If I'm wrong, we'll pay for it for years to come...but I've never played this game and I wanted to tinker a bit.

What I did was deal not very many assets into pretty good talent, while we took back some salary, the real coup was being able to get other teams involved to the degree we did. New York seemingly did it to cut payroll, since McDermott is a legit player that they dealt to Indiana for picks.

Meanwhile, we pick up three starters two guards who'll surely be part of our lineup and a forward in Davis who I think can help us a lot. My only FA goal is to pick up a big and maybe some depth. But otherwise, I feel like we're in good shape.

Free agency was sort of crap. Lots of guards, but not a lot of skilled bigs. I got what I could though and so, here's the players we signed.

Ok, no idea how this will work out. But we'll see how it goes. Regular season is 42 games. We'll stop at mid-season to how things are going.

Here's the 1971 all-star break standings

Here's our stats so far. For not really having any idea how this would go, I think we're doing pretty well. The game says my roster talent is poor, by the way, so you know...not really sure, but I tended to ignore ratings in this game and looked at stats because well...it's just easier that way to make a measure of who is good and who isn't.

For some reason, the computer seems to overfocus on guards for these AIs teams, you'd see teams without as many bigs or emphasizing a full roster plus depth, so we managed to get some talent that fell through the cracks.


This isn't a superteam though.



My colors might throw you off. But my order from best to worst is black, gray, pink, blue and white being worst. Davis and Blakney were our All-Stars this year.

With about four weeks to go in the regular season, we were leading the North division and then Teresa Cribbs, our best player went out with a broken foot that'll keep her out for until early May. So if we can get to the 2nd round of the playoffs, we might get her back by then. This is where the depth will come in. Elysa Pastor will take over in the starting gig for her.

We were 26-11 at the time of the injury, so we'll see how the last month or so goes without her.

We go 5-0 without Cribbs and end the year at 31-11.

Jordyn Davis was All-WNBA 1st team, All-Defensive 2nd team and Rachel Chamberlin was named most improved player. The expansion team finishes with the best record in the WNBA this regular season and are the top seed in the Eastern Conference after winning our first division title in franchise history.

So we're taking on the Washington Mystics (25-17) in the Eastern Conference semis. They're more talented and we're missing our best player, so you can't take them lightly at all.



EASTERN CONFERENCE SEMIS
Game 1: Philadelphia 146, Washington 137
Game 2: Washington 157, Philadelphia 137
Game 3: Philadelphia 154, Washington 138 (PHI wins series 2-1)

In the Eastern Conference Finals, we take on the New York Liberty (28-14) who finished 3 games behind us in the Northern Division, they beat Charlotte 2 games to 1 to advance here.



Cribbs is still out 12 more days. I forgot the 1st round is best of 3, so we might not get her until late into the finals, if at all. It would be a bummer to end the year like this, but it is what it is.

EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS (Best-of-5)
Game 1: New York 134, Philadelphia 119
Game 2: Philadelphia 131, New York 126
Game 3: Fury 133, New York 130
Game 4: New York 141, Fury, 132
Game 5:


Despite a valiant effort and the return of Teresa Cribbs who was day to day by now, we still couldn't put out the victory. Still, a hell of a first year for the entire franchise. Not bad for not really knowing what I was doing.

And obviously, the trick here is playing with women players the whole game is turned on its head almost because its often like reading Greek.

New York Liberty beat the Houston Comets 3 games to 1 to claim the 1971 WNBA title. It was New York's first title in 31 years and the first time they'd made it out of the 1st round since their last Finals appearance in 1953 when they lost to Seattle.

Meanwhile, that was Houston's 3rd trip to the WNBA Finals since 1966 (both previous times they'd won) and have won 9 titles overall.

What the points???

I didn't realize the modifier would do that, to be honest.

I dunno if it's just that I've got players who are importing too good (they're pretty terrible in FBCB) but my stat modifiers are 500 pace, 500 inside fg, 500 field throw %, 750 jumpshot fg, 750 3p %, 500 tunrovers, 750 steals, 500 blocks.

Maybe I ought to turn up blocks and turnovers. But I'm sort of fine on the whole with the high scoring games.

136 possessions in 40 minutes is intense.

I just realized it's because we had a 24-second clock. I'm going to experiment next season with a 48-second clock and see what that does to scoring.

Apparently, it's pace. I just saved a test version because I don't have the time to play through my dynasty (or more like, I have other shit I need to do..) and I didn't see much change. Lowered pace to 100 and got scores over 200 points. Raised pace to 1500 and saw a 57-46 game. So it's all in the pace, not anything else.

Ok, so I simmed the next season while my internet wasn't working last night. It was a pretty fun off-season, I got my targets including re-signing Jordyn Davis and Jennifer John. I managed to get some depth. Remember Miranda Albanese, the one PG I thought about picking up in the expansion draft?

Well she was a free agent, so I signed her this off-season as an insurance policy. Not that we needed it.

Here's the stats from the past year. I messed with pace a bit, but forgot for most of the season, so it was normal scoring, too low and I'm not as big a fan anyway.


I knew we'd be more talented. I made some tweaks to the squad after a really rough Novemebr where we went 3-5.


In the end, we ended up with the #2 seed in the east and had to face the Washington Mystics in the 1st round. We made a trade with them earlier in the year -- they offered -- C Erika Torrest for C Michelle McGee and a 1st. Torres was the better player, no doubt. But she (and McGee) are both free agents to be, so I did the deal because a 1st was worth it to me, especially since we don't have one in this draft.

Starting next year, we'll have picks again tho. Anyway, this was the subtext of our series against the Mystics.

EASTERN CONFERENCE SEMIS
Game 1: Fury 128, Mystics 125
Game 2: Fury 125, Mystics 124

So two close games, but two Ws and we're out of there and back to the Conference finals for the 2nd straight year, taking on the defending champs, the New York Liberty.

EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS
Game 1: Liberty 144, Fury 121



Game 2: Fury 101, Liberty 99

Game 3: Liberty 129, Fury 99

Down 2-1, I just tried not to panic, really. I conceded that Game 2 was really a lucky win anyway. After the 3rd game, I made adjustments to our lineup. I went huge the rest of the way out, changed the defense to a zone and jacked up the pressure. Lowered 3s a bit, but mostly decided to force them to beat my bigs, because we had the size advantage over them and my bigs can get to the basket inside.[/i]

Game 4: Fury 124, Liberty 117

Game 5:

Our first WNBA finals is against the Phoenix Mercury.


I keep our lineup the same from the conference finals. I don't know much about Phoenix, but I just figure it might work okay for us. I did shorten the rotation, we had too many ladies getting into the games and gave Rachel Chamberlin more playing time. She's far too good to be not playing as much as she doesn't on our squad.

Game 1: Fury 113, Mercury 100
Game 2: Mercury 116, Fury 113
Game 3: Fury 126, Mercury 116
Game 4:



A title in two seasons is sort of ridiculous. But for whatever reason, WNBA teams are overemphasizing PGs at the peril of starting bigs. Even with that, we're not killing the system. Liberty probably would beat us in a long series. Mercury weren't better than us, but almost had our number.

Still, really exciting to reach the mountaintop two years in.

I sort of want to expand the league more now and take over a new team, because we've already won in Philadelphia. But I sort of like this ballclub, we don't lose many players and so, I might wait a year or three to do that and see if we can't at least repeat before I go on another experiment.

Expansion will happen, but with no expansion draft. I'll stay in Philly.

The four new teams:

Boston Blizzard
Milwaukee Does
Orlando Miracle
San Jose Hustle

We'll go up to 47 games now, the way I envision (not sure how the schedules in this game actually work) is you play your division 2 times, the other division in your conference 3 times and then the other conference teams 1 time to give you that total. What happens in reality, again, no clue and it doesn't matter all that much.

47? That's a very odd number because it means imbalanced home and road schedules at least.

(Yes, I'm being anal, but I occasionally waste precious brain cells on these sorts of scheduling puzzles in sports, trying to find a way to come up with something that's better than how it's done in real life.)

This is why I keep you around. I'll go to 48? But not until next year, because my sleepy self simmed already past the off-season part where we could tinker.

And chances are, we'll be expanding again in a few years anyway, so we won't stay at 48 probably through 1980 when we switch from D3 players to D1.

In the draft, we were up to our usual shenanigans.

I traded two players who were bit players that I originally got in the expansion draft.

I sent that 1st rounder I got from the Mystics along with SG Erin Ramirez and SF Kendall Proctor to the LA Sparks in exchange for the Sparks 1st rounder and two 2nd rounders. It enabled me to move up to the 11th pick in the draft, because I wanted to get a power forward if possible.

The player I was targeting went 2nd rather than falling to us. So then I had this pick that I didn't really "need" per se. Still, a solid point guard fell to us in that spot and so, I thought I'd just go with it.

Still, I needed to fill that big position. So I made a deal to acquire C Kayleen Wallace from the Houston Comets in exchange for two future 1sts and a serviceable power forward in Ashley Blakney. She's good, but Wallace is a much better player.

See for yourself.

ASHLEY BLAKNEY


KAYLEEN WALLACE