Funny post appeared in TrueHoop today: Sneaking a suspended player on the court in a teammate’s uniform. If you’re too lazy to click, it starts with a Turkish player in his country’s top pro league. He gets suspended for fighting. While he’s serving the suspension, in an upcoming game he and his coach conspire to have him put a subpar teammate’s jersey on and sneak into a game! I’ll let TrueHoop top it off…
he was only detected…after a rival team noticed suspiciously good statistics for Tufan Ersöz, the player whose jersey [Cemal Nalga] was wearing
Sneaking players in dreamleague? Never!
I said this was funny, but at the same time, it brings up some serious issues concerning fair play.
To the other Poor Man’s Commishes out there, I guarantee you this will happen in your league, if it hasn’t happened already.
I hate to admit it, but every season in our dreamleague rec leagues, this also happens. Once again, we have evidence that what happens in the pros, happens in dreamleague!
In Dream League’s Bay Area league, we have over 125 teams spread across at least ten separate divisions. Often times, participants choose to play on two teams in separate divisions, something which we can manage, although everyone realizes the risks when we start our trademark double-elimination playoffs, which can mean a doubleheader for any team that loses and gets bumped down to the Losers Bracket of their division (think about it, a doubleheader for 2 teams can equal 4 games in one day for one guy!).
Anyhoo, playing for two teams in separate, disparate competitive divisions is no problem. But guys will still play on another team from the same division!
The main reason for doing it is because your team doesn’t have enough players to field a squad, and would rather not forfeit, even though our rulebook states that you can grab any random dude off the street to fill a spot (as long as it’s still the regular season and you don’t have more than three players who would be of a caliber in a higher division).
But sometimes, guys just want to win, and they’ll cheat to do it.
And every time they do it, they perpetrate as an impostor. The guy who is playing on the other team in the same division will have his name written as someone else’s on the scoresheet.
Usually, this happens in our lower divisions because in the higher divisions, everybody pretty much knows each other after a couple seasons (kinda like the close-knit player community in the NBA), and you really can’t get away with it. But in the lower divisions where we have more turnover of teams, people can get away with it.
As a Poor Man’s Commish, perpetrating is very hard to police, but we’ve gotten to a point where all my scorekeepers know who’s on what team, and any new players playing on more than one team in the same division would stick out like a sore thumb.
Which means the only time people get away with this is when the player is a non-factor. But if he played a good game and the other team has a sneaking suspicion that they’ve seen this really good player on another team that they played earlier in the season, then all hell breaks loose.
Which means this is just such a stupid thing to do, even though your first inclination is to categorize it as a “white lie”. You can get away with it, but you don’t realize how easy it is to get caught! And when you get caught, it’s bad. We actually have a rule in the Bay Area league now where if this happens, it’s an automatic forfeit and a $25 fine to the team.
Matter of fact, this happened last Sunday! I know that the “crimes” committed are usually out of competitive desperation, but the problem with it is, you leave your opponent in a precarious situation. It makes everything uncomfortable and, quite frankly, wastes the Poor Man’s Commish’s time in trying to get all the facts and make everybody happy.
My solution for last Sunday is to fine the team that knowingly picked up the illegal player $25. That team still lost their game, so issuing a forfeit changes nothing in this case, but I would’ve reversed the win/loss, had they won.
Moreover, the second team must also bear responsibility for having this player as well, because their opponent was the one that claimed they were given a raw deal having to play against a good player who played for another team already. So it ended up that the second team beat the opponent that protested. On top of that, the second team had no idea that the player had illegally played for the first team.
Because the perpetrating player was supposed to be on the second team anyways, I’m not going to issue a forfeit on the second team in their win against the team that protested. However, we do have $5 fines for egregious unsportsmanlike technical fouls and what the player did was equivalent to two technicals.
Therefore, I have given the second team the choice of accepting a $10 fine, equivalent to a double-technical, and letting that player continue playing with them — the team that he’s supposed to be on — or accepting a one-game suspension for that player.
Again, the first team (the perpetrator) got fined $25 and would’ve received an automatic forfeit had they not still lost.
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