In case you haven’t heard, this summer is going to be epic. At the very minimum, three of the NBA’s best players are going to be unrestricted free agents and that has teams clamoring to clear sap space while simultaneously creating a favorable environment to woo these superstars. That’s going to mean NBA GMs are going to be extraordinarily busy before the February 19 trade deadline, which is just over two weeks away. And when NBA GMs start making moves, fantasy GMs quickly follow.

Some teams will be buyers, other sellers. A few will stand pat, but most will be involved in serious trade discussions with gigantic fantasy playoff implications. With each NBA trade, at least one player’s value is altered and the ripple effects can be felt across a bevy of players on both teams. To help prepare you with what to expect this trade season, the Fantasy Lab is going to review the NBA teams with the most logical—and rumored—trade scenarios. From this, you can figure out if you should be buying, selling or looking to acquire certain players. It might even be worth your while to make some speculative adds in the deeper leagues if you’re in a comfortable position.

As a fantasy basketball enthusiast, you have to love the waiver wire. Where else can you pick up trash and potentially have it morph into gold right in front of your eyes? It’s just the best. Except when it’s the worst. Cause it was your jettisoned player that’s blowing up on your archrival’s squad right about now. That’s when the wire cuts you like it was barbed. Either way, the action is intense and the cycling of players into and out of the free agent pool forms the lifeblood of your league.

Even if this is your first season playing, by now you’ve seen that simply dropping and adding free agents is all well and good—the hope of hitting the free agent lottery is rekindled with each new acquisition, replacing the most recent failed attempt at striking at rich—however, there’s nothing like the excitement of trying to snatch a guy who just hit the waiver wire unexpectedly. (And yes, it’s always unexpectedly because you instantly see that Player X has value and can’t for the life of you believe that said player was cut. That’s the one sure way to know when to put your claim in.)

This budding excitement starts from the moment before your eyes open when the sheer power of anticipation jolts you awake and you scurry for the quickest way to get online. The surge of adrenaline coursing through your body while scanning your email inbox for that fantasy service notification puts enough pep in your step to make you skip that morning coffee. (If you’re not receiving email notifications, it’s way past time you stepped up your game, Tyler Hans-bro). Holding your breath when you finally click the message open, in that instant, you simultaneously pray for the “Congratulations, your claim has been accepted” message while desperately trying to ignore the growing dread of a rejected claim. Finally, you learn your fate.

Learn more after the jump.

After tackling keeper league rankings for players 22 years old or younger last week, the Lab got a few questions from readers in deeper leagues (14 and 16-team leagues in these instances) asking for player recommendations. So this week, the focus is squarely on the players not sexy enough for the majority of people in those standard 12-team leagues.

Let’s do some quick hits for those owned in less than a third (33 percent or under) of all Yahoo! leagues but owned in more than 5 percent of leagues. Then we’ll swim over to the deep end of the free agent pool and dive deep to discover not diamonds in the rough but rather pearls in the oysters, if you will. You will? Well, you shouldn’t have. But it’s excellent that you did!

Hit the jump for the list. Please note that this article should have gone up yesterday morning but didn't do to technical difficulties, or something like that.

One year ago, the Fantasy Lab debuted its top 25 fantasy basketball keepers of players 22 years old or younger. The column was a smashing success (I got more emails than ever before) despite a numbering error that actually brought the list to 26 players (surprisingly no emails about this). The people wanted more keeper advice. So the Lab is back with grades on last year’s list and a new top 25 in what promises to be an annual tradition.

But why 22 years old? It’s explained best in the intro in last year’s column, but to summarize: When players used to play four years of college ball, they were 22 when they entered the League; now the rookies are younger and more varied in age and their development on draft day, making it harder to accurately project a player’s career arc using the conventional wisdom of the last century. Over the last 15 years (since KG went from prep to pros), we’ve learned that if a player can establish he’s for real before he hits 22, the odds of becoming a superstar are heavily stacked in his favor.

Click through to read the rest of the article.

The year was 1987 and an award-winning commercial featured a young Matt LeBlanc (looooong before he was Joey on “Friends”) delicately positioning a bottle of Heinz ketchup on the roof of a building so that after taking his time getting down the stairs—along the way popping his collar and sliding down a banister—the bottle would finally pour its thick tomatoey goodness onto a just-bought, street vendor hotdog positioned ever so coolly behind his back. The slogan at the end of the commercial promised, “The best things come to those who wait.” Hunt’s ketchup never recovered.

Years later in 1996, a Guinness beer commercial later dubbed the “Best Beer Commercial Ever” promised, “Good things come to those who wait.” The idea behind this ad was to reverse negative consumer opinion of the average two-minute process it takes a bartender to properly pour a pint of the tasty Irish stout. It’s hard to argue against that notion with 10 million glasses of Guinness enjoyed per day.

The message in each campaign echoes the sage proverb “patience is a virtue.” Clearly this is great advice, with practical application in fantasyland when it comes to injured players. If you are able to remain patient and wait out a productive yet injured player’s lengthy absence, you will often be rewarded come playoff time.

But who is worthy of a wait? And whom should you cut loose? More important still, when is the right time to add an injured free agent to your roster, especially at the expense of a healthy player who is producing in the meantime? Unfortunately there is no overarching steadfast rule, as is often the case when dealing with injuries—or pretty much anything else in fantasy basketball for that matter.

Hit the jump for the answers to these questions.

He who was quick enough to pull the trigger on Joel Przybilla, Oden’s clear-cut backup and the obvious beneficiary of his minutes, should find themselves with a useful C3 or C4 who should be a top 10 shot-blocker and possible double-digit rebounder. He’s basically found money.

The really interesting flip side to this is that in Indy, there wasn’t an obvious replacement hanging around the waiver wire who was slated to eat all he can off of Granger’s enormous plate of fantasy goodness. It will likely be some combination of Dahntay Jones, Brandon Rush and the recently activated Mike Dunleavy. Fantasy-wise, Dunleavy was probably owned already in your league since it only takes one owner to roll the dice on a player returning from injury, Jones was in and out of the starting five already but was 71 percent owned, and Rush is still too inconsistent to take a flier on if he’s not going to see the bulk of the minutes. Not every team is capable of filling potential holes.

(No, Ty, we want to hug you)

The Lab isn’t out to jinx anyone, but wouldn’t you like to know who are the backups that would excel if a team’s star ever went down? To help qualify the answer, anyone owned in more than 50 percent of leagues are 1) obvious 2) more likely than not to be owned, so that means Paul Millsap, Anthony Randolph, Jason Terry and Will Bynum aren’t worth discussing in this column. Yes, Bynum. If Rodney Stuckey were to ever go down, Bynum might actually get to show that despite his diminutive stature, he’s fully capable of being a starting PG in this league—one that fills up the box score too.

To read the rest of the article and find out the star reserves, click through below.

To stay ahead of the curve in fantasyland, digging on the waiver wire is a prerequisite. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to dig a few holes to unearth the rare gems and if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again That’s the beauty—nay, necessity—of keeping a “soft or “rotating” roster spot, especially during the first month of the season.

But you’ve chosen a smarter path to success; you’re inside the Fantasy Lab. Too cocky? Not if the Lab can back it up. And the Lab is going to back it up...and dump it. Looking at players owned in fewer than 33% percent of Yahoo! leagues—that means these guys are ranked outside your standard 144-player pool—here are some suggested players to gamble on or add to your Watch List, depending on your current needs.

J.J. Hickson, SF/PF/C, Cleveland

Hickson is probably one of the hottest pickups in all of basketball right now and there are quite a few reasons why, starting with the monster alley oop cram on a feed from LeBron that had the announcers dubbing him “The Prince of Fresh Air.” A new starter for the last five games in place of Anderson Varejao, Hickson has the benefit of LeBron’s playmaking, which probably helped him go 9-9 from the field on Tuesday night on his way to 21 points and 9 boards. Cavs’ management has been high on Hickson since last year when they drafted him 19th overall from NC State, but he’s young and they wanted to find a way for him to be more comfortable on the floor, so they started him. Now he might never leave the starting five. Factor in his availability at three positions and the deteriorating health of both Zydrunas and Shaquille (no last names necessary, right?), and you have a fine looking find.

Check out the rest of the article by clicking the Read More link.

We’re barely one week into the grueling 82-game NBA season, yet there’s undoubtedly been a flurry of roster moves made in your league, or leagues, if you roll like the Lab does. While the NBA preseason certainly helped the coaches get a feel for their new players, many coaches are still tinkering with their starting lineups and adjusting their rotations as they try to develop the consistent pattern that is the mark of a playoff-bound team. Or they are Don Nelson and none of this stuff matters to you. Once most of the starting fives are set in the next week or two and the bench rotation starts to take shape, only a major injury or trade is going to yield another impact free agent making this the key time to add a potential waiver wire gem to your roster.

Unlike baseball with its constant call-ups from the minors, shuffled pitching rotations and newly minted closers every time someone blows a save, or football with its bye weeks, the time to strike in fantasy basketball’s free agent market is now. If you have a player that’s slow out of the gate or not meeting your expectations, gambling on some fresh blood now might mean a championship later. But whom should you pull the trigger on?

Surely you’ve discovered by now that there’s never a clear-cut way to identify the breakthrough players, however, the Lab relies on one crucial statistic that seems to shed the most light at this time on who will make the leap from unrosterable to a productive player or even a star.

Click Read More for the rest of the article.

Every fantasy basketball player knows what happened yesterday. The return of the NBA season doesn’t come without weeks of agonizing through the preseason, praying your drafted players don’t get injured (I hate you, Blake Griffin), so when the games start to count, every fan is locked into TNT for the action and the live scoring is fired up on their computers (I love you, StatTracker). Which is precisely why the Fantasy Lab, (which can also be found every Wednesday morning in its glorious return to the highly esteemed SI.com), needn’t waste your time reviewing what you surely saw with your own two eyes. Yes, what happened yesterday is well documented by the time this article is live, and any competitive league has likely seen the proper transactions already executed—Andray Blatche, Aaron Brooks, the Lab trusts you have found a roster spot if it ever was in question. What you will find is a preview of tonight’s potential roster additions, when the bulk of the league is in action. Get a head start on the research your competition will be doing by knowing these players now.

Not every guy on this list will bust out tomorrow – that would be impossible – but there should be some names on here you weren’t even considering drafting as recently as this past weekend. There’s probably some guys listed below that you’ve never even heard of (remember Jamario Moon?). But a lot can change in a day; it’s not like we’re trying to build Rome, people. This is fantasyland and the landscape is forever changing so you have to be willing to embrace the next hot thing with your soft roster spot (that last guy on your roster that should be on constant rotation as you chase one of the few true impact free agents). And to do that, you got to get the jump on the competition.

G/F Corey Brewer, Minnesota – Minnesota is already without Kevin Love for about a month and now the probable starting PG, Johnny Flynn, might miss the opener with the flu. This just gives more opportunities to Brewer (and Ryan Gomes, who the Lab nearly listed here as well) to produce. Even the worst NBA teams score over 80 points a night and Al Jefferson isn’t going to do that alone, even though it seems like he might on some nights. Very quietly—cause it’s hard to do it any other way for a T-Wolf in the preseason—Brewer has emerged as an across-the-board fantasy threat. Showing signs of his pre-injury form that made him invaluable on two NCAA championship teams in Florida, Brewer led the team in scoring with 15.2 ppg and added 1.0 3pg, 1.8 spg, 1.9 apg, 4.2 rpg and 0.6 bpg in just 27 mpg. His long arms and anticipatory knack create steals by the bushel, which is the main reason to own him, but the other categories will be shaping up nicely as well this year.

F/C Ryan Anderson, Orlando – When Rashard Lewis got slapped by the Fun Police with a 10-game suspension, most people assumed the battle for the vacated starting spot would be a battle between the two free agent acquisitions, G/F Matt Barnes and SF/PF Brandon Bass. They did battle, but neither player’s skill set could help them replicate Lewis’ strong, floor-spacing, three-point shooting on offense and rebounding and length on defense like Anderson. In seven preseason games, Anderson drilled 23 of 41 triples – that’s a 56 percent clip and more than three per game! Now the Lab doesn’t expect Anderson to produce like Lewis, but know that in April last year when the former Pac-10 leading scorer got 25 mpg, he hit 1.9 3PM, with an 88.9 FT% for 11.4 ppg, 5.6 rpg, 1.5 apg, 0.8 spg and 0.5 bpg. He’s going to hit a lot of threes for a center-eligible player.

PG/SG Lou Williams, Philadelphia – Tonight will mark this five-year veteran’s first ever start in the NBA. Expect him to make it a special night, especially against the team that sent the Sixers packing in last year’s playoffs. As a reserve, Williams proved to be a more than capable scorer. Using that ability as a threat will draw help defenders creating open looks for teammates and dimes for Williams. He’ll probably crack 20 points tonight, but you’re going to have to deal with some category-dragging FG% and 3PT%, but in more-standard 3PM leagues, his value there will be buoyed simply by the number of threes he jacks up on a nightly basis. Sweet Lou has a legit shot to be the number two scorer on the squad—if he’s not too busy feeding others and posting more assists than anticipated.

Here's the full list of Atlantic Division Previews.

Boston Celtics

CelticsBlog | LOY's Place | Celtics17 | Red's Army | Hoops Addict | Celtics Central | Celtics Hub | Gino's Jungle

New Jersey Nets

Slippery When Nets | Barkley's Mouth

New York Knicks

Posting and Toasting | Bandwagon Knick

Philadelphia 76ers

Liberty Ballers

Toronto Raptors

RaptorsHQ.com | Hoops Addict

Bonus Links

See full schedule here | Also see SBNation preview storystream