There's an 11-game slate in the NBA tonight so there's a lot to pay attention to for fantasy basketball implications. Here's what I'm watching for:

7pm

BOS at PHI

Elton Brand is supposed to start tonight after a flair up in his right Achilles tendon kept him out the past couple games. He had surgery on the other tendon though so this doesn't bode well for the future. But he wouldn't be playing if he didn't feel ready, so I'm hoping to see him jump around a little without pain and actually grab some boards or block shots. Doubtful, but a very positive sign if he plays well, especially against KG and Perkins. Thad Young can't be happy if he's back to the bench, but he should play well against the second unit.

DET v CLE

I want to see if JJ Hickson can continue his strong play filling in for Shaq. He catches a monstrous break with Ben Wallace out of action. He got added in my main league this morning and I'm already regretting not making the move for him when I had the chance. Another strong game would solidify my feelings of self-loathing.

LAL v CHA

Can Andrew Bynum have an explosive game or is his injury really holding him back? You know Pau Gasol is going to have a bounceback game after his pitiful display in their last effort. I hope Ty Thomas goes wild tonight though I traded him away in my keeper league last week. When you get CP3 in the deal, it doesn't matter who you give up.

NYK v TOR

Ever since Me-Mac came to town (it's a little ironic that someone with that nickname is now playing POINT GUARD for the Knicks), Wilson Chandler has really struggled. He's back in the lineup after missing two games due to a death in the family. Against the T-Dot without Chris Bosh in the lineup (Martian Death Flu), Chandler has a very good opportunity to show that he's Shawn Marion Lite, well at least the Marion from the Phoenix years. The Knicks really want him and Gallo to succeed and help attract free agents as attractive complementary pieces who can grow with them, so they should see all the minutes they can get the rest of the way out. I want to see Chandler at 37+ minutes tonight. He's well rested.

The most exciting thing though is the fact that Bill Walker is getting a chance to play--and in a system that's perfect for him. Many thought Walker was a better high school prospect than his college teammate at Kansas State, Michael Beasley. But knee injuries really put a damper on his career, yet his explosiveness still seems to be there. Or at least that's what I'll be investigating. The Knicks may have found themselves a weapon here and I wouldn't hesitate to roll the dice in 14-team leagues or deeper.

MIL v WAS

Can Brandon Jennings actually hit 50 percent of his shots one night? He's only done it twice since way back on December 30. Against the Wizards, he has a chance. And my boy Andray Blatche, I want to see you use your quickness to get Andrew Bogut in foul trouble and then explode for 30+ points and 10+ boards. A couple swats would be nice too.

Hit the jump for the 7:30pm games and on...

In most standard re-draft leagues, the trading deadline will inspire a few moves, with the majority of owners just tinkering here or shoring up a category there. You don’t see very many blockbusters, as the vast majority of playoff-bound teams don’t want to mess with their success. For example, the Celtics didn’t trade Paul Pierce or Kevin Garnett but they were willing to part with Eddie House to land Nate Robinson.

In a keeper league, however, the trade deadline often re-shapes the entire landscape of the league from top to bottom. Deadline day can be crazier than Craig Sager’s wardrobe, farfetched as it seems for those of you who have never participated in a keeper league.

That’s because it can breathe new life into every team, playoff-bound or not, because of the promise of next year. With future draft picks at your disposal, you no longer need to find a perfect player-for-player match to make a trade. You can throw in a draft pick to even out a deal, or more commonly, deal a scrub and a top draft pick to a non-playoff team to get a “rental” to bolster your team for the playoffs. It’s a win-win situation for both teams and if you’re serious about hoisting the trophy, you’re going to have to make a move or two to stay ahead of your closest competitors.

The other option though, and the main focus of the Fantasy Lab today, is a non-playoff team trying to score a top keeper from a playoff-bound team, and to do it without giving up a draft pick if at all possible. These deals happen less frequently than Andris Biedrins sinking consecutive free throws since they’re usually initiated by the non-playoff team and requires the team thinking “Championship!” to trade away one of their most valuable players. Floundering in seventh place in a keeper league with six playoff teams, I decided to see if I could cash in my players who I did not intend to keep in order to upgrade my keepers. Remarkably, I managed to nab Chris Paul from the first place team. Using this deal as a guide, The Lab will walk you through the process to land your own stud keeper, provided you’re not in it to win it—this year.

Hit the jump for the meat of the article...

Despite Brandon Roy’s overreaction to his hamstring injury one week ago when he hinted he might have to be out for the rest of the season, commonly referred to in NBA lingo as “shutting it down.” He said, “I think if this [pain] is with me the whole season then I don't really have a shot at playing. Two week stretches isn't doing it. We don't have that much longer in the season.” But we know he wasn’t a shutdown candidate since his team is fighting for playoff positioning and he’s too competitive not to play. But that’s certainly not the case with every player.

Good players on non-playoff bound teams are the prime shutdown candidates, almost always due to an injury they suffered sometime during the year. Identifying these players and then possibly dealing them away before your league’s trade deadline could mean the difference between finishing with the trophy or finishing in the losers bracket. Now with the NBA trade deadline behind us, it’s easier to identify which teams are going after it and who’s putting their season in the tank, pun heavily intended. We can use this information to figure out how things might go with some borderline playoff contenders. After that, we delve into the injury situation and see who is still fighting through an injury. Put two and two together, sprinkle in some analysis and boom, here’s this week’s Fantasy Lab.

The shutdown candidates, in no particular order:

Devin Harris, PG, New Jersey

If there ever was a perfect shutdown candidate, it’s this guy. Harris has suffered through a myriad of injuries and it’s affected him all season long. The team is just awful; they could challenge the NBA record for fewest wins in a season, so it’s not like he’s playing for anything. If it was just one injury bothering him, Harris might want to fight through it, but considering he’s already played fewer than 70 games each of the last two years, maybe he’ll be smarter and shut it down before one of the nagging injuries turns into something serious. If that’s the case Courtney Lee will be relied upon more heavily than he is now. Terrence Williams might also see more time and is more of a playmaker in the point forward mold.

Read the rest of the list after the jump.

With the NBA All-Star weekend on the horizon, it’s time to name this season’s Fantasy All-Stars and give the players the recognition they deserve. The Fantasy Lab’s Fantasy All-Stars are a bit different than the NBA’s since we name not just the top producers but also the players that have demonstrated the most value to their teams based on when they were acquired. That’s because owning these players is how you win in fantasy.

Moving right into the Fantasy All-Stars, the following players are the top producers at their position. These are the top-ranked players in the game and there aren’t many surprises here, meaning there weren’t many value picks. Two top names you won’t see are Carmelo Anthony and Pau Gasol because they missed enough games to have enough of a negative impact on your team. Here’s the squad after the jump:

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.