[ An introduction to the NIBL, past, present and future ]

Intro

The NIBL is a fantasy basketball league located here in the heartland: Naperville, IL.

That's NIBL, as in:

The NIBL is the brainchild of its two co-commissioners: "Young Bill" Krieger and "Johnny Rai" Raimondo. When most people hear about the NIBL, they ask "why?" Well, the NIBL's creation had two primary influences:

1. Don Fenton - who ran a fantasy basketball league (shit, I won) that we wanted to improve and that Don wanted to unload, and
2. Pockets - the sports bar that provided the necessary fuel (re. alcohol) to get us motivated to do it

The key features that we wanted the NIBL to have are:

• simple scoring
• head-to-head competition each week
• fantasy playoffs that would coincide with the NBA playoffs
• a nice web site to follow all the action

The decision to have the NIBL playoffs during the NBA playoffs rather than the last couple weeks of the season was controversial. The NIBL value of NBA players would not only depend on their raw statistics, but also their availability during the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs. This aspect has made the NIBL a little different than almost all the other fantasy league out there and has made the player draft and the game a lot more interesting.

So, the NIBL was born November 22, 1997 at the inagural player draft.

The first player taken in the draft was Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls by the Aruba Thongs.

As we all know, it's all about the ring... winning. So, bow down to the NIBL champions at:

NIBL Hall of Champions

How We Play

The basic idea is that you select a team of NBA players and compete based on the statistics of the NBA players that you have chosen. The NIBL has around 16 teams, and teams compete weekly based on the results of NBA games during that week.

Here's a quickie on how to play:

• You draft 10 NBA players to be on your team.
• Each team must draft 2 centers, 4 forwards, and 4 guards.
• Each week you play a different fantasy opponent head-to-head.
• You pick 5 players (1 center, 2 forwards, 2 guards) to play each week... along with a 6th man in case someone is sick or AWOL or whatever.
• The stats (points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks) of those 5 players over a week of NBA games determine your fantasy team's score.
• You must play each of your players at least once during the regular season.
• The team with the highest score over the week wins. In case of a tie, the home team wins.

If you want more details than that, check these pages out the NIBL League Bylaws contain a formal (sort of) description of the rules. It's probably even easier just to click around the site to see how it all works.

For NIBL historians, here's that cool, ancient "intro" written for the first season: Old NIBL Intro

Site Map

Here's everything that I can think of that's available at the NIBL web site: