I want to remind you that the Fantasy Basketball Season is here and there is no better way to get up to date fast then with the 2014 Fantasy Alarm Fantasy Basketball Draft Guide. Over 100 pages of Fantasy Hoops complete with rankings, team by team analysis, sleepers, busts and 20 proven strategies to help you win both seasonal and daily fantasy hoops leagues.

Those of you know have read my articles or listened to my show on SiriusXM radio, you know that I tend to have some strong opinions. Every now and then I will rant and rave about a topic that is important to me. Luckily (or unlucky I suppose) as Assistant G.M. subscribers you will receive one of these rants in your email box every week. It’s a little thing that I like to call: One MANS Opinion.

On Tuesday the NBA kicks off it’s 69th (yeah!!) regular season with three very ho-hum matchups. Oh don’t get me wrong, I am anxiously awaiting the rematch of the first round of the Western Conference Playoffs between the Spurs and the Mavericks and even more so the Lakers getting a beat down at the hands of James Harden and the Houston Rockets.

But unlike the generic start to this season, I am actually really excited about the upcoming NBA season. This may not sound like any big revelation to you but it is a pretty surprising feeling for me actually. I haven’t been a big NBA fan in years to be quite honest. To be honest with you I have never really gotten over the whole Tim Donaghy NBA referee scandal from back in 2007. I always knew that the officiating in the NBA was awful but the confirmation really forced me into the realization that the sport is simply not an honest competition. The fact that home teams shoot 50% more free throws and thus win 70% of every game played is just ludicrous. I’ve been saying for years that the NBA is more WWE than either NFL or MLB.

Yet here I am a few days away from the start of the season and I am genuinely excited about it. Upon trying to figure out why I am all of a sudden more interested in the NBA right now I have come to several different realizations.

The first and most obvious thing luring me back to the NBA right now is the return of LeBron James to Cleveland. I never really spoke out about “The Decision” to take his talents to South Beach back in July of 2010 but I didn’t like it. The entire production was impossibly self indulgent but beyond that it was the epitome of what was wrong with sports. Arranging your own team and coaching staff in a city of your choosing while completely screwing over your hometown is as bad as it gets in sports.

LeBron James should have never left Cleveland. Sure it was good for him to win two championships but a player of LeBron’s caliber would have won a title or two no matter where he went. I think it took him a few years to realize this and I am guessing that carrying Dwayne Wade & Chris Bosh on his back last season helped him see the light.

In the past 34 years, only nine franchises have won the NBA Championship. What’s even worse is that 25 of those titles were won by just four teams (Lakers, Bulls, Celtics & Spurs). Compare this to the NFL where 17 different franchises have won the Super Bowl in that span. MLB is even more diverse in that there has been 20 different champions in the past 34 seasons. To put this in perspective, just 30% of NBA franchises have been able to experience the joy of winning a championship. The NFL has had 53% of their teams hoisting the Lombardi Trophy and MLB has seen 67% of their franchises win a championship.

If you are Milwaukee Bucks fan, what incentive do you have to buy tickets, jersey’s or other memorabilia? The same that Cleveland Cavaliers fans had without LeBron James.

We’ve seen plenty of superstar athletes make reputation-destroying mistakes over the years. Whether we are talking about Barry Bonds, Ben Roethlisberger or Kobe Bryant, these guys have never regained the love of the fans that they once had. But I have got to say that LeBron returning to Cleveland has me completely forgiving his previous mistake of migrating to South Beach.

But it isn’t just LeBron James that has me excited about this upcoming NBA season. As a Bulls fan I am very happy (and nervous) to have PG Derrick Rose back on the court. Rose was explosive the other night against the Cavaliers in scoring 30 points on an impressive mix of outside shots and his patented drives to the lane. With the continued growth of Joakim Noah and the additions of Pau Gasol, Doug McDermott and Nikola Mirotic the Bulls are going to give the Cavs all they can handle in the East this year.

I’m also really excited about fantasy basketball this year for the first time in a real long time. I have only done one seasonal fantasy hoops league the past two seasons mostly because of injuries and the sitting of players in back to back games. Last season I started playing more and more daily fantasy basketball and did much better than I thought that I would. The move last season was to strike when teams would sit their star players and then play the big upside values who got the start. That and stacking against the 76ers wound up netting me some very solid profits in 2013. This season our team at Fantasy Alarm is building some outstanding tools to help with our Daily Fantasy Basketball Playbook which will be written by our guy Mark Kaplan.

The plan is to use some of the very things that I dislike about the NBA and spin them into DFS gold this season. We are going to have extensive referee data which will help us determine which teams and players will be going to the line more and thus help us uncover some daily fantasy basketball gems. We are going to have all of the stats on players on the second leg of a back-to-back and how they preform against certain style of defenders. It’s a real exciting time and I am certain that this NBA season is shaping up to be one of the best that we have had in a very long time.

Of course, what do I know? I am just a frosted tip radio show host who has dedicated his life to commenting on sports. You may not agree, but that is OK because this was just One MANS Opinion.