The NBA Stock Exchange is a fantasy game offered by NBA.com. This game is unlike standard fantasy basketball, so if you choose to play you have to approach the season with an entirely different mindset. In standard head-to-head or rotisserie leagues, the only purpose is to acquire better statistics than the other owners in your league. Sleepers and breakout players still have value, but only as a means of adding quality statistics on the cheap.
In the NBASE format, though, there are two major purposes instead of just one. You still need to acquire great stats to win the game, but in parallel you also have to try to maximize your earnings. Just like in a real stock market, where stock prices increase for undervalued stocks as more people buy them, in the NBASE game the monetary value of players increase as more owners buy them. As such, a sleeper or breakout player in NBASE not only helps contribute to the team's standings, but also gains a quantified amount of financial value for the team as well. As the players in your portfolio gain in value, you gain the money to upgrade your holdings such that as the season progresses you can trade some of your breakout guys at peak value and invest in more productive studs.
There is a very fine balance that needs to be maintained as you build your team. You need to have enough production on the squad to stay competitive in the standings, but you really need to have some potential "growth stocks" in the portfolio as it is vital to start building the value of your portfolio right away. In fact, at the start of the season, it is probably more important to build up money than it is to be near the top of the standings. This ratio will change as the season progresses, as by the end you will want to maximize standing position and money won't be as important. But early on there will be more volatile price changes than there will be at any other point in the season, and if you take advantage of that added value early on you will be in place to buy that extra production later on.
The NBA Stock Exchange is a very fun game for those owners that like to control their team's destiny and compete on multiple levels. I will be writing weekly advice articles for the NBASE game as I have in each of the past two seasons, and if you want me to use your team as an example in the column just respond to this post and let me know. We can all play together this year and share in the fun.