25 points. That's your margin in the Melbourne derby, with United rolling South East Melbourne 86-61, and if you want the full box score it's all up on ESPN. That's where I'm pulling the score from, the listing on the matchup page itself, and I'm not going to pretend I had a second independent source.

I don't write a ton of NBL here, which is a gap I should probably fix, because the league keeps feeding us exactly the kind of numbers-forward drama this column runs on. An 86-61 final in a derby game is a statement win and a scoreboard that tells you one defense showed up and one offense didn't. United held the Phoenix to 61 points. In a 40-minute game that's roughly 1.5 points per minute. That's not a bad shooting night, that's a locked doorway.

Derby games are where I'd normally caution against overreacting to one result, and I'll hold that line, but only halfway. Rivalry games carry emotion, sure, and emotion normalizes. A 25-point margin doesn't normalize. That's a gap in roster execution that shows up in every lineup, every bench unit, every possession cluster. When the second units are on the floor and the margin is still widening, you're watching depth win a game.

What does this mean for fantasy NBL players, all twelve of you? (I say that with love, you know who you are.) It means United's rotation is producing value beyond the stars, and it means Phoenix players just saw their floor crater. If you're holding Phoenix guards who needed volume to matter, a game where the team cracks 61 is the kind of night that quietly buries a week of scoring. Volume is the whole contract in fantasy basketball and blowout losses are volume killers. Fair warning that I'm working from the final score here, not full play-by-play, so treat the rotation-level stuff as read-the-box-score inference until I dig into the team stats page.

My general rule from NBA fantasy carries over fine here: trust the trend, not the scoreboard. One 25-point derby beatdown is a data point. Two or three in a row is a pattern, and patterns are when you make roster moves. Deb would tell me I'm boiling a rivalry game down to spreadsheets and missing the whole story of the night, and she's half right, the atmosphere in a Melbourne derby is real. But the standings don't care about atmosphere.

I'm logging this one in the ledger as a "watch United's margin-of-victory trend" note. If they're stringing together 20 point wins by mid-season, that's a coaching staff running away with the league, and coaching continuity is one of the most underpriced inputs in any fantasy format, basketball included. You heard me say it about hockey and I'll say it about the NBL.

Ray Delgado tells me I can't appreciate a derby without having sat in the stands for one, and maybe he's right. He's been right before, annoyingly, usually right after I run one of his eyeball claims through the numbers and it holds up. I'll run these numbers again in a few weeks.

What about you, anyone out there actually playing NBL fantasy or trading these markets? I want to hear it, because I'm genuinely deciding whether this league deserves a weekly column slot, and the sample size of my inbox is currently two emails and a guy DMing me about a Parlay Street promo. Not exactly overwhelming.