i guess i'm building for the future now

Elton Brand just ruptured his Achilles tendon during practice. This wouldn't be news at all in my world, were it not for the extremely unfortunate fact that Mr. Brand happens to be a mainstay of my fantasy team. So now I'm looking at keeping a D-Wade returning from injury, a Brand out at least six months with an injury, and a wild card for the third keeper -- maybe Johnson, maybe Butler, maybe Odom, maybe a couple of those guys packaged for an elite keeper. But in any case, it's at least a 97% certainty that my fantasy basketball team is completely hosed for next year. At this point I'm debating whether or not to try to dangle my keepers as trade bait for a great young guy or even trade for the first pick in the upcoming draft (i.e., Greg Oden) once we figure out who has it...

...Which brings up another point. For me, my dilemma forces to the front and center some issues I don't remember ever getting resolved at the end of next season. Who actually has the first pick of the draft? Will we have an IR on which we can put players with long-term injuries? Will we have some sort of "advanced rights" on a player which we can use to draft a promising young guy in the lower rounds and then stash him in reserve for future years? (For example, we'd have to declare him ineligible for the entire year and then decide what to do with him the next summer -- maybe we could have one or two keeper positions of this sort so we could have some rookies under wraps to bring onto our teams or replace with a different rookie at the start of each season.) I sense that some discussion is needed here. What was a hurry-up-and-wait sort of offseason for me just got really freakin' dicey and I now need to decide what to do with a team in limbo. Might need to rile up the other fellas soon...