Krypton Knights had this one. That stings. A 2-5 team sitting last in Sea of Hands was ahead of Dark Phoenix, the best team in the league. Then the final points came in, and Dark Phoenix won 125.22 to 124.24. The 0.98 margin is the smallest in 17 meetings between the two, and it dropped Krypton to 2-6 while Dark Phoenix moved to 7-1.
Some of the league may not know this, but the two managers are cousins. This rivalry has been a family argument since 2006, decided one fantasy week at a time, and it just got its closest finish yet.
On the scoreboard, these two really are kissing cousins. Across two decades, Krypton has scored 2422.65 points against Dark Phoenix, and Dark Phoenix has scored 2418.45 against Krypton. That’s a 4.20-point gap over 17 games, about a quarter of a point per meeting, and it favors the team that keeps losing. Dark Phoenix leads the series 10-7.
How that happens says a lot about both franchises.
Krypton wins big. The three most lopsided games in the series are all Krypton wins, led by a 76.67-point beating in 2017 and back-to-back blowouts in 2016 and 2017 that each topped 60. When Krypton gets Dark Phoenix on a good week, it doesn’t stop scoring. Dark Phoenix wins the other way. It owns the two closest games the cousins have ever played, a 1.23 win in 2015 and now this one. Krypton runs up margin it can’t bank. Dark Phoenix collects the coin flips. Do that for twenty years and you get a series where the team with more points has fewer wins.
The streaks tell the same story. Dark Phoenix has twice won three straight, from 2013 to 2015 and again from 2018 to 2020. Krypton has never won more than two in a row. It had a two-game run going into this week, after the two teams didn’t meet at all from 2021 through 2024 and then played in back-to-back weeks last season. Krypton won both of those, by 3.41 and 6.93. Week 7 ended the streak. The only playoff meeting, back in 2007, went to Dark Phoenix by 33.02.
This week fit the Dark Phoenix side of the ledger in an uncomfortable way, because Dark Phoenix didn’t set a good lineup. It started Christian Kirk, who scored zero, with KC Concepcion’s 16.95 sitting on the bench. In all, Dark Phoenix left 29.45 points on its bench. Krypton set the better lineup and still lost, in part because Nehemiah Pritchett’s 1.25 sat on its bench while the starting corner scored zero. In a game decided by less than a point, a cornerback who barely registered would have been enough.
There’s a version of this where you call Dark Phoenix lucky, and it isn’t entirely wrong. But ten wins in 17 meetings is a pattern, not a fluke. Dark Phoenix has the best record, the most points, and the best defense in the league this season. What it has against Krypton is a habit of winning the games that come down to the end. Krypton has a habit of spending its best weeks running up the score.
Twenty years and 17 games in, the cousins are 4.20 points apart.
