No, but the guy was a brand new user who went shopping for foreign talent, and just plain beat me. No excuses, he just had the better team.
Basically for this league, shoot for 7 (respectable) in your core stats, depending on your offense/defense, and you will win most of your games. I like rebounding most, so I went a bit higher than 7 for my bigs and found a sweet SF with good rebounding too. If you shop carefully, you can buy your starting 5 for under 100k total.