If Blake Griffin goes off for 52 points tonight against the Memphis Grizzlies, the Los Angeles Clippers certainly aren’t going to try and sell high on their budding superstar to get maximum value for him. (Well, Donald Sterling is still the team owner, so never rule anything out.)

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try and sell your own shares in Blake Griffin, should his value see an uptick after the game. That’s essentially what StarStreet, a Boston sports startup, allows you to do, investing actual money in the performance of real-world athletes to see if you can turn a profit on the ensuing transactions. Think of it as traditional fantasy sports kicked up a notch.

The UI is simple: You set up an account, put a few bucks in it using credit card or PayPal and start buying up “shares” in those players you think are undervalued. The market itself is zero-sum, so as one player’s value goes up, it cuts into the price of others. And new players entering the system are offered through IPOs, just like any company going public. It’s what’s known as a blind Yankee auction, so people can bid on what they think LeBron is worth, and the top 100 bidders will get the 100 shares at the price they bid. When time runs out, LeBron hits the open market with traders open to buying and selling him as they see fit.

At the moment, StarStreet’s flagship trading market centers around the NBA, with 13 players currently open for trading, as well as LeBron James, whose IPO wraps up tonight.

The MLB market (above) has just opened with four players, but it will continue populating until Opening Day. There’s also a new March Madness market that is for play-money only.

VC have certainly taken notice, with initial seed funding coming from SV Angel and Jarr Capital, as well as Don McLagen, Andrew Blachman and Ben Littauer.

StarStreet founder Jeremy Levine, who gave Wired.com a hands-on demo at the recent MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, was quick to point out that user-participation trends — about 25 percent of all StarStreet users are active every day — are a sign that his outfit won’t go the way of a similar company, One Season, which lasted … wait for it … one season before blowing through $3.5 million of funding and closing up shop.

AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast