Trade Deadline Strategies

Trevor Bucher

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In your leagues, you may notice a trend among the successful teams – I know that I have. The perennial contenders know how to work the trade deadline to their advantage. The basics of the art are commonplace. You buy guys who are producing if you are looking like a contender by selling off young assets and draft picks. You sell aging guys who are producing if you look like you are a rebuilding or reloading team. There are subtleties to the dance that is working the trade deadline, though. You have to be honest with yourself about your team. You have to be honest with yourself about player values. The trade deadline means half of an NFL season has passed and you can no longer cling to your offseason or preseason valuations of a player if you want to actually pull off a trade. Paper champions from August can be ravaged by injury and ineffectiveness. This process can take some soul searching. I sincerely hope this guide to how I approach trade deadlines can help position you to take advantage of the opportunities that will come up over the next several weeks.

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Team Evaluation

I assume this part is fairly obvious by mid-season for most of our readers, but a refresher never hurt anyone. You need to know whether your team is a contender or a pretender. I always like to say that if you’re not sure whether you are a contender or not, you are not. Records don’t mean everything. Our own Karl Safchick has an excellent anecdote that should provide a framework for the state of mind with which you should approach your team evaluation.

Sure, his record isn’t the greatest, but his team is in position to compete. My personal favorite tool for team evaluation is the all play record. If you play on MFL, this is calculated for you on the Power Rankings page. If you don’t, I would highly recommend you calculate your all play record for each team you own. The math is simple: for each week of the season, take your team total score and compare it to every other team in the league, then pretend that you had played one another. Then, divide the total wins you would have accrued throughout the season by the total number of “games.”

Here is how I evaluate my teams using this method:

allplay

Player valuations

Now that you have fairly evaluated your team and removed at least some of the bias that hold in evaluating it, you need to do some homework on player values so you can decide who to buy and who to sell. The values that you assigned to players over the offseason and preseason are almost certainly irrelevant at this point of the season, rookies notwithstanding (they hold value whether they’re doing well or not.) Did you think an aging veteran would be producing, but he is instead struggling? No one will want to buy him, he may have become a roster clogger. Did you think a young player was a bust, but he is suddenly putting up numbers? It might be time to rethink your value on these guys. Don’t stop at the surface level. Look at contract situations for entire teams.

If you are going to target a young RB who is not at the top of his team’s depth chart, what is the starter’s contract situation? What is the salary cap allocation for offensive line? Is the salary cap swinging towards pass catchers? What are the strengths of the offensive line and defense, which can dictate game scripts week to week? The same can be said of pass catchers. Does the team seem poised to throw a lot due to a weak defense? Can the offensive line pass protect? Does the quarterback have the ability to get the ball to the receiver? Do the receiver’s strengths mesh with the quarterback’s strengths?

League size, starting requirements, and scoring will all play a huge factor in player valuation as well.  I cannot provide a one size fits all guide for player valuation.  This will require some serious homework if you are dedicated to taking advantage of the trade deadline.

Finding ideal trade partners

Now that you’ve evaluated your own team and evaluated more players that you would care to admit to your family and friends, it’s time for you to evaluate another piece of the puzzle: every other team in the league. You need to know which teams are contending, which teams are rebuilding, and which teams might be on the fence as to where they fit onto the spectrum. If you are contending, your primary teams to target will be those who are looking to rebuild. Send offers for their older players or players who are producing right now but have a cloudy future. If you are rebuilding, buy young players that aren’t yet producing from the contending teams. If you’re in the middle, pick a side and give your team some direction. Remember, trades need to make sense to both owners. Savvy owners will create win-win trade offers. Are you deep at wide receiver but weak at running back? Find an owner with the opposite problem and try to swing a deal. You can save yourself a lot of rejected trade offers if you find the right target in the first place.

Don’t be your own worst enemy

One thing that I cannot stress enough is to not shoot yourself in the foot. You really need to have gone through each of the steps above to take advantage of the trade deadline. Once you find a player you want on a team that makes sense as a trade partner, your initial offer needs to be reasonable. It does not have to be perfect, but if you lowball then you run the risk of the other owner flat rejecting and cutting off trade talks. You have to be honest about your evaluations. What you paid for a player no longer matters – every player on your team is a sunk cost. The only thing you can affect is what you do with those players going forward.

You also need to be respectful of your trade partner. They have their own thoughts and valuations, which may well be different from yours. That is absolutely fine. Try to work something out that helps both parties, but do not be afraid to step away from a trade if it isn’t working out. They don’t have to make a deal with you much the same as you don’t have to make a deal with them. It isn’t personal, so don’t take it that way. Remember that this is dynasty, so you will be dealing with this owner again in the future. A burned bridge can only hurt you.

Parting thoughts

Hopefully the steps I’ve laid out above help you formulate a coherent strategy. I’ll leave you with this quote from a post I recently made on our forums. This sums up my thoughts on player values and trading, and is essentially my mantra when I am at the trade table.

“The concept of value I think is flexible. In my mind, the value of a given player is the point at which a deal can actually be struck. This is obviously influenced by both the buyer and the seller. If the seller places too much value on a player, then they don’t truly have a market value, because the price will never be met. That’s fine, but then again it isn’t really an indicator of their value in a trade. The same can be said if no buyer is willing to pay a reasonable price. If every single offer is a lowball, then that player’s trade value is low enough that he effectively has no trade value, because no trade can occur.
Since there are more potential buyers than sellers for an individual player in any given league, more often the potential trade value is set by the seller. The only two reasonable outcomes are for the buyer to hold onto the player if they cannot get their asking price, or to adjust their concept of that player’s trade value.”

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