Dynasty Trading Post: October 2020

Welcome to the Dynasty Trading Post, the first of the 2020 season! This column is intended to track which players or assets increasing, or even decreasing, in value, allowing our readers to adjust their sights and values accordingly. This column will also feature many of the trading and player evaluation tools we offer at DLF.

With a spate of injuries that struck the NFL in the first two weeks of the season, many dynasty owners have been forced to scramble and find any means necessary to save their young seasons. With three of the top five ranked dynasty assets now either out for an extended period of time (Christian McCaffrey and Saquon Barkley) or yet to play many fantasy-producing snaps (Michael Thomas), owners of these players are in panic mode.

Let’s see how the dynasty landscape has shifted with the fantasy season now roughly a quarter of the way through the fantasy regular season:

A Giant Shift In Trade Value

The aforementioned Saquon Barkley suffered a major injury in week two against the Bears, tearing his ACL and partially tearing his meniscus. His injury ensures that he will have no impact on the remainder of this season, leaving many dynasty owners with a tough decision to make: either trade Barkley away and lose out on all of his future fantasy production, or hold onto him and risk losing any shot at winning a championship season.

Well, the decision was heavily slanted towards the first of those options with Barkley’s trade market exploding by an astounding 708.7% percent in the last 30 days over that same period just a month prior. Of those trades over the past month, a full 89 percent of them occurred immediately after his injury, displaying, in remarkable detail, how deeply his dynasty value has suffered.

To further illustrate this point, Let’s take a look at two trades shown below:

In both instances, Barkley and an additional high-value asset were traded away in order to acquire a rookie running back who was ranked, prior to his injury, noticeably lower. While Barkley was the fifth-ranked dynasty asset, Clyde Edwards-Helaire was the tenth-ranked asset and Jonathan Taylor was the 11th-ranked asset. In each case, the panic that Barkley’s injury-induced caused both owners to liquidate him, despite not only the higher value he presents, but in addition to WR17 Allen Robinson and RB29 Zack Moss, respectively. Where such trades would have been dismissed outright by several Barkley owners just a week earlier, some look to be panic selling in an effort to remain competitive going forward.

A Display of Christian Values

While Christian McCaffrey is also battling an injury of his own, he is in a significantly different situation than that of Barkley. McCaffrey was also injured in week two, in his case when Carolina faced off against Tampa Bay, but he escaped with a much less serious high ankle sprain. Nonetheless, the original timetable for his return called for a four to six-week absence, putting him back on the field well past the halfway point in the fantasy regular season.

McCaffrey claimed he would be back in action sooner than doctors expected, but Carolina opted to be more cautious and placed him on the Injured Reserve (IR) list. It is important to bear in mind, due to COVID-19 rule modifications, players placed on IR are eligible to return to action after a minimum of three weeks, making the impact to a team’s season significant, but much less so than in years prior.

In spite of the reduced time that McCaffrey will face on the IR, many dynasty owners have looked for other options to keep their playoff chances intact. The volume of trades involving McCaffrey ballooned by 139 percent over the prior 30 day period the eighth largest percentage jump of all players, but arguably one of the most intriguing given the fact he is the top-ranked dynasty player and he is able to return, albeit on the roster of some new teams, to impact the second half of the fantasy regular season. As was the case with Barkley, McCaffrey’s trade volume saw a significant boost following his injury. In this case, 72 percent of all trades conducted over the past 30 days involving him occurred after he suffered his injury.

McCaffrey’s direct back-up, Mike Davis, has also seen an explosion in the number of trades he has been a part of. In the days since McCaffrey’s injury, Davis has been a part of 103 trades, more than all but one of DLF’s top-ranked players. Meanwhile, in the year prior to McCaffrey’s injury, Davis had been a part of just 97 trades. Had the pace of trades involving Davis held steady over the past year at the same rate we’ve since McCaffrey’s injury, Davis would have been a part of roughly 5,356 trades over that span of time. You might say he’s in very high demand lately.

Doubting Thomas

Very few Michael Thomas owners could have foreseen how poorly this season has started off for their fantasy star. After suffering a high ankle sprain against Tampa Bay in week one, the second time in this article that I’ve mentioned a top fantasy player suffering just such an injury against the Buccaneers, Thomas was projected to miss up to four games while recovering. This new caused Thomas’ trade volume to see the second-highest spike among the top wide receivers, behind only JuJu Smith-Schuster. A full 78 percent of the trades involving Thomas over the past 30 days have occurred following his injury, against pointing to the fact that dynasty owners in 2020 are all in and are trying to keep their seasons alive by any means necessary.

One of the more interesting trades collected occurred in DLF’s very own DLF Dynasty Champion Series 002 – South league where one owner traded away the aforementioned Michael Thomas in addition to Sammy Watkins in order to obtain DeAndre Hopkins. Plugging the trade into the DLF Dynasty Trade Analyzer, we notice a few interesting things:

First, the Thomas owner is losing a significant amount of value in this trade according to the analyzer. The difference between the two sides is a 16.8 percent difference. Second, if the owner trading away Thomas had opted to not add Watkins and, somehow, the other owner miraculously had Watkins and added him to the trade, the analyzer would have viewed this trade as incredibly even, 780.9 points to 783.3, a difference of three one-hundredths of a percent. Third, the two players being trades away, Thomas and Watkins, are actually both younger (27) than the player received, Hopkins (28). Finally, while Thomas’ Overall Rank has remained constant at 5.25, Watkins’ rank has moved up as of late. Conversely, Hopkins is the only player in this trade whose ranks has actually dipped, moving down to 8.25.

Yet some additional reasons why I implore you to take a look at DLF’s extensive list of tools before sending, or accepting any dynasty trades. Well, that and understand that emotional trading can get your dynasty team into serious long-term problems.

I know the injuries we have seen explode across the dynasty scene in recent weeks have a lot of owners panicking, it’s natural. That said, every owner faces these challenges at some point in their career. The key to weathering it is remaining calm and making use of as much information as possible. In this article, we made use of the Dynasty Trade Finder, Dynasty Trade Analyzer, and Startup Dynasty ADP to look at player values from a few different angles.

That said, there are so many more tools available to DLF subscribers by simply heading over to our Tools page. There you can find, as of the publishing of this piece, 31 different tools to help you make the hard decisions to make your dynasty team successful. This page is every expanding so check back often. Finally, remember, DON’T PANIC!

As of this edition of the series, the Dynasty Trade Finder has recorded 353,991 trades that have occurred over 5,670 dynasty leagues, making it the premier trade database in the dynasty fantasy football market. Make sure you check it out today by clicking here.