Dynasty Mind: Building Trade Offers And Player Archetypes

Successful dynasty management is all about effective roster evaluation, understanding how your team matches up with the competition, and incorporating your dynasty plan to the maximum effect. The end goal of each season should be to finish first on a contending team or to finish last on a rebuilding team. Far too often dynasty managers struggle with implementing the correct strategy to help them achieve their goal and end up stuck in the middle of dynasty leagues - where they never truly contend for a title or end up too far away from the premium elite rookie draft picks which make a huge impact on dynasty rosters.

The ‘Dynasty Mind Series’ is a trio of articles to support making the right decisions to succeed in dynasty - aiding you with the optimal philosophy, process, and game theory to help you implement an effective dynasty plan towards achieving your goal of being the best, or worst, team in your dynasty league.

GAME THEORY

This series outlines the key moves to make in your dynasty leagues - focusing on the thought process which can be applied successfully to any league or situation. The idea behind the article series is to focus on strategy, plans, and moves to make without necessarily mentioning which players are buys and sells - we have plenty of excellent content here at DLF to identify assets to covet.

At this stage of the season you should be well on your way towards achieving one of two dynasty goals for 2023: either finishing first or last, contending or rebuilding. Approaching the midpoint of the season, the worst place you can be is in the middle - make sure you are aggressive in moving in one of two directions and if you’re unsure of the way to go it’s always better to edge toward a rebuild than proceeding with a weak attempt at contending. This aligns with the notion the macro-market tends to overvalue what they have and undervalue what they could have. More teams will believe they have a chance at making the playoffs and competing for a title than finishing last - making the early move to rebuilding a leverage play.

In the first article of this series, I analyzed a number of aspects in relation to making the right decisions to succeed in dynasty leagues: navigating league settings, understanding league economies, effective roster analysis, understanding the trade cycle, and the strategy for waivers and taxi squads. For this article I’ll be focusing on three key themes: the overall philosophy and contrarian play of buying vs selling in a trade, ensuring you target the right teams to trade with in your dynasty league, and how dynasty archetypes can supplement player evaluation and leverage trades, to add value to your roster. Essentially I’ll be analyzing how to conduct effective trading and succeed in accurate player grouping for their range of outcomes.