Mastering Salary Cap Drafts: Part 7, Inflection Points

Note: This series is designed to take salary cap drafters of any ability and refine their skills to that of a seasoned veteran. The articles will go from basic concepts to the most advanced salary cap draft theories. Each article is designed to build on the previous articles in the series. For best results, read each article before proceeding to the concepts in the next article.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve read about all the different parts of a salary cap draft – how to prepare, nominate and bid, and read your league. All of it leads to an ability to isolate certain points in the draft when your skills allow you to capitalize on opportunities you see happening in real time. Those moments are called inflection points. While technically a math term, in common parlance, an inflection point is a time of change in a particular situation or, more succinctly, a turning point.

Inflection points occur multiple times in each draft, and the resulting conditions can last different lengths. Paying attention to when they hit will give you opportunities during the draft. If you aren’t watching for these changes, you will miss them and lose valuable moments to improve your team. Remember that you may not always be in a position to capitalize on these inflection points, but if you are watching for them, you are more likely to be ready to take advantage. You will not be successful if you are constantly behind when those shifts occur.

Not all inflection points fit neatly into these boxes, but in general, here are the six major inflection points you’re likely to see in every salary cap draft.

Point 1 – Settling In

This one is easy to spot. When the draft begins, there will be a period right at the beginning when people are still settling in. They will be thinking big picture about the draft, organizing their papers or computer program in front of them, and getting ready to battle. Often a big-name player will be called out immediately, which heightens this phenomenon's effect. Quickly there will be a large portion of someone’s cap in play, and because it is so early, people won’t want to spend a big percentage of their money immediately. With the whole player pool spread out before them and their full $200 left, there will be a subconscious mental barrier to spending top dollars on the first couple of players nominated.

What You Can Do

Getting a deal on a top-tier player looks different than getting a deal on a lower-tier player. Often a couple of dollars, or maybe up to $5, is all you can expect in a deal for the elite players. The best way to get one of those deals is while people are settling in. This inflection point is often extremely short, so it’s important to recognize it immediately and jump on it (sometimes, it can last as little as one player). Don’t forget that this can also recur during a draft if there is an extended break at some point. Just before going on a long break, or just after a food break where you have been paused for a while, can replicate the behavior you saw from other managers at the beginning of the draft.

Point 2 – Fast Spending, Top Talent

There will always be varying degrees of experience in any salary cap draft room, affecting this particular point. Veterans don’t get as excited to throw out the big names and start piling up talent. But it will still happen, and this point will feature a fairly long run of elite talent before drafters branch out to different types and levels of players. The end of the run is when everyone takes a breath and starts to nominate their kicker, the first defense, or the first low-ranked tight end. There will still be talent on the board, but people will start focusing on their individual plans.

What You Can Do

Sometimes it is advantageous for you to slow this run down by throwing a curveball out there. Nominating Elijah Moore after watching Davante Adams and Dalvin Cook get rostered can often wake people up to the fact that you don’t have to nominate all the best guys first. But often, you won’t be able to stop it. Instead, now is the time for you to start to define your own draft, as discussed in Part 4. At this point, you’ll see the market getting set for the top guys and know if you will be competing for them. If the spending is wild, you should force yourself to relax and wait. The draft will return to you for deals later when the money is thinning out. But if people are timid and prices are lower than you thought, you must act fast. It is far more common to see wild spending than caution, but you should look for both.

This inflection point is one of the most important in the entire draft. It is where you decide on a strategy and watch everything flow from the decisions made during that crazy first run of players. The purse strings are loose, the talent is elite, and the bidding is usually wild, but you must control the moment to set up the rest of your draft.

Point 3 – Scarcity Creeps In

Plenty of players are left at this juncture, but two major things have changed: A substantial amount of money has been subtracted from the room, and tiers begin to show scarcity. Managers have secured several players, and plenty of elite talent has already been rostered. This is not to be confused with a lack of total available players. Rather, this is where the boomerang effect will start to become more prominent as tiers begin to dry up. This might be one of the longest stages in the draft. Some teams have already taken themselves out of the running for big players, but others have quietly spent almost no money. As a result, prices will become the least predictable that they will be for the rest of the draft. There will be big spikes as players panic and try to secure the final guys in their respective tiers.

What You Can Do

First, don’t be one of the ones panicking. Because you have read this series, you know you cannot allow positional runs to dry things up before securing the players you need. So when you see the draft move to this point, speed is of the essence. You may feel you are spending more on a player than you wanted, but the alternative is to pay a lot more for someone later because they’re the last good player remaining. The worst-case scenario is that you get bid up on one of the remaining players because of scarcity, so you stop and think, “I’ll get one of the few that are left.” Someone else is likely thinking the same thing. If you don’t buy that player now, it will not only get worse for you in a minute, it will get much worse. The random spikes in pricing will be challenging, but it is what you have prepared for.

It is hard to judge this and pull the trigger at the right time, but finding that balance is what turns a decent drafter into an excellent one. Hopefully, at this point, your plan is already in place (you defined that during Point 2 above), and you can begin to shift your focus from a meta-picture of the draft to a more specific focus on people’s rosters and the reasons behind their bidding.

Point 4 – Max Bids in Play

Now the game of salary cap drafting is truly afoot. Most teams have a maximum bid in play, limiting their desire to spend on players they are not targeting. The elite talent is gone, as are most of the tiers directly below the top guys. At this stage, the buying power in the league becomes unequal. The playing field is slanted substantially with cap dollars, affecting who people nominate. As a result, your draft is affected by other people’s decisions more than your own.

What You Can Do

This is prime deal-getting territory. Since drafters are more carefully monitoring their cap and have several players on their team, you will see some players inexplicably go cheaply. The spikes in prices become smaller, and overall behavior becomes more predictable. Unless they are on your Do Not Draft list, you should be trying to snap up the first couple of deals to dominate the draft going forward. Remember, you aren’t falling in love with certain players. You’re here to fill a few spots during this period (not a lot – a few!) with good players at rock-solid prices.

Stacking a couple of deals is the best way to put together a dominant roster while remaining relevant through the draft. You still have to keep your roster flexible, but it is a mistake to pass on some of these deals by trying to save your money for someone better. You can’t get those deals back when you pass on them! You must grab a few deals during this period, or your chances at a next-level roster are gone.

Point 5 – Low Caps, High Competition

There is a tendency to lump this particular inflection point with Point 6 below (Low Cap, Low Competition). But that is a mistake. After Point 4 is winding down, you will see people with smaller amounts of money that seem too low to be much of a factor. Assuming this is dangerous. Even if a team is sitting there with eight roster spots left and $31, you may not be aware of their intention to spend $24 (their max bid) on one final play. It is common to make the mistake of saying that this period is like the period of the draft at the end where there are lower cap amounts, but almost nobody is capable of spending more than a few dollars on any one player. When you reach Point 5, the competition for players will still be fierce, and teams will try desperately to finish strong. Raw dollars spent will become smaller, but each dollar will matter more and more.

What You Can Do

Hopefully, you have saved your least important nominations for this phase, like your kicker, defense, and backup tight end/quarterback. This is when they come in handy to effectively punt your nomination instead of having to call out someone you could get stuck with or someone you want to sit on for later in the draft. Now is when waiting is usually the optimal play. To do so, your nomination game takes on the most extreme importance. You must call players out that other managers will want to spend money on or fill a roster spot with. This is also one of the more critical moments for using your manager tells when a player is nominated. Pay attention to the teams competing with you in remaining cap dollars and analyze what they need. Your goal at this moment is to start to fill up your roster. You’ll stall as long as you can by getting your kicker and your defense wrapped up, and then hopefully, you are in a position to nab the top available player(s) left before the next inflection point hits.

Point 6 – Endgame (Low Cap, Low Competition)

The final shift in the draft happens when the draft turns into a modified snake draft. There will be several teams who can’t bid more than $3-5 for anyone, and some teams begin to grab their last players. This part of the draft is still important! You have gone from competing for players everyone wants to the get-your-guy territory. You will want to be on the lookout for players with big upside that have been ignored to this point because of some major flaws. They will be popular targets, but you have been cagey and saved enough to get them if you want them. For example, would you rather grab Kadarius Toney for $4 or Tyler Boyd for $2? Boyd may provide some sort of fantasy value, but he is the ultimate salary cap fade. If you have done your job to this point, you have plenty of wide receivers, and Boyd does nothing for your team. Toney, on the other hand, showed flashes of being a special player in his rookie season. Taking a player like him with breakout potential over a veteran like Boyd is always better. This point in the draft is for long shots with upside and players people have forgotten about.

What You Can Do

The idea during the endgame is to have enough money to get the lottery tickets you want while spending your money before the draft gets to the true $1 per player point. You should aim to finish your draft before most of your leaguemates by fixating on a couple of players you have isolated for this stage in your pre-draft preparation. Is there someone suspended that can be a factor down the road? Hurt and out for a month? A backup you need for your top guy? No matter the case or reason, grab your guys and get out. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting there watching your favorite guys go because you spent your money too early. The endgame doesn’t have the pressure of the previous stages because you should’ve already set yourself up to finish strong, and if you didn’t, it’s too late anyway. Paying attention to physical tells and nominations is still important, but the difficulty level is substantially lower as you finish the draft.

Conclusion

So there you have it. You’ve followed along as you learned the basic concept – spend all your money! – to the most advanced analysis on when your room is shifting during your salary cap draft. There is no substitute for experience when identifying the right moves in this format. Often people can forget that instincts are built through experience and preparation. You don’t gain instinct by finishing your third salary cap draft. You need repetitions. And you must make those repetitions count by carefully studying these concepts, preparing for your drafts, and then observing and implementing everything you can every time you draft.

The drafter's instinct for drafting becomes the best friend when all of the skills in this series are mastered or at least thoroughly understood. You’ll see the shifts as they happen, spot the tells on the fly, and instantly know which buttons to press, when to bid, and how to dominate your salary cap draft.

You’ll likely never leave a salary cap draft in your fantasy career thinking that you had a perfect draft. There will always be a move you could’ve made that you failed to make. That is what makes this type of drafting so much fun and why it is so important to push every edge in the pursuit of Salary Cap Perfection. Good luck and happy bidding!