Dynasty, in Theory: Finding Win-Win Trades

There's a lot of really strong dynasty analysis out there, especially when compared to five or ten years ago. But most of it is so dang practical-- Player X is undervalued, Player Y's workload is troubling, the market at this position is irrational, and take this specific action to win your league. Dynasty, in Theory is meant as a corrective, offering insights and takeaways into the strategic and structural nature of the game that might not lead to an immediate benefit but which should help us become better players over time.

How To Trade

Today, we're going back to basics with a primer on how to trade in dynasty. Not "how to trade well" or "who to trade for" or "when to trade" or "what to trade away"-- that's all too practical. (Also, not "what buttons to click to execute a trade on your league's hosting platform". I'll assume you already have a working knowledge of the relevant software.) If another manager has players or picks you want, how do you get them to give you those players or picks in exchange for something you have?

Drilling to the core of the matter, you will want to trade with another manager when you value the thing you're getting more than the thing you're getting up. Likewise, the other manager will be willing to agree to that trade when they value the thing you're giving up more than the thing you're getting.

Searching For Disagreement

This suggests that the most obvious path to a trade is finding assets where you and the other manager disagree on what they're worth. And that's a fairly effective route. In one of my favorite trades, I gave JuJu Smith-Schuster and received A.J. Brown in 2019; I felt (correctly, with the benefit of hindsight) that Brown was just scratching the surface of his potential while Smith-Schuster was plausibly on his way down.

At the time, Brown and Smith-Schuster were essentially the same type of asset. Brown was a 22-year-old receiver en route to a strong start to his career. Smith-Schuster was a... 23-year-old receiver en route to a strong start to his career. The only way for such a trade to happen is for the two parties to fundamentally disagree on the value of one or both receivers.

Five years ago, these kinds of trades were not uncommon, but they're becoming a dying breed. In the older days of dynasty, player values were much more individual and would vary quite wildly from manager to manager. Recent years have seen the emergence of consensus value lists which have gained widespread acceptance, starting with monthly ADP from DynastyLeagueFootball about a decade ago and accelerating with the rise of KeepTradeCut and FantasyCalc, two free, community-driven consensus value estimates.

The consequence of the traction these "consensus value charts" have gained is that there's much less disagreement over player values than there was 5-10 years ago. I'm not saying this is bad-- I've written before about how it's a great idea to use these sources as an anchor in negotiations even when you disagree with them because it limits your downside risk. This is the optimal way to play, in my opinion. But it does make that old style of "just find two guys we disagree about" trade virtually impossible.

One promising area involves league adjustments. The consensus values are still relatively one-size-fits-all, but savvy dynasty managers know that player values are heavily dependent on league specifics like scoring and starting lineups. 

To that end, here at Footballguys we have Dan Hindery's Dynasty Trade Value Chart, which will customize its values to your own league's scoring and lineup rules (a massive advantage in dynasty, where those rules tend to vary from league to league much more substantially than they do in redraft).

I'm a huge fan of Hindery's charts and use them extensively in my own leagues, not least because Hindery approaches the game very similarly to how I do. They're a great way to find areas where a player's actual value given your league specifics differs substantially from the generic consensus values many of your leaguemates are referring to.

 Searching For Agreement

But many managers are wise to the role that league settings play in determining values, which means if you want to trade today, you likely have to find a place where you and the other manager agree about what the players involved are worth, but want to trade them anyway.

Per Hindery's latest value charts, Garrett Wilson is "worth" 41 points of value while Breece Hall is "worth" 40. If that was the final word, two managers who agreed with those values would never complete a Garrett Wilson for Breece Hall trade.

But if the manager with Garrett Wilson also had lots of other top wide receivers but nothing at running back, and the manager with Breece Hall had plenty of other good running backs but no wide receivers, they could each reasonably conclude that the player they were getting was more valuable to them than the player they were giving up.

Similarly, Hindery's values have Tyreek Hill "worth" 29 points and Chris Olave worth 27. But if the team with Tyreek Hill is otherwise terrible, Hill is worth much less to them-- not only will all the extra production this year be wasted, it will actively harm their 2025 draft position. In this case, it can make a lot of sense to consider Olave the more useful player for their specific roster.

So far this is super obvious stuff. "Trade old players to contenders and young players to rebuilders" and "if you're strong at one position and weak at another, find another manager who is weak at the first position and strong at the second" are not exactly groundbreaking recommendations. (I did say we were going back to basics, here.)

But it's important to recognize the underlying observation that even if two managers are in complete agreement on how valuable a player is, that doesn't mean they agree on how valuable that player is to their team. And it's also important to recognize the general pattern-- it's easier to trade with teams that are dissimilar from your own (strong at a position you are weak at, contending when you are rebuilding, etc).

Because there are plenty of other sneaky cases where players can have different values to different rosters if you just know what to look for.

A Real-World Example

This article was inspired by trade discussions I recently had with a friend of mine. Our league holds its rookie draft very late, and I was looking to make some room for my picks. My team in that league is very strong and his is much weaker, so after I mentioned that I was looking to trade, he told me "Your players are so good top to bottom and mine are so lousy that we're not good trade partners, really".

What he didn't see is that's exactly what made him the ideal trade partner. He had gone to the publicly available trade calculators and plugged in some names and couldn't find any packages where both sides were roughly equally valuable. But because my team was so deep, the marginal value of the extra roster spot was much higher for me than for him. And once that was pointed out, we found a half-dozen different trades we could make that would all "pencil out".

For instance, one such trade involved me giving Gus Edwards and the rookie pick which would be used on J.J. McCarthy for Jake Ferguson. According to FantasyCalc, that trade favors the other manager by 20%. Per KeepTradeCut's values, it favors him by 25%. After adjusting for my league settings, Hindery's trade values find it favors the other manager by a whopping 40%!

Why would I do this? Because to draft J.J. McCarthy, I'd have to cut a player-- in this case, Tank Bigsby.

I wasn't really trading Edwards and McCarthy for Ferguson, I was trading them for Ferguson and Bigsby. And Hindery's values say I win that by 2%, FantasyCalc says I win that trade by 5%, and KeepTradeCut says I win it by 18%.

That roster spot wasn't an issue for my trade partner-- he had plenty to spare and added five more rookies after McCarthy. So from his perspective, that trade was a net winner. But from my perspective, it was a net winner, as well. (Add on top of this that Edwards was unlikely to crack my starting lineup and thus had much less value to me as a backup, whose primary job is to maintain value. Factoring in that, I estimated my margins as much higher.)

Maybe you like the trade or maybe you don't. In practice, it's entirely irrelevant since we settled on a different trade, anyway (one that still leveraged the higher marginal value of a roster spot to me so that we both "won" according to all of the value sources).

The example is just to illustrate the goal. We can long for the days when managers frequently disagreed about what players were worth, but the reality we're operating in is that consensus value charts are a big part of the game and they're only getting bigger. Which means we need to shift our focus.

Given that we no longer disagree on what a player is worth, how do we find areas where we disagree on what a player is worth to us? Cracking this is the key to trading. And trading, I would argue, is the key to dynasty.