There's a lot of 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.

A New Perspective

One thing I like to do with this column is to offer a new way of looking at things. Instead of treating wins as a goal, consider treating roster value as a goal and wins as a byproduct. Consider valuing future production based on the chances you'll be around to benefit. Consider whether it's better to be a specialist or a generalist. Consider the ways that optimism is baked into the fabric of dynasty. Consider treating "prospect" as its own position, distinct from QB, RB, WR, or TE.

Or don't consider these things. They're ways of looking at your team and your process that can give you a new perspective and suggest new approaches, but none of them change the underlying reality. These are all frames that I sometimes adopt and sometimes cast aside.

Today I want to pass on a framework that a friend gave to me nearly a decade ago. It has probably changed the way I play dynasty more than any other idea.

You Have Many Leagues, But Only One Team

Let's say you have Lamar Jackson, but you're a huge fan of Jayden Daniels and you're bummed that you missed out on him in the rookie draft. You know from FantasyCalc-- which calculates player values based on actual trades from actual leagues-- that Jackson and Daniels are essentially considered a tossup-- Jackson is rated at 6030 points, Daniels at 5999.

You offer Jackson for Daniels, but it turns out that the manager with Daniels in that league is also a True Believer and won't let him go for anywhere close to market value. This is the problem with the entire concept of "market value" here-- if a dynasty league is a market, it is a thin one with only one potential seller for each player. As a result, we'll see wild swings in asking price from league to league. 

Because of how it's calculated, the value on FantasyCalc will always be an accurate representation of a player's price in aggregate; if he costs more than that in some leagues, that only means he must cost less than that in others. If you could just trade players in leagues where your target was overvalued to acquire him in leagues where he was undervalued, this wouldn't be an issue. But you can't. 

Well, you MOSTLY can't.

 Let's say that instead of trading Jackson for Daniels, you trade him for Puka Nacua (5938 points of value). You don't especially want Nacua. In fact, you already have him in another league. But let's also say that the manager with Daniels in that other league is not a true believer and is willing to trade him for your Puka Nacua. So you send Jackson for Nacua in this league and Nacua for Daniels in the other.

Looking at both of those trades together, your teams collectively sent away one Lamar Jackson and gained one Jayden Daniels. If you think of everything as one big team, then you got exactly the trade you wanted. It's not exactly trading across leagues. But it's not exactly not trading across leagues, either.

Does It Really Work Like That?

Kind of. Mostly.

Imagine a manager with 12 teams. Across those 12 teams, they have each player exactly one time, all distributed evenly. One team might have the players rated 1st, 24th, and 25th. The next might have the players rated 2nd, 23rd, and 26th. The third has players rated 3rd, 22nd, and 27th. And so on.

Because all of their teams are perfectly average in expectation, each team has a 1-in-12 chance of winning the title this year (on average). The expected number of championships is exactly 1.

Now imagine a similar manager except none of their teams had DeVonta Smith (currently the 36th overall player), but two of them had Malik Nabers (the 3rd overall player). We don't know how that extra Nabers is distributed, but we should still expect better championship odds because Nabers is probably better than Smith.

Imagine a manager who across their 12 teams has six of each of the Top 24 players. Surely this manager will win even more championships in expectation. Winning is a byproduct of scoring and while individual players can exceed or underperform expectations, players valued high outscore players who are valued low overall.

High volume DFS and Best Ball players don't tend to look at their rosters as standalone units. Instead, they track all of their rosters together and concern themselves with their overall "exposure" to certain players. The default exposure rate will be 1/12th (or 8.3%). If the manager particularly likes a player, he'll have higher exposure than that. If a manager doesn't like a player at his cost, the exposure will be lower (though few high-volume players advocate taking exposure all the way down to zero). There's no reason dynasty managers can't do this, too.

Of course, the distribution of players also matters. If one team has six quarterbacks and another team has none, then neither team is likely to win a title this year. But distribution matters much less than most assume, and it's fairly easy to move value across positions if one needs to-- especially if one can trade across leagues like this to find a buyer.

And we can always just put up guardrails. If we're trying to sell Jackson in one league and acquire Daniels in another, we can look to sell Jackson in leagues where we have other strong quarterback options and acquire Daniels in leagues where we don't. We can consider roster composition and the other relevant factors (age vs. competitive status, say) before executing the paired trades.

The more leagues you play in, the more you'll have to choose from, and the easier it will be to find one that matches your goal. If we had infinite leagues, finding ideal pairs would be trivial.

Another Way To Exploit "Cross-League" Trades

So far we've been looking at roughly value-neutral trades that we want to make (because we prefer one side or the other). But sometimes a trade offer comes in that we're largely indifferent to, but which is value-positive (according to the current trade market).

For instance, say someone offers us Sam LaPorta and a 2nd for our Trey McBride. That's a bit of an overpay but not a huge one; McBride and LaPorta are currently valued as a virtual toss-up. Maybe we prefer LaPorta, maybe we prefer McBride, but this presents us an opportunity; if we find another league where we can trade our LaPorta for a leaguemate's McBride, then executing the paired trades amounts to conjuring a 2nd round rookie pick out of thin air. We finish with the same number of LaPortas and McBrides, but one pick that we didn't have to start.

(If we get really greedy, we could probably find a league where we can trade our LaPorta for McBride and a 2nd, picking up two second-round picks in the exchange.)

In this case, we're not using a third player as a "pass-through" to get from the player we have to the player we want. Instead, we're arbitraging the fact that player values will be higher and lower in some leagues. We sell LaPorta where he's expensive and buy him where he's cheap. We do the same for McBride. As a reward for our efforts, our "team" stays the same, but we get extra compensation in the wash.

I hesitate to call anything in dynasty "risk-free profit", but this qualifies. It doesn't matter who winds up being better between McBride and LaPorta; either way we break even on the swap and pocket an extra 2nd.

What If You Don't Play in Infinite Leagues?

As I noted, the more leagues you play in, the easier it becomes to find paired trades. But what if you're only in a handful of leagues?

It's still probably worth checking. Maybe you can't get things to line up perfectly, but Jayden Daniels is going to be valued higher in some of them and lower in others. You can still endeavor to buy him where he's cheaper and sell him where he's more expensive. You may not be able to completely eliminate risk, but the overall arbitrage remains the same.

What If You Only Play In One League?

If you only play in one or two leagues, one option is to just ignore this entirely. Consider this a mental framework that's available to high-volume dynasty players but of no use to you.

But there's another option. For the past decade, I have only played in one or two dynasty leagues, but I noted at the top that this framework actually changed my behavior. Why? Because while I don't actually manage infinite fantasy teams, there's nothing to stop me from pretending that I do.

Let's look at the hypothetical McBride and a 2nd for LaPorta / Laporta and a 2nd for McBride trade pair. We know that this pair of trades, taken together, is positive value-- regardless of which tight end is better, we're keeping both and banking two extra 2nds. That's the total net value: two trades get us two 2nds at no cost.

Given that we don't know which side is better, we can choose to treat each side as half as valuable as the overall pair. This breakdown isn't "risk-free". Instead, one tight end will likely outperform the other, so that side of the trade will be worth more than a 2nd, while the other side will be worth less. But we don't know which side is which in advance.

If a leaguemate offers me McBride and a 2nd for LaPorta, I can accept that offer because it's an overpay according to the most recent real-world market values... and then just pretend that I executed the second leg of the deal on one of my infinite other imaginary teams. (The second leg of these trades is always easier to complete in imaginary leagues.)

Thinking this way has left me far more willing to make positive-market-value trades. Without the actual paired trade, sometimes this results in me losing value, but sometimes it results in me gaining more value than the size of the "overpay", too-- and over a large enough sample, those losses and "extra" gains offset.