Between Amendola and Cobb it may not matter. Glad this isn’t a PPR league.
Well, that’s ugly.
I will be keeping Torrey Smith at 4.12 and Denarius Moore at 8.12 (though I may change my mind again before Sunday.)
Anyone have a cheat sheet that maps screen names to team names?
8/25.
With Arian Foster’s back having been surgically replaced with a pool noodle, I’m putting Ben Tate up on the trading block…
Since it looks like no one is interested in Thomas in the 3rd, I’ll need to move back in that round. Anyone interested in moving up?
I would, but it looks like I’m keeping AJ Green that round.
If anyone is looking to move down in the odd rounds (other than 3 or 5), I’m always open to trades.
I have the last picks in even numbered rounds and no use for them. If anyone needs to move back for keeper purposes I’ll swap my even picks for your odd picks in the following round(s).
Does trading picks specifically to have keepers later in a round really serve the league? Seems detrimental to me, people should be forced to make the keeper at their natural or earliest pick in a round.
Both teams get value out of the deal - the team with the keeper improves a non-keeper round pick, the team without the keeper also improves a pick. Usually the team with the keeper gives up a little bit more in terms of pick value. I don’t see the downside. IMO, any league that manages to facilitate more trades in whatever way they can is doing the entire league a service by creating a league with active owners.
Both teams get value out of the deal because the guy making the keeper gets a free ride. There’s no downside for him to trade, no cost, which means it’s logical for him to accept anything of value, less than the fair value of the trade. Which then counter-acts the purpose of a reverse order of standing draft order, because guys at the end get to move up for less than fair cost. It ends up amounting to busywork - put the offer out there, take anything you can get, hope you’re the lucky one that snags some value instead of some other person.
There’s a reason keepers have a price attached to them. Allowing people to move their keeper packs back later in the round is only fractionally different from allowing to keep them in a later round. There’s no benefit to the league to allow this - it just benefits a couple of people at the back of the draft who get to move up cheaply, gives the person with a keeper a free ride to get free value back for the cost of the keeper, screws the people who get someone to jump ahead of them in the round, and has no appreciable benefit to the league overall as far as I can see. And I’m a guy who really encourages and seeks out league participation - but not of this sort, which is at best busywork, and at worst runs counter to the interests of the league. Trades are only value-neutral and beneficial to a league when both sides are giving up roughly what they’re receiving. This situation is asymmetric and kind of pointless, except I guess you could say you’re trying to reward the players more willing to put in the busywork to get this done and punish the more idle players. I guess on that basis I hate it slightly less.
I forgot this league snakes, so take out that part of the objection. Still think it’s a bad idea for the rest of the reasons.
Why should two guys with third round keepers pay different “amounts” to keep their players?
Why should one guy be able to gain value for a kept player because he happens to have the keeper fall in an even or odd round where he has a relatively high pick?
Kept picks are essentially removed from the draft. To be allowed to trade them and gain value for them is craziness. If a guy wins the league this year, but due to the snake draft, drafts first in round 2 - should his round 2 keeper be given way more value than the guy who finished last who happens to draft at the end of round 2? But if the keeper happened to fall in round 3, then the situation is reversed. It makes no sense.
Keepers should essentially be players who are removed from being draftable, and draft picks that are removed from the draft. That is essentially what the current system is - nominally to fulfill technical requirements, those players actually become “drafted” in a pre-determined spot in the draft order, but effectively the player and the draft pick are removed from the draft. To be able to gain value from what was essentially removed from the draft doesn’t make sense.
Or, if you prefer to think of it this way: imagine keepers are players that are added to the end of each round. Their relative position within the round is irrelevant. They’re kept. They’re outside the draft. It’s not as if someone drafting at 3.5 can draft a player that was kept at 3.6. So their order within the round is irrelevant. So if it helps to understand, you can think of keepers as being inserted into the tail of each round they’re kept in, after players with actual draft picks that round make their selection. The results of that are functionally identical to how we run it. This explanation isn’t necessary - I’m only adding it as another way of perhaps coming to understand my point.
This one seems obvious to me, I’m kind of confused as to why this isn’t immediately apparent with everyone else. This isn’t a parity mechanism - with a snake draft whether your pick in a particular round is high or low is essentially coincidence. It adds random noise to the league, screws over third parties, and screws up the trading incentives. I see no upsides to it, nor any logical reason it should exist.
I couldn’t agree more. And I think your initial confusion about draft order (i.e. thinking it was non-snake) is muddling my confusion of your argument. How exactly are these trades not value neutral (give or take whatever margin of error is acceptable)?
If my AJ Green keeper were a 4th rounder (instead of the 3rd round), I’d be looking to move back, since I pick 2nd in the 4th round. Let’s say I made an offer to 4th and 19. It’d look something like this (value in parentheses derived from the fantasy trade calculator):
Munch gives:
4.02 (648)
5.13 (410)
1058 total
4th and 19 gives:
4.14 (528)
5.01 (519)
1047 total
Pick value alone, 4th and 19 comes out a little bit ahead - even moreso when you figure that he gets the best pick in the trade, while I get to improve a lower round pick at essentially no cost to me. Now, if you want to argue that I should have at least some cost assessed for giving up the better pick since it doesn’t have any value to me over a lower pick in that same round, then you should convince the league that maybe I should have to sweeten the pot a little by improving one of 4th and 19’s lower picks, like bumping up his 10th round slot or something.
But we’ve been in this league for over 10 years now - at this point people should be aware of the benefit to both sides of the trade, and if they’re wary of giving some advantage to me, then the market would have corrected for it at some point. Also, at the end of the day, AJ Green is worth the exact same at 4.02 as he is at 4.14.
I suspect you didn’t read my previous post as you wrote that, as it fleshes out some of my objections.
But to specifically address your post, you mention that if your keeper happened to be in an even round instead of an odd one, the value would be reversed. That alone should indicate that there’s something screwy with the idea. But beyond that - if someone is offering you fair value for a trade, they’re not acting in their own interest. Since there’s no cost to you moving down, it’s logical for the bidder for your pick to offer scraps. After all, you might as well take scraps. Now if there’s a bidding war, then the value can be driven up, but I’ve seen no evidence of that here. So if you’re getting offered a fair deal, it’s essentially because the buyer doesn’t understand the nature of the relationship.
Furthermore, any value you do receive is unearned. It wasn’t your strategic decisions nor some sort of parity effort that resulted in you happening to have a keeper in the right round, except in so far as you might not have kept a player if they’d fallen earlier in a round, but that’s kind of a separate issue.
We all understand that kept players aren’t really part of the draft, right? If I make a keeper for pick 3.6, it’s not as if pick 3.5 could draft him, but 3.7 couldn’t. These aren’t normal draft picks, they’re essentially just record keeping picks outside of the normal drafting process. To act as though they are a normal part of the draft and assign them trade value misunderstands their nature. Nothing would change about the nature of the draft if instead of keeping a player in a certain spot, the yahoo software instead just added them to your roster at the end of the draft and reformulated the draft order to remove the picks that would’ve kept them. It would be logically the same thing, but it would dispel the misunderstanding that these are real, regular draft picks.
There is nothing preventing a bidding war, though. You make it sound like the people making trades are a cartel. They’re not; they’re just the most active players. If more active players have an advantage, that’s as it should be (though Dave might get screwed there).
That depends on how you’re defining “fair”. “Fair” in the sense that the balance is even on the trade calculator, or “fair” in the sense that this is an open market? If it’s only fair on the trade calculator, then people should start insisting on more value down-draft added into the deal.
Another point to consider is that picks early in the round in a keeper league are very valuable, especially those after round 3. 4th and 19’s picks in Rd. 4 (4.14) and 5 (5.01) are crucial, as the second pick has the potential to be kept for two years, versus Rd.4’s potential to just be kept for one. If he has a Round 5 keeper already, managers in the lower picks should have the opportunity to seize on that opportunity to jump up and trade for that pick.
My objection on the basis of fair trading is like, a very small and practically irrelevant part of my argument. I was just saying that screwed up incentives is one of the problems of the system. The main problem is that those picks aren’t real picks, they’re placeholders to more easily feed data into a yahoo drafting app, they’re not real draft picks.
Really, you can toss aside everything I’ve said so far, and just the obvious notion that they’re not real draft picks, they’re placeholders that could be completely discarded if yahoo tracked the data in a different way is all that’s needed to understand this. You could stick the picks at the end of each round, or simply remove them from the draft entirely, or have yahoo automatically add them to your roster before the draft - and all of those things would have the same result. Because it’s all just a fictional pick, a placeholder to understand/track the data yahoo is handling. Because it happens to use the method that it currently uses rather than any of those other functionally identical things doesn’t make them real picks that should be tradable. A player can’t use them during the draft, they’re not actual picks, there’s no reason to treat them as such.
I understand what you’re saying, but the fact is that they ARE picks, at least in the sense that they have value. You may choose to believe they don’t exist, or that keepers should just be considered to be taken in some bookend pocket universe at the end of a round, but with the system we have in place, they’re picks.
Especially since no one actually has any keepers right now - the keeper deadline is next week. So why shouldn’t I be able to trade a pick that I have that I may or may not use? What if in my hypothetical above, I first trade my 5th and 6th round picks for Spiritus Mundi’s 4th round pick, giving me 2 4th rounders? Why shouldn’t I get to decide which of those picks I keep AJ Green in when I declare my keepers?