Alright, as far as advocating against the trades of picks that represent kept players page 2 of last year’s thread contains a lot of discussion about it.
- Assigning players to certain picks is a record-keeping necessity because of the way yahoo does the draft. What’s actually being done, or should be done in a keeper system, is that you keep a player, and that player is removed from the draft, and one of your picks is also removed from the draft. Even though a guy may technically be kept in round 3, pick 2 - that’s not actually meaningful, that’s a record-keeping fiction, because it’s not as if the guy picking round 3, pick 1 could draft him. That player is not really kept at 3.2 in any substantive sense, it’s simply a way to tack a keeper system onto the way yahoo’s draft software tracks drafts.
The only logical way to run a keeper league is to remove the kept players from the set of draftable players, and remove their associated draft picks from the draft. So we have fewer players than the set of draftable players, and fewer draft picks by the same amount. So as much as Player X is unavailable to draft because he’s out of the draft, so should be the pick used to keep him. It just disappears, with that round having one fewer draft pick than it otherwise would have.
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The position of the keeper has more or less value by coincidence/arbitrarily. If you have one of the picks at the top or the bottom of the round, it’s going to have more value than people drafting in the middle, because every other round, you will have one of the top picks of that round which has more trade value. People will rarely bother to move up from, say, 10th to 6th but they’re more likely to be motivated to move up to the 1st or 2nd slot. Furthermore, to demonstrate the arbitrary/coincidental aspect of this, because of the draft snaking, if you have to keep a player in the 3rd round and you’re at the top of the draft, your pick is valuable. But if you keep him in the 4th, it’s at the bottom of the draft and not valuable, or vice versa if you’re at the other end of the drafting order. This isn’t an issue of strategy, it’s more or less just coincidence.
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Each side of the trade gets value out of it because the guy trading away the fictitious pick is giving up nothing. He’s not trading anything of value. So it’s beneficial to him to trade away the pick for literally any offer, no matter how small. The incentives are screwed up.
This damage the league as a whole, as more assets shift to one player for arbitrary reasons. Real trades involve people giving up things of roughly equal value. With uneven value, the rest of the league suffers as one player profits unfairly from a random situation.
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More directly, whatever value a person gains by trading into a slot comes at the direct cost of the people below him. So if I use my resources to trade into a fictitious 3.2 pick and steal the guy who would’ve been taken at 3.3, I directly screw the guy, having not paid the real value for the pick, because the player trading away the pick is trading away nothing. He can sell it for the smallest increment of value we could possibly have, and still come out ahead. But everyone below me in that round of the draft effectively moves down one slot in the draft order for that round over what they would’ve had we been handling this issue logically.
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It’s essentially busy work. The more active players get rewarded for bothering to be pro-active about it, and in order to not fall behind, everyone has to keep up. Now in general I like to encourage participation, but only if people are participating meaningfully - making strategy decisions, discussing legitimate trades, or even just talking smack. This is essentially just a weird arbitrary mini-game tacked onto the league.
To me, this whole system is completely nonsensical, gives no added value to the league, involves no real strategy, rewards people randomly, and unbalances the league. It’s an awful system that only survived because no one really thought about it and it wasn’t used much.
If that’s not convincing, I recommend reading the discussion we had last year about it that I linked at the top of the post.