Making a trade in fantasy basketball can be a daunting task. We all want something for nothing but that’s only a reasonable expectation if we want a month-old fruit cake leftover from Christmas or an STD. But unfortunately for us, neither can blocks shots; they both do however require one. For me there is a psuedoscientific method to follow when formulating a trade. A simple step-by-step process that when followed should accomplish two things. Firstly, the process helps us determine a player’s value in the eyes of our trade partner. This is crucially important for the second part, to help prevent us from selling our players for less than they’re worth. Here before you today I present my ‘get rich quick‘ guide to trading. Fantasy basketball players I mean, not STDs. Because that’s what ChristianMingle.com is for.
Step 1 – The 1st step is to figure out what we need and what we have an excess of. This step should be the easiest. If we are constantly losing assists then we more than likely need another PG. If we are winning boards and blocks every week then we can afford to lose some.
Example: Our team consists of Teague, Lawson, Jennings, Augustin, Collison plus Cousins, Favors, Sanders, and Robin Lopez, plus wings in a standard 12-team league. Pretty obvious right? We have too many point guards and not enough bigs. There’s an excess of assists, which also tends to mean too many turnovers, a poor FG%, and not enough rebounds.
Step 2 – Now that we know our needs we need to find a trade partner, not a particular player. If someone in the league has the same needs we have then we skip them, the odds of a trade happening that can help is very small. Instead we should focus on managers who’s need fits our excess and who’s excess fills our need.
This guy has Holiday, Westbrook, Bledsoe, Lin, Sessions, Marshall, and 3 center eligible guys, he’s definitely not our guy. But this other guy has Felton, Isaiah Thomas, Deron Williams and is 2-10 in assists on the year. His bigs are Aldridge, West, Lee, Blatche, Taj Gibson. He might be in the market for a PG and I like a few of his bigs if the price is right.
Step 3 – Now that we’ve found our trade partner we need to figure out how much value they put on both the players we want and the players we want to give up. It’s time to make an offer. We are not looking for it to get accepted. That’s worth repeating. I’m not looking for my 1st offer to be accepted. What we’re doing is fishing for a counter offer. The offer should be something we are willing to accept and even though it’s in our favor it shouldn’t be absurd. Once we get that counter offer we will now know a range of how our trade partner values everyone. If we don’t get a counter then we target another player on the same team. Their lack of a counter doesn’t mean they don’t like getting trade offers. I mean really, who doesn’t like getting trade offers? It usually just means they don’t want to deal the player we want or they don’t like the player we’re offering.
Let’s start high. We want Aldridge. We’ll float an offer of Lawson straight up. If we get no counter then we’ll target a different player. If he counters with say… Lawson, Cousins for Aldridge, Felton then we now have a low range, ours, and high range, his, of ‘worth’ and that’s really all we wanted.
Step 4 – With this new information we now have 3 choices. First we could take his offer, doubtful. Second, we can decide that we are close enough and make another offer somewhere in between the original offer and the counter. Or third, decide we are too far away from each other and move on. This is usually the case. Remember we aren’t trading for a player per se. We’re trading for stats. So we target someone else on the same team.
Lawson, Cousins for Aldridge, Felton. If we decide the counter offer is close enough then lets make another offer. How about Aldridge, and a wing player for Lawson, Favors? Remember our goal in this example is to improve our bigs, rebounding, FG%, blocks, ect. Leaving Cousins in the trade doesn’t really help us and do we really want Felton? Or our other choice, say, “No Thank You”, we aren’t close considering Cousins and Aldridge aren’t that far off and Lawson is significantly better than Felton. Who else do they have we may want. I like Taj.
Step 5 – Hopefully he accepts our counter. More than likely though another round of counters will be necessary. Either way if this is the case we should be really close to agreeing on something. However if we just can’t work it out or their original counter wasn’t close and we move on to another player then we go back to step 3.
So we aren’t getting Aldridge. Fine. Let’s see how much he values Taj Gibson? I’ll float an initial offer of Collison. Collison is a temporary starter and the last PG on our team. We don’t need him. Let’s see if we get a counter. I’m probably willing to go as high as Augustin or Jennings for Taj, I like him and he fills a need.
The example given is close to how I made the real life fantasy trade of Collison for Taj. Yep, he took my 1st offer for him. I tried to get Aldridge for a while and I’m not sure the offers and counters mentioned here were the real ones but this is really close to how it went down, and is exactly how I approach trading every time. I hope you found this helpful and if there’s anything you would like me to try to clarify or go further into detail please feel free to ask in the comments.
