5 ways to approach trades, from least to most annoying
There's a fine line between firm and overbearing.
The best part of dynasty is the trades. You can trade virtually all year long and, if you’re like me, you do. In so doing you will run up against many different trading strategies and deploy several of your own. You may find that the best way to get a good deal is to spend your precious time on this earth grinding someone down to their absolute last nerve, until they finally accept your terms and you take the bag. I say this not as the grinder, who employs this strategy, but the ground. This strategy works on me. To those that employ it in my direction, I can’t blame them. I will make you work for it, but I will also, ultimately, try to find a solution with which I can live. I am here for you.
But… you can make good trades without being overbearing. You can also make so-so trades without being overbearing. You can also make so-so trades and still win your league. You can even make bad trades and still win your league. There’s really no excuse for bad trade etiquette except the sad fact that it generally works. I don’t think the key is to employ just enough bad etiquette to win, but if you do, there are still some tactics you should avoid not merely because I hate them but because, even if they work, they make the next deal harder and might make your life miserable—though not nearly as miserable as that of your trade partner.
I have to state straightaway that this topic was suggested to me by my baseball leaguemates. I’m certainly no prince in trade discussions when I get annoyed, though I’m much better than I used to be, and I don’t think they wanted me to analyze my own behavior per se, but I will. What I can say straight off is I don’t send trade offers with the hope of ripping anyone off, ever, unless it’s at their suggestion. In dynasty, unlike redraft (where ripping someone off is the whole point), there’s no need to cash a check on every deal. At any given time, there should be someone in your league in a complementary position to yours with complementary pieces, and I am constantly seeking those out instead of trying to sneak one past the goalie on someone, so to speak. This is only notable insofar as there are some owners who only want to pull one over on you, and will accept nothing less. They are the worst, but they’re also vulnerable, and we’ll get to that.
First, though, there’s proof of my fidelity in the time I did suggest a rip-off trade, and fairly recently. Before our baseball league’s most recent FYPD we had the ol’ roster cutdown season, and an up-and-coming team let it be known its back-end players were available for late draft picks. I did an extremely cursory scan of his roster and offered a fourth-round pick for a player who, because he plays in San Francisco, isn’t very young and has a famous name, I figured wasn’t actually that good, but when I was finally prodded to look up Mike Yastrzemski’s stats at the other owner’s prodding, I was horrified not just at my offer but at the Red Sox for letting so obvious a target get away. The only saving grace was that the other owner said this type of offer was so unlike me, he knew something was wrong. He implied something we both knew from experience: There are some for whom this type of snakery is the norm.
But again, I am not immune to criticism. I just got in a big trade argument on Saturday. It ended with the trade getting done and both sides happy. Shit happens. The key is to not be shitty if you can’t help it. With that said, here are the type of traders you generally see in dynasty leagues, rated 1-5 poops based on how shitty they actually are:
The manager who only does good deals (💩/💩💩💩💩💩)
Rather than speak generally about this type of guy, I will speak specifically about Jake Devereaux, a member of most of my leagues, dynasty expert as far as these things go, and guy who only makes good trades.
I hesitate to blow more smoke up his butt than necessary, but Jake is very good at dynasty sports for two important reasons: He drafts well and he trades well. Unlike some people (me) who generally trade well but largely trade often, Jake picks his spots. The same is true of the guy I tried to steal Yaz 2 from. Part of this strategy is patience, and knowing that if you just wait, eventually someone will come to you and make you an offer you should obviously accept, and then you do. The counterpoint to that is you need money to make money, so the drafting part up front is very important. Put simply, this sounds like an easy strategy to employ, but it’s hard on several fronts.
This isn’t to say they don’t occasionally make even trades, but they usually do so to fill specific needs and wants. It’s never the tip of the iceberg for a run of bad deals. If it’s still potentially two poops-worthy, it’s because no one likes seeing the good teams get better. Cheating imho.
The managers that are always down aka the bait-and-switchers (💩💩/💩💩💩💩💩)
This is me. These are my people. Yes, we can be annoying. But we’re always there.
Generally, we have very strong opinions about values of players because we have overthought all of this way too much and generally, the juice is still the juice, and the trade should be good, but the action is also the juice, so to speak, and the thrill of the trade is an end in itself. The key here is not to avoid bad trades entirely but to accept that you’ll make some bad trades but you’ll make even more good ones. You just gotta try to make them all good and you should hit often enough to justify the effort.
The problem with this strategy, as a de facto proponent of it, is that you become a target and end up fielding so many terrible offers it can hurt. But it’s also kinda what you sign up for. The problem with the people interacting with it is that there tends to be a lot of bait-and-switch, often but not always unintentionally. If you want a player from me and offer me X but I prefer Y, I will do everything I can to keep the discussion focused on Y instead of X. The same will be done to me when the other owner suggests Z for Y but I say Z is off limits, just as Y was. This is all standard stuff, but it can bog down the whole operation.
Of course I kinda like it in the bog, and if I get worked over from time to time, I prefer it to be on small deals, the story in my last post excepted. There are certainly managers that are as eager to trade as I am and are firmer against doing trades unless they get a clearly positive return, and it can be annoying and/or effective enough that, through sheer volume, it’s a little poopier than archetype 1 above.
The managers that never trade (💩💩💩/💩💩💩💩💩)
I get it: You have a rich interior life and dynasty sports aren’t a matter of life and death for you. You are basically a ghost in the league. You’re not hurting anyone but you’re not helping anyone, or so you think. You’re hurting me.
You disgust me.
The carpet-bombers (💩💩💩💩/💩💩💩💩💩)
A nicer me might hesitate to call out this behavior just to save a specific football leaguemate some gruff but he’s the perfect example of this and, having discussed it with him, he knows it. He still rubs some people the wrong way, but he’s not a giant jerk about it, as, far more often, these characters are, and we have made it work for us.
It has taken a while to get here, because this strategy is very annoying.
This is exactly what it sounds like: Carpet-bombing owners with bottom-up offers. They don’t start out close and it takes weeks to get them there. The value spread can be huge, and when you reject the trade straightaway, it’s back in your inbox with a third-round pick added. Then you reject that one—because it’s basically identical—and it comes back with two third rounders. Reject again, and now there’s a second involved, but now you’re giving up a third, too. It is a 10 steps forward, 9 steps back sort of affair, which is why unless you’re the type of person always down to deal (hello!), you probably don’t have to the patience for it. But, of course, your patience isn’t what the other owner cares about at all. They want specific players without giving up much of value, and they won’t stop until they do.
In the case of the specific person I’m talking about, I will say that they do not talk down the players for whom they are trying to trade. That archetype is coming. They talk up their crappy assets, but I respect it far more than the opposite approach. But all this and I can hear the readers asking, “Why deal with this person at all?” Well, two reasons, one of which is practical. The first one: Phone addiction! Gotta do something. The second one, which is the good one, is that occasionally, if rarely, this type of trader will want someone so bad they send an unbalanced offer in your favor to start, just to get the deal done. I’ve seen it happen from several of these managers. You just have to be there at the right time. And yeah, it punctures a giant hole in the bad trade offers they sent previously and insisted were good, but it goes to show the price of indulging them isn’t always negative.
The managers shit-talking the players they want (💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩/💩💩💩💩💩)
Kill me. Just kill me. If I do this, you have my permission to throw me in a swimming pool full of canned tuna in a lightning storm, which is basically my worst nightmares combined.
The first thing I hate about this strategy is everything. Specifically: Why do you want a player if you’re saying he’s bad, or going to be worse, for reasons A, B and C? Also: Never—and I mean, never—will the offending manager play the same game with the players they are selling you; it’s a one-way street to Kill Me Now central.
But also: At least in my leagues, and I would guess most healthy dynasty leagues, the depth of knowledge is pretty good, Yaz brainfarts aside. So if in a football league I was attempting to trade, say, Alvin Kamara, to someone who claimed to want him, and the person attempting to trade for Kamara was to say well his value is going down because Drew Brees is probably retiring, well, yes, duh. As this discussion is, uh, not purely hypothetical, suppose that in ranking players for the upcoming season, the entirety of Internet rankings of Kamara going forward, which have plainly priced in Brees going away (I’ve seen Alvin as low as 26 or so, down from top 10), reflect this, but the response I got, in effect, was that the rankings should probably be even lower.
Well, okay. I don’t much agree, but I see the point. It’s a perfectly cromulent one. It just makes a lot more sense coming from a manager not actively trying to trade for Kamara. And this is a relatively benign example, to the point that, as noted, we worked out a deal after about an hour of being pissy to each other. Wonderful way to spend a Saturday!
But that is the absolute best-case scenario for how it can turn out. In general, it just poisons the water not just for future trades but for the whole league, and for future trade discussions within the statute of emotional limitations. And it just makes no damn sense, nor does it compel me. I get every other strategy on this list. I don’t get this one. And you won’t get it from me.