Methodology

How We Turn Real Trades Into Player Values

Most fantasy rankings start with an opinion. An analyst decides what a player is worth, and you're trusting their judgment. We start from a different place. When two managers agree to a trade, they're telling you something concrete: at that moment, in that league, both sides believed they were getting roughly equal value. Neither manager wrote down a number, but the trade itself is a statement about relative worth.

Every trade is an equation

That's the core idea: treat every completed trade as an approximate equation. If someone trades Player A for Player B plus Player C, the market just told us A ≈ B + C. One trade in isolation tells you very little. Maybe one manager got fleeced, maybe a contender overpaid at the deadline. But we track hundreds of thousands of active leagues and have analyzed millions of completed trades, and when you solve all of those equations simultaneously, the noise cancels out. The values that emerge are the ones that best explain everything the market has done, with every player and pick priced consistently against every other.

This is a well-established statistical technique (least-squares fitting), applied to a dataset that's hard to argue with: real decisions made by real managers with real rosters at stake.

Four markets, solved separately

A quarterback in a Superflex league is a different asset than the same quarterback in a 1-QB league, and a 28-year-old running back means something different in dynasty than in redraft. So we don't adjust one set of values with unrelated factors. We run the entire calculation independently for each format: Superflex dynasty, non-Superflex dynasty, Superflex redraft, and non-Superflex redraft. Each format's values come only from trades made in that kind of league. Redraft markets effectively shut down in the offseason, so redraft values are refreshed from draft season through the end of the season, and offseason redraft numbers reflect the last active market.

Recent trades matter more

Fantasy markets move fast. A trade from this week says far more about a player's value than a trade from two months ago, so every trade is weighted by its age. Recent trades dominate the solution while older ones fade smoothly rather than falling off a cliff. Values are recalculated every day against the full weighted history, which is why they track the market without overreacting to any single day's trades.

Who gets a value

A player only receives a published value when they've been traded across enough different leagues to produce a reliable signal. Counting distinct leagues rather than raw trades matters because no single league, however active or however weird, can push a player's value around by itself.

What this approach buys you, and what it costs

The benefit of market-derived values is that they're self-correcting and free of narrative bias. Nobody has to decide to “buy in” on a breakout player. If managers start paying more, the values rise, automatically and proportionally. The cost is a short lag. Values reflect completed trades, so after major breaking news it takes a day or two of post-news trading before values fully adjust. We think that's the right trade: a measured market reaction instead of a panicked opinion revision.