Fantasy football trade value big board: Cooper Kupp back on the top shelf, valuing 2-for-1 deals and
If you recall in past fantasy football seasons here at The Athletic, the rest-of-season Big Board rankings and trade value chart were separate entities. Well, we’re doing something different this year, combining Brandon Funston’s rankings with Austin Mock’s trade value chart, essentially killing two birds with one stone. And we added a downloadable version of the chart at the bottom of this column.
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This chart (board? Choard?) is meant to be used as a general player valuation guide for the basis of fantasy football trade negotiations in 1QB, half-PPR formats (12-team leagues). Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and certainly readers will find disagreements with some of the valuations here. That’s fine — again, this is just another tool at your disposal as you try to determine a deal that might work for you in your league. That said, before we get to the chart, Funston usually offers explanations for some of the biggest value differences on this board compared to the industry consensus. But this week he’s going change things up by talking about unbalanced deals, since that has been a hot button issue in the comments.
The Best Player Tax: Determining a value baseline when giving up the best player in a 2-for-1 unbalanced trade
Many of you have asked about how to value a 2-for-1 (unbalanced) trade. I think I’ve come up with a decent way to determine a general baseline value. Look at the red/pink tiers in the bottom table as the Best Player Tax (BPT) value range — that would be a range of 25 (Skyy Moore) to 43.5 (Gus Edwards).
So the value to be made up by the team sending two players, to the team giving up the best player in the deal, would be the 25-43.5 BPT value range in addition to the difference between the value of the best player in the deal and the top player being sent to the team giving up the best player.
For example, if you are trying to trade for Tyreek Hill, and the best player you are planning to send in return is Isiah Pacheco, the additional player thrown into the deal should have a value of the difference between Hill and Pacheco (105-80 = 25) in addition to the 25-43.5 BPT value points. So that would mean the value of the additional player in the deal should be in the 50-68.5 range. A trade of Pacheco and Michael Pittman Jr. (68.5) would fit that value equation at the top end, and Pacheco and a receiver like Jordan Addison or Michael Thomas would land near the bottom end.
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All that said, this is just a general baseline value — a starting point. If you are trading Christian McCaffrey or Tyreek Hill, or any of the top shelf values in fantasy football right now, you should want to be compelled to do so. If I’m dealing Hill, I’d want to be blown away by an offer. And so should you. With that in mind, here’s a look at some recent unbalanced 2-for-1 trades that have been made in Yahoo leagues involving top talents — you’ll see what I’m talking about by being compelled by an offer:
Oh, I also saw a Tyreek Hill for Isiah Pacheco and Jordan Addison deal in the mix, so score one for the above methodology!
Alright, sorry if I confused any of you. Let’s get to this week’s chart!
The Week 7 Chart
(Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports)
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