If you’re playing regular fantasy football, you’ll encounter trades. Ideally, trades help both teams, but sometimes, people want to refer to a third party to make sure they’re not getting ripped off. Some people will ask other people they trust while others will use trade calculators or trade value charts. However, people often don’t know how to use trade calculators.

What are Trade Calculators?

Trade calculators usually give a certain point value to every player. You can then input the players on each side of the trade and the trade calculator will tell you which team it favours or if the trade is fair. These values are usually set by ‘experts’ in the field, however, some come from crowdsourced information. If ‘experts’ are behind the trade calculators, it’s like getting an ‘expert’ opinion on the trade. If the data is crowdsourced, it gives you an idea of how the public would see the trade. Many like to use different calculators to get different opinions and you may notice that different calculators value players very differently.

Variables

One thing to keep in mind is that not all leagues are the same. This also means that player values are different. In leagues that start two quarterbacks or two tight ends, those positions become more scarce, and therefore more valuable relative to leagues that only start one of each. Also, leagues that give additional points for receptions favour receivers over rushers. How deep your league is can also change the values between studs and depth pieces. Trade calculators that factor in such variables may be better unless you are in an average league. The biggest variable is whether you are in a redraft, best ball, or dynasty league. Older superstars will be much more valuable in redraft leagues rather than dynasty ones.

How I Recommend You Use Calculators

For calculators that come from ‘experts’, I’d mainly recommend that for beginners. If you don’t know the players well and how stats translate to fantasy points (real-life performance isn’t always proportional to fantasy performance), then it can help to get advice from others who have more experience in the game. However, I don’t see a point to these for people who have more experience and know the players. Once you are no longer a beginner, maybe you can refer to it as an extra opinion, but you should learn to make decisions on your own.

Once you are an experienced fantasy football manager, I would recommend pivoting away from ‘expert’-run trade calculators to crowdsourced ones. Using average draft position can also work. At this point, you should be able to know which side of a trade you prefer. But it can help to know how the public values the trade in order to figure out if you can ask for more or not.

Trade Calculators

Popular trade calculators or trade value charts can come from Dynasty League Football, FantasyPros, and RotoTrade.

Popular crowdsourced trade calculators or ADP can come from Keep Trade Cut, or FantasyPros.

Wrap-Up

I hope this gives you a better idea of how to use trade calculators. They aren’t to replace your own judgement. They also should not be used to tell other league mates whether their trade offers are bad or not. They are just opinions that you can choose to take or leave.

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