Geek of the Week – Trades!

Terry Campkin

2015-02-22

Tradesies

The Fantasy Hockey Geek with a guide on how to evaluate fantasy trades.

Pop quiz, hot shot: a rival manager offers Ovechkin, Burns and Simmonds to you for your Tavares, Karlsson and Johansen. What do you do? What do you do? Situations like this are what makes fantasy hockey so enjoyable, but getting the answer right is what makes fantasy hockey profitable. Today, I am going to show you how to answer these scenarios correctly every time.

The trade I outlined above actually happened in my main keeper back in August, before the season started. I remember it (somewhat) clearly as I was there when it happened, sharing in a BEvERage or two with a few guys from my league and we got to talking trade. One manager (we will call him SS) was after Ovechkin pretty hard and he had the inside track because he owned Erik Karlsson and the current Ovi owner (named BB) is a huge Sens fan. This guy was pretty much only going to move Ovi in one scenario and SS was able to provide that scenario.

The genesis of the trade was that it started out as Karlsson and Tavares for Ovechkin. When the conversation was at that point, I thought to myself "that's about right" because Karlsson and Tavares are both top 10 owns in my league but Ovechkin is #1 with a bullet (our league measures Goals, Assists, +/-, SOG, PPP, SHP and Hits). Somehow, the trade evolved and in the end SS was getting Ovechkin, Burns and Simmonds from BB for Tavares, Karlsson and Johansen. Everyone around the room was trying to break down the trade and decide who won. On one hand, Ovechkin is a beast in our league – the best player by far. On the other hand though, Karlsson is probably the best D and Tavares is also a top 5 player who should rival Ovechkin at least in terms of points. For me, the addition of Burns tilted the deal so that it was undoubtedly in SS's favour but let's see what Fantasy Hockey Geek had to say!

One tool on Fantasy Hockey Geek that I don't talk about often, but is very useful is the trade analysis tool. If you are looking at a trade that is one for one, then a usual FHG value can probably give you everything you need to know but for a multi-player, multi-position deal it can get a lot more complicated. This is where the trade analysis comes in. I entered the trade in FHG using this season's stats and ran the trade analysis. Here is what came out:

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The output from the trade analysis is really cool because not only does it give you the raw numbers that you gain or lose, it gives you the effect on overall value. Let me elaborate:

From the "Post Trade Team BB" column, you can see that the trade cost BB in Goals (12), +/- (-11), Shots (82) and Hits (277), while he gained in Assists (24), PPP (2) and SHP (2). On the far right column though is the most important stat "FHG Value" and you can see that this trade has cost BB 12.4 FHG Value points. The "FHG Value" is essentially the complex math that is done behind the scenes by FHG that looks at a players' stats to see how much they are or aren't contributing to your team in terms of overall value. You don't need to know the math (that's why you have FHG), you only need to know that higher is better when it comes to FHG value. In the case of this trade, the overall FHG Value of the guys BB gave up was 347 but the value of the guys he got in return was only 334.5, so FHG is telling us he lost the trade. I have to say I was actually surprised to see that this trade was much closer than I thought and I am impressed that these two GMs came up with such a fair deal. Make no mistake though, SS won the deal.

Looking at the raw numbers, a lot of less seasoned Fantasy Hockey GMs may think that BB actually won the deal, I mean his players have combined for 156 points compared to the 144 that SS's new guys have put up. So why is FHG saying SS won? Let's take a look:

The big wins for BB came in As and SHPs where BB gained about 57 FHG Value points. SHPs are such a random stat that I personally don't put a ton of weight into this and actually if you removed them then SS would win this trade by a more significant margin. We do count SHP though so I will include them in this analysis.

The big gain for SS comes in hits, where he is gaining 66.3 FHG Value points (277 extra hits). He benefited so much in this one category that it more than makes up for what he lost in As and SHPs. Basically, the FHG math is telling us that 277 extra hits are worth considerably more than the 24 extra assists and two extra shorties that BB got in the trade.

I took a look at our league standings to try to get an understanding how right or wrong the FHG math was and here is what I saw:

SS is first in the league by a large margin, so I am sure he currently has no regrets.

Looking at the season totals in the Hits category, SS is currently third in the league with 1677. If he hadn't made this trade, he would have only 1400 hits placing him 7^th in that category. Clearly he turned a category of weakness into a category of strength.

Looking at assists on the other hand, SS is actually still in first with 483! Losing those 24 assists in this trade didn't cause his team to skip a beat. I am not sure if SS realized this at the time, but this move was exceptionally shrewd for him because he addressed a category need giving up a bit from a category of strength while improving the overall value of his players. The trade has ended up being extremely close but it was very strategic on his part and his team is reaping the reward. As it turns out, it looks like the FHG math was correct in that the 24 assists mattered a whole lot less than the 277 hits.

Now, all of this as I have laid out is a little bit of hindsight. These two managers didn't know these numbers when they made the trade back in August so I wanted to see if they COULD HAVE had a better idea at the time. To do this, I re-ran the league in FHG using Dobber's preseason point projections and here is what FHG spat out:

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Incredible! Dobber's projections are pretty much bang on with what has happened so far in reality. If this analysis was run in August, FHG would have calculated that SS would win the trade by 12.6 FHG points. Based on year to date actual numbers, he is winning the trade by 12.4 FHG points. That's some good accuracy there.

The trade analysis tool on FHG is an incredibly valuable tool and as we head towards the trade deadline in most leagues it is something that we can all take advantage of. I would suggest running every multi player trade through this tool before pulling the trigger to make sure you are on the right end of the deal – and be sure to balance out the numbers of players if you need to with waiver scrubs in 2-for-1 deals etc. If BB would've done this in August then he may still be holding on to Ovechkin today. Do these tupes of analyses yourself and you too can win every trade.