Welcome to the Dynasty Trade Review HQ, your go-to source for mastering the art of Dynasty Fantasy Football trading. Dive into the depths of player valuation, league dynamics, and negotiation strategies. Let’s navigate the trade market together and craft winning trades for building our dynasty rosters.
Our trades today focus on liquidity and how we use it to acquire the players that we want to acquire on our rosters. We’ll also examine the value of a player based on starting roster size. Our league is using a 12-team SF, Start 9 0.5 PPR.
Liquidity & Player Values
Liquidity is a popular term to describe how easily a player or prospect can be moved. Almost any Dynasty manager is interested in buying C.J. Stroud right now, he is a piece that you can put on the trade block and get offers in your inbox immediately.
The opposite end of this spectrum of liquidity would be Quentin Johnston.
After a rough rookie season with minimal production but a lot of snaps, the Dynasty space has written off QJ. Sure, everyone will offer you their 3.09 for him, but at that price, he’s worth holding and hope bounces back. With a player like Quentin Johnston, you need to decide if you want to sell before his value decreases further, or hold and hope for the bounce back. How you decide is up to your roster needs and what you think you can get for the player in return.
The easiest assets to move in Dynasty are picks. Nobody hates a 2025 first-round pick, as it’s the gold standard of Dynasty. They can be anything you want; even though their value might fluctuate year to year, they’ll always retain and increase in value – everyone loves smashing DRAFT when the rookie draft season rolls around.
So how do we get an asset we’ve identified we want off our roster? We convert them to a pick. As you can see in the trade above, we traded a 2026 3rd and Quentin Johnston for a 2025 2nd-round pick. Do we lose overall value in this trade? Absolutely, but what we gain is an asset that people will want, and we can use it to negotiate further deals.
With our newly acquired pick, we acquired Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who had a slower rookie season than we anticipated for the 2024 season. With Tyler Lockett likely gone after the 2025 season, JSN should be primed for a breakout in 2025. If you don’t believe in a JSN breakout, then you choose a different player as your trade target. Without this slow start to JSN’s career, we wouldn’t have the buy window that we have available to us. If he started his career recording a 1000-yard season, you’d be paying 1.05/1.06 rookie price tags to acquire him. With our 2025 2nd packaged with Josh Downs, who had flashes as a quality player last season, it was enough to have our JSN manager take his chances on the draft pick and player combo. I’ll take the risk to reward here on JSN, who was the top overall WR prospect for the entire year of 2023. I’m going to bank on his talent to eventually shine through in a crowded WR room in Seattle.
League Scoring
Now, let’s look at our league scoring. In a .5 PPR, there are fewer “PPR Merchants”, these are the players who run out stat lines like Josh Downs’ Week 3 against the Baltimore Ravens. He had 12 targets and 8 receptions for 57 total yards. In a 0.5 PPR league, this would give you a score of 9.7 fantasy points. Not an entirely unusable start for our lineup, but certainly not a week-winning player. In a full 1.0 PPR league, Downs’ floor rises and this same week we would earn 13.7 fantasy points. Full PPR versus half-point PPR changes the floor and ceiling values of fringe starters. This also specifically affects slot wide receivers, such as Josh Downs, Zay Flowers, and Demario Douglas as they are usually running shorter routes and gaining fewer yards per catch.
For our 0.5 PPR leagues, we like our WRs to have some touchdown upside. Players like Nico Collins, George Pickens, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba all project out more as full-time WR1 roles. These players offer higher upside than the former players mentioned that fill the “slot” wide receiver role.
Hope you enjoyed the article! If you have a topic on trades you would like to see discussed, or you’d like a trade analyzed please DM me at @DynastyReviewHQ with your league roster and scoring format. Keep grinding those trade lines! #DFFArmy #AlwaysBeBuilding
