What's The Right Size for a Trade Offer??

Let’s talk about trade size for a bit today. Many times while going through reader comments I’ll come across people who ask my opinion of a trade offer that looks something like: Kaman, Boozer, Anthony, Duhon and Nelson for Camby, Parker, Davis and Rasheed Wallace. My first thought? Whoa! That’s a lot of players swapping teams. Fact of the matter is deals like this have a substantially smaller chance of actually succeeding. I’m not saying that people won’t make them, just that there’s more to a deal like this than swapping players and values.

In a standard size league, where each owner has roughly 13 guys on their team, attempting to send a deal that involves you giving 4-5 guys and you receiving 4-5 guys is effectively like saying to your counterpart “Hey, let’s swap teams”. Because that’s really what you’d be doing. You’ve got to look at it this way, the more players you add into a deal on his end, the more opportunities you give him to say no. All he has to do is find one guy in that deal, regardless of the player’s current value, that he is in love with and he walks away.

Now let’s talk about valuing such a deal. How would you actually value this deal? There are so many moving parts involved that it’s difficult to see what a person is actually gaining and what they are losing. Remember, we have the added advantage of both the team and trade analyzers, which means we are fully well aware of what the deal outcome will be. But your counterpart? He’s basically flying blind and again you’re giving him plenty of various opportunities to say no to the deal. He will have a hard time seeing that while he loses Davis and Parker’s assists, he’s going to make up a lot of those through Duhon and Melo. Instead he will just see ‘I lose two of my big assist guys here, so no’. Remember, whenever you send out an offer to another owner, their first reaction to it is ‘OK how are you trying to screw me here’. The goal is to make the deal as transparent as possible and use our buy low strategy or sell high strategy as the advantage. (Speaking of late bloomer Buy Lows, how bout Vince Carter and Devin Harris?!).

For me, the sweet spot is either 1-1, 2-2, 2-1, 3-1 or 3-2. Once you introduce players 4 and 5 into the deal, you are going well past the comprehension of most fantasy players.

You also place yourself in a position of risk. All it takes in any deal is one of the players you receive to not perform the way you planned for the deal to be a loser. Adding in too many players greatly enhances this risk. Now I’m well aware that people will shoot me messages here with examples of huge deals they’ve pulled off. But chances are if you look back over that 5-4 deal you made, two players could have easily dropped from both sides and the deal would not change much and still would have gone through.

Simple and targeted. Your offers need to stay simple because we’re dealing with simple minded people who are just not going to put in a lot of effort to sort through that many players in the exchange. Targeted because we want the other owner to know exactly what we’re trying to get and exactly what we’re willing to offer. This way, they can understand better where we are coming from and they will be more likely to send a counter than just walk away.

Give yourself the best chance to get a deal done every time an offer is sent. There’s just not much time left to waste.