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Trade Wins - In-Season VBD

Julius Thomas2This week I’d like to revisit Value Based Drafting.

You’re likely well aware of VBD from your draft day preparations, but as a reminder, it’s a great tool to measure the difference between a top player and a baseline player at his position. Comparing across positions, it gives us a good sense of the relative value of drafting a player at each position.

In a nutshell it’s the reason we draft fourth and fifth running backs before drafting a kicker, despite the fact that your kicker will score more points for you over the course of the season. Kickers are deemed expendable, with a very low marginal value from one to the next, so we can afford to take them at the end of our draft.

It’s important to remember that VBD isn’t inherently predictive; it tells you the past as opposed to the future. But it gives us a sense of the relative value of one position to another and tells us when to draft a certain position, if not necessarily who.

Unfortunately, we seem to throw away this useful tool once our draft is over. But if we monitor it periodically throughout the season rather than at the end, we can use this insight to assess the value being exchanged in trades.

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