ADP is a Mind Fuck

Ok. I’m interrupting my regularly scheduled Hitchhiking for a brief piece I hope lands somewhere between genuinely insightful and *hits blunt once.*

I was inspired to write this piece based on three factors:

First, I wrote most of this on planes and trains (but no automobiles) deprived of with wifi which took the possibility of penning a research-intensive Running Back article off the table.

Second, I was walking home from a friend’s place late a few nights ago after a Pirates of the Caribbean marathon, and fired up a best ball draft. This ill-fated voyage resulted in auto-picking Gerald Everett from my queue three rounds before his ADP. To my surprise, the team worked out really favourably, to the point I don’t think I’d take back this error if I could. 

Lastly, I was chatting the other day with friend and analyst Ben Gretch about a few players, and we wound up on the topic of closing line value: specifically how aggressively to draft Jonathan Taylor as he slides down draft board.

There are three reasonable approaches to the ‘Closing line Value’ discussion on sliding players such as Taylor.

The first is what I call the risk aversion approach: if a player you were overweight on is now sliding down boards due to increased risk, perhaps you try to lay off until you are confident his slide has reached closer to the bottom in order to minimize your outsized exposure to a player at a bad price. 

The second approach is the balancing approach (what I initially advocated for): you keep drafting Taylor at roughly the same rate as previous, but try to be especially price conscious in hopes that your overall Taylor exposure starts to even out with his average draft position across all drafts, and you remain overweight.

To this point, Ben said — quite compellingly — that it’s difficult to align being very in on a player at once price, and then being hesitant to draft them at a lower price for closing line value focused reasons, unless you think the reasons for the slide are not just valid, but even more concerning than the market thinks. (if you are in line with the market on whatever factor is moving a player down the board, your default position should then remain above market on the player)

This leads me to the third approach: draft the players you want, and if they fall, draft even more of them. To punctuate the discussion, Ben said aptly, “it’s such a mindfuck,” to which I responded, “it’s all kind of a mindfuck.”

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Your Exposure is Probably Zero

Debates of how to reach our desired exposure to a given player at the best possible cost across hundreds of teams ring shallow if you remember how lucky we would be to advance even two or three of those teams to a tournament final. I posit we focus on exposures and CLV because it allows us to perceive greater control over the game of educated pinko we engage in every year than we actually have. 

The odds of any individual Best Ball Mania team to reach the finals is 1 in 1586 (1/16 * 1/16 * 2/12). If you max enter the tournament you are roughly a 1 in 10 shot to send a single team to the finals give or take your ‘edge’ vs. the field. If you max enter with 30% exposure to your drafted player, you have a roughly 3% chance to be cheering for that player on a finals team.

Capping exposures, “mixing someone in,” and aggregating costs on each player are all goals of debatable importance, but are mostly divorced from the chance any team has to win by the time all the money is up for grabs.

I don’t lay this out to be nihilistic or to drive you into depression. But I do think it puts into context just how limited any potential edge derived from exposure management or closing line value is. Even if you draft 50-percent of a player, and that player fails so epically that every one of those teams now draws entirely dead (which is likely not the case), the actual downgrade to your odds of finishing high enough to profit from Best Ball Mania is fairly marginal because your odds of doing so were marginal to begin with. 

It has been proven that ADP value, and closing line value, positively effects your teams. However, the effect is marginal, and the overall data does not account for circumstances in which ADP value is prioritized in place of other edges such as optimal structure or correlation. Lastly, the effect of every single edge is necessarily marginal due to the low odds of victory and the randomness of the game we’re playing.

If you try to account for every possible edge, you often wind up unhappy at the end of your drafts. I speak from firsthand experience in this regard. Out of nearly 1000 career best ball drafts, the teams including only players I’m targeting, at or past ADP, with correlation throughout my roster would be in single digits.

While parlaying those three aspects together requires some amount of luck, you can combine one or two in every draft if you are committed enough.

While this hasn’t always been my perspective, the more I think about it, the more I’m willing to let ADP value be the one worth sacrificing.