Tearing Down your Dynasty Team

You're probably not tearing it down hard enough

I led off this week’s Hitchhiker’s Guide with some thoughts about how Week 5 appeared to be the “first week of the rest of the season.”

I want to continue that theme today in an evergreen, dynasty strategy post covering tear downs. If you are rostering Breece Hall, Cooper Kupp, or Ja’Marr Chase you may look at this hinge point of the season as the start of the run you imagined your team having this summer.

For those however who were reliant on Anthony Richardson, Justin Jefferson, De’Von Achane, or James Conner, the tines of the fork in your road may be pointed directly at your jugular.

This piece is not a comprehensive guide to the decisions you face when deciding whether to, or how to, complete a tear down, let a lone a “rebuild.” But it will cover some of the key concepts outlining why teams should consider tearing down more often and more aggressively, and the key decisions you face at the outset.

I. Why you Tear Down

For many people, a tear down is viewed as Step 1 of a rebuild. While that’s often the case, I see this as one of those “all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares” situations.

A tear down is simply the maximization of a determination that future buying power is of more importance to your overall expected value than near-term production.

What does that mean?

BASIC PRINCIPLES

As explained in my Market Principles of Dynasty series (linked below), your dynasty roster has three currencies:

• Draft Picks

• EYR Value: production that is projected for years beyond this one

• Current Production: the projected production of your assets in this year

Those three forms of currency make up the buying power of your roster. This is often referred to as the “value” of your roster. I use the term buying power because I find it more precise: the buying power of your roster is the total value of all assets on your roster measured by what you are able to trade them for to other managers.

Your dynasty league has two economies: the buying power economy and the production economy.

The buying power economy is the “value” race: who can gain more buying power relative to other managers over time by purchasing assets that rise in “value” (ADP / trade value) and avoiding those assets which depreciate in trade value?

The production economy is the ‘redraft’ half of dynasty. Who can compile the most projected (and eventually actual) production in the current year?

The reason I use buying power rather than value to describe the trade appeal of your roster is because I choose to use the term roster value in a different way. In my opinion, the value of your roster = the expected value of your dynasty team in terms of projected income over a given period of time. Expected value means the aggregate outcome of all possibilities within a probabilistic sample.

If a $100 fantasy league is winner-take-all and every manager has an equal chance to win, the expected value of each team is $100, and the expected profit is $0. Let’s say you have a 20% chance to win the league. Now your expected value = 0.2($100 X 12) = $240, and expected profit is $140.

I’m not expecting you to do an actual calculation of this figure. But you can surmise what I mean by just thinking of your relative chance to win the league each year over a period of time. The average chance to win a 12-person fantasy league is always 8.3%. So in order to have an expectation of profit, you need to average above an 8.3% win equity over time.

The expected value of your roster over time is determined by its buying power and its current production. In other words, how strong of a chance do you have to win this year? And how strong of a chance do you project to have to win in the future? The former is primarily a measure of current production, while the later is best estimated by judging your roster’s buying power to remain (or become) competitive in the future.

THE IMPACT OF INJURIES ON BUYING POWER

When bad things happen to your team, the expected value equation of your team naturally changes. Losing Justin Jefferson’s points makes a reasonable impact on your current year win equity for fairly obvious reasons. But it also makes an impact on your buying power because Jefferson’s trade value takes a hit.

Jefferson however is a particularly unique example in that because he is so young, and has been so elite for a sustained enough period of time that the reduction in his buying power is almost entirely a short-term issue. This makes him unique from even young studs like De’Von Achane and Anthony Richardson who may draw more long term questions based on their injury. It makes him a very different scenario from say, James Conner, who is permanently losing buying power based on this injury regardless of your outlook on him when he returns. That is because you are losing at least 4 games of production from a profile whose appeal was heavily weighted toward current production. Conner may smash upon his return, but you can’t ever get those four games back.

Below is a chart that illustrates this: (Ignore the numbers, it’s just an arbitrary scale)

The gap between the blue and grey lines represents the sunk cost of the injury. There is nothing you can do about it at this point. You suffered an injury and the long term outlook of your team was harmed.

The gap between the blue and green lines represent a mix of (a) the buying power lost by each asset as a result of once-projected production being lost, and (b) the buying power lost by this injury’s impact on the asset’s future uncertainty.

For assets like Conner, almost all that loss is contained to category A, while it’s more weighted more to category B for Achane and Richardson. For a young player with insulate value like Jefferson, there is little expected value loss from either category long term.

The gap between green and grey lines represents the hold tax of the asset. I’ve used this term before to refer to future draft picks, but the same notion applies to injured players. Whenever you store a portion of your buying power in an asset that cannot produce points, you are paying an opportunity cost to do so, a cost I call the “hold tax” i.e. the tax of holding an asset that does not score.

That tax is eventually paid back to you in the form of buying power gained by the time the asset is once again able to produce.

PAYING THE HOLD TAX

I’ve used the example of Week 5’s major injuries as the instigating event in your decision to tear down because it’s timely, and helps illustrate my larger point well. But the benefits of tearing down your team are not contained to teams with pre-existing injured players.

At any moment, on any team, you can choose to surrender current production for hold tax assets; picks, injured players or rookies (who are speculatively taxed based on a perception they will produce less now and more in the future). In other words, you can trade production for future buying power.

Choosing to do so will surrender a portion (or all) of the expected value of your current year’s team, but will likely increase the expected value of future years’ teams.

II. Tearing Down is NOT a zero-sum game

I’ve written before about the concept of diminishing returns within the multi-year outlook of your dynasty team in my personal favourite dynasty column this year: (Link Below)

That column made a case to remain competitive in as many seasons as possible. So you may think that any case in favour of a complete tear down is diametrically opposed. I’m making the case that they are not.

One day soon I’m going to make a post called “Reasons to Trade in Dynasty.” Today isn’t that day, so just take a leap with me to one of those reasons: the re-allocation of production between timelines.

In this type of trade, one manager wants current production and the other manager wants future buying power and you make a trade in which each gets what they want. You don’t have to only make these trades when you tear down your team. At any moment, you can try to avoid diminishing returns over time by re-allocating some production from the current year to later years or later years to the current one.

The idea (explained more in the linked piece) is that it is really hard to win a dynasty league, and you can only increase your odds in any one year so much. Therefore, it’s generally a better use of your assets to take projected production away from your highest win equity years and funnel that into your medium win equity years, because it will have a larger impact. [If that’s too abstract, please read the linked piece, drop a comment, or just ignore it]

Tearing down your team is not necessarily oppositional to this strategy, it’s the logical end point.

Just as increased production has a limited impact on the win equity of a juggernaut team, increased production has a limited impact on a team that is hopeless to begin with. More importantly, decreased production on a team with minimal little or no win equity makes little or no negative impact on that team’s expected value.

If you already can’t win, any further loss in near-term production makes absolutely no impact on your outlook.

This creates a win-win scenario in trades. Find a manager who can make a positive impact on their expected value by adding current production, at no cost to you, and find a way to make a deal.

The two charts below demonstrate this idea. Here is a hypothetical veteran player who is projected to add 15 points above replacement (PAR) for the remainder of this season, 20 PAR next season, and 15 the season after that.

Because Manager B has a 0% win equity already, the actual impact of this year’s 15 PAR is zero. In future years I’ve assumed that both managers realize those points equally.

This player isn’t actually useless because Manager B can keep them on their team and benefit from their production in future years. But they’re definitively of lesser value to that manager since they are wasting the current year production entirely.

In my opinion too many managers assign value to players in reverse order. They start at the market value of the player first, and then base the return they want for a player at that value. This makes some degree of sense in “zero-sum” trades; those in which you are trading a player for another player and betting on yourself being right and the other manager being wrong. There’s really no way for both managers to win such a trade, so the manager who gets the better “price” in terms of buying power is more insulated and probably wins that deal a higher percentage of the time.

But in this scenario, the trade is not zero sum. The value of a player to one manager is based on the production they can get now, the production they can get later, and the buying power of that player starting next year. The value of that same player to the other manager is based only on the last two categories. If the two managers can isolate what percentage of the player’s current buying power is stored in the player’s current year’s production, and make a deal to “share the profit” of that delta, both managers win.

Ok, I get it. No trade negotiation actually sounds like this. Trust me, I do play in several real dynasty leagues and explaining the prisoner’s dilemma to people to facilitate a trade has well… diminishing returns. But in totally plain language, these concepts can and should be applied in your leagues every day.

Take for example Deandre Hopkins. According to FantasyCalc, Hopkins is worth an early 2024 2nd. At 31 years old, a substantial portion of that value is tied up in his current year production. We can’t know for sure, but it would be reasonable to estimate that if he performs exactly at projection for the rest of the year, he still depreciates to late-2nd value by the off-season as a result of him using up a chunk of his remaining productive games.

This means — if we assume his “market” value to be efficient — that his actual value to a manager who cannot compete this year is closer to that late-2nd. Meanwhile, his value to a competing manager is at least that early-2nd, and possibly slightly more since Hopkins has uniquely high value to a competing manager in need of a WR.

First off, the selling manager should sell for as much as they can get. When you are the seller, you should be active in all trade negotiations shopping players to every manager in your league and making sure that you are selling a player for the highest value on offer and not just to the first customer. That being said, if you’ve canvassed your league, and cannot secure a “win” (i.e. someone willing to pay above their “market” value), you should start measuring each trade offer in terms of its value relative to the actual value of that player to you.

Holding Hopkins because nobody will give you an early 2nd, only to hold all year and wind up with an asset worth a late 2nd in the off-season is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

This column is focusing on the perspective of the seller, but this is a universal take: ALL Managers should be actively willing to take advantage of any opportunity where their incentives or timelines differ from a league mate, and there is a trade possibility out there where both players can “win.”

You do not need to “beat” your trade partner. You are one of two people involved in a transaction while 10 others are not. Ideally, both you and your trade partner find a way to mutually advance your team’s interests and each improve your expected value relative to the other 10 managers in your league.

III. Tearing Down vs. Competing

So we’ve covered the appeal of making a ‘sell.’ But is it worth it? And why tear down completely as opposed to just selling off some veterans?

On the first question, to tear down or compete, you need to ask yourself this question:

Based on the position of your roster, would you benefit more from adding or holding current production now at the expense of future buying power, or would you benefit more from adding future buying power at the expense of current production?

Ultimately this is a case-specific determination based largely on the possible impact you can make on your long-term buying power, and the extent of the expected value you’d be sacrificing this year by tearing your team down.

I’m going to ignore situations where you are either a clear cut playoff team, or already 0-5 and well out of the mix. The prescriptions in those cases are pretty clear. Let’s assume instead you are largely in the middle; 2-3 or 3-2, and middle of the road in points for. You are considering a teardown either due to under-performance from some key players or a major injury.

This middle-area is the zone in which major choices in either direction are likely to make the greatest impact and this is the time in the season you should be making aggressive moves.

The largest determinative factor of your team’s win equity is the chance to get a bye. Therefore, you are generally better served making ‘buys’ early in the season rather than at the trade deadline so your additions can help you secure a bye.

Similarly, one of the largest incentives of a tear down is to improve the value of one major asset already on your roster: your 1st-round pick. Depending how aggressively people in your league are tanking for Caleb Williams, it may not yet be too late to make a legitimate push for 1.01, or at the least: 1.02-1.03 by making an aggressive sell off right now. This is especially true in leagues that award the 1.01 by “max PF” in which it’s possible to pick up 50+ points per week on competitors if you clear out enough producers.

Lastly, by Week 5/6, results year-to-date are historically more predictive of rest-of-season results than pre-season ADP. At this time, the appeal of playing the middle is largely lost. You have enough information on your team to know how strong it is, what its weaknesses are, what the best targets would be, and how much buying power you carry.

The following is an in-exhaustive list of worthy considerations when deciding whether to buy or tank:

• Whether or not you have your 1st-round pick (and other picks)

• Distance between you and the top pick(s) (and how it’s determined)

• The distance between you and the current bye-holding teams

• The relative strength of the top contenders

• Your perception of your team’s projected production vs. it’s YTD production

• Your upcoming schedule (byes and opponents)

• Your league economy: liquidity and ageism

  • 1. How easy is it to sell players for legitimate value in draft picks and/or rookies or injured players?

  • 2. How easy is it buy players for picks in the off-season to re-stock your 2024 team after selling off this year?

• MOST IMPORTANT: The total buying power of your roster

  • The driving decision behind all your moves should be maximizing the impact and length of your championship window:

    • “high-value” teams should be more incentivized to BUY mid-season and sacrifice future value, because you are already assured contention in future years and should focus on extending your window into the current year

    • “low-value” teams should be more incentivized to SELL mid-season because you are likely to enter a rebuild at some point regardless. It’s better to sell now and avoid further depreciation so that your rebuild can be as short as possible

IV. Tearing Down vs. Rebuilding

Getting back to the opening thought of this article: all rebuilds involve tear downs but not all tear downs mean rebuilds.

A tear down may occur on a high-value team or a low-value team, and may be the start of a multi-year rebuild or a one-year blip.

The one commonality between every well-executed tear down is that it’s an attempt to accumulate as much value as possible in the shortest window of time possible such that you can either eliminate the need to rebuild entirely, or shorten the length of time in which you have to.

Below is another pair of charts which describes an abstract hypothetical (with arbitrary numbers once again) to illustrate this point.

In each chart, the team starts “rebuilding” with a total value of 70 (let’s assume the average “total value” to achieve a bye = 100).

The first chart roughly demonstrates a team which builds around a core of young players, and the team presents a mix of near term production, long term production and future picks. Because the team is weighted young and adds new draft picks every year, I’ve assumed that its total value owing to Picks and EYR value remains stable, but that as its young players progress, 20% of its total Pick+EYR value accrues into productive value each year. The result is a steady increase in total value year over year.

The second chart opens from the same starting value, but is weighted heavily toward EYR value and picks. This is meant to depict a team with tons of excess draft picks and several rookies but few other young players. For the sake of consistency, I assigned the same rate of 20% accrual into productive value, and stability in total EYR+Pick value due to incoming future draft picks each year. Because a greater share of the team’s value is stored in accruing assets, the total value gain year over year is considerably higher.

If the charts aren’t your thing, let’s try a metaphor.

You have $50K and need to save for a house which requires a downpayment of $60K.

You can either put your money into a tax-free savings account with 0% interest, or into an investment fund.

If you choose to put $30K into the savings account, you need to make a 50% return on investment from the remaining $20K in order to afford the house. If you put all $50K into the fund, you need just a 20% return on investment.

To be clear, this column is NOT financial advice: merely a metaphor…

In a dynasty context, if you need to accrue value, putting a substantial portion of your buying power into a Ja’Marr Chase or Patrick Mahomes will extend the amount of time it takes to accrue total value because you are putting a lot of stock into assets which are stable, but unlikely to gain considerable value.

Putting the entirety of your roster value into draft picks is helpful in that you are guaranteed year-over-year value accrual by paying off the “hold tax.”

If you want a higher-risk option with a higher immediate value ceiling, store your buying power into rookies, who are strong bets to accrue value on aggregate, but do experience losses along with more substantial immediate gains than picks can.

Generally speaking, you should make this determination based on the length of time you are comfortable rebuilding for, the current buying power of your team, and the liquidity of your league.

If you already have a strong-value team, but have merely suffered substantial injuries to a Justin Jefferson or Anthony Richardson perhaps, you may be better off holding a few of your elite assets and merely selling the depreciating veterans. Leagues are not perfectly liquid (despite my best desires) and you cannot be assured that you will be able to purchase back elite-level, scare assets at the same efficient price you’d sell them at minus a half-season of production.

If you have a low-value team, I suggest a Tank to Zero, or at least close. First off, you want to make sure you’re maximizing the value of the number one appeal of a tank: turning your 1st round pick from an asset worth 1 1st round pick into an asset worth 3-4X that if you secure the 1.01.

With Caleb Williams at the top of the draft, I suspect the value of the 1st-round to look something like this:

• 1.01 = 4 Base 1s

• 1.02-1.03 = 2 Base 1s

• 1.04-1.05 = 1.5 Base 1s

• 1.06-1.08 = 1 Base 1

• 1.09-1.12 = 0.75 Base 1s

If you can make a deal which materially shifts your odds of getting the 1.01, that should be worth taking a small “market” loss for. This also opens up plenty of opportunities to approach co-operative league-mates and work out mutually beneficial deals.

In any event, the higher percentage of your roster you can free up into pure, accrual assets, the faster you can increase the buying power of your roster.

This does not mean you have to wait until every pick you trade for conveys and you make the draft pick. For some teams, simply exchanging all or nearly all of your key players into draft picks, and securing the 1.01, will lead to a 5-6 Base 1s increase in buying power from where you would be without any trades to where you are as a result of those trades. At that time, if you have the buying power to support it, you can try to trade as many picks as it takes to field a competitive team that is more sustainable than the one you sold off.

If you are an extreme-low value team, I would be more interested in taking shots on rookies or high-variance profiles and hoping to hit a home run to expedite the process.

Per my dynasty rankings, an average team within a dynasty league has a value of approximately 18-19 Base 1s in total (inclusive of players and picks). Feel free to add up the value of your team vs. my ranks and try to determine where your team will stand in the off-season based on your current level of dissolution, and when you should start to consider buying back.

My general rule of thumb is if you are able to field a competitive team while being Top-3 in buying power you should always aim to do so, because otherwise you are sacrificing too much EV near term for diminishing returns long term.

All in all, a tear down is only a statement of your plans for the current season. Whether or not you contend the season following should be determined less by the state of your roster post tear down and more by the buying power of your assets.

V. Tear Down Tactics

The last thing I wanted to address are a couple tactics to consider.

1. In a league that determines drat order by MaxPF there is no reason to roster bench assets without material buying power who can hurt your draft position. Simply label anyone who is worth less than an early 3rd as available to the highest bidder and drop anyone who is not claimed: try to attach assets like this into other deals for a late-round pick while someone is incentivized to trade for a player of yours they actually want

2. If you are in a less liquid league where you are either struggling to sell off all your players at fair value, or fear that you won’t be able to seamlessly buy back in the off-season, tank to zero at one position group. For example, if you want to keep your QBs and WRs in place, you can sell any key RBs and then drop/sell all other backs so that you are taking 0s at the position in MaxPF every week. If your league mandates starting a compliant lineup just look for backs who play special teams only. This artificially reduces your points every week in a way that doesn’t actually align with how far away you are from competitiveness.

3. Consider keeping a couple core, productive, young players on your roster if you can do so while still remaining in the poll position for 1.01, and you have sufficient buying power to avoid complete liquidation. The best possible assets to hold on a tear down are injured stars since you are getting the same hold tax advantage as a pick but without concerns over how to convert that pick into points in a future trade. When a Justin Jefferson, for example, gets hurt; you have a far better shot at trading for him if you are sitting on Ja’Marr Chase than if your best offer is 2 1sts and Zay Flowers. You are taking on less downside risk by storing any value in players on just 2-3 elites than by doing it across several young players, and you will also reduce your MaxPF by concentrating your value into very few producers.

VI. Conclusion

This has been a very abstract post so I want to quickly highlight the TL:DR for you, and I’m happy to answer any questions.

• The decision of whether or not to tear down should be based on what option maximizes the expected value of your team over the long run

• Trades are not zero-sum when made to re-allocate points on different timelines. Work with your league mates to find win-win deals

• You should be willing to consider the value of your assets in terms of their ACTUAL value to you rather than their market value when completing deals. This includes a consideration of their off-season trade value, and their possible negative impact to your draft position

• The more extreme you are in selling off players — INCLUDING young players — the faster you can accrue buying power to prevent a prolonged rebuild

• The extent to which you tank to zero (i.e. roster zero players) is dependent on your league rules, league liquidity, and the current buying power of your roster

I made this post free because I haven’t done a long form strategy post in a while. But if you enjoyed it, I would greatly appreciate a subscription and I think you’d greatly appreciate the kind of work we do here.

See you next week!