“Dynasty Dashboard is a tool that aims to convert consensus expert knowledge into relevant, customised, and actionable information for your dynasty league.” — dynastydashboard.com

Dynasty trade calculators (e.g. dynastyfftools.com, dynastytradecalculator.com, rotoviz.com/dynasty-adp, dynastyfootballfocus.com, the list goes on…) are beloved by owners because it makes valuation incredibly convenient: each player’s situation is boiled down to one number for easy relative comparison.

The actual secret of creating this number is often shrouded in mystery (and/or paywalls, tisk tisk), which is a shame because so many important underlying assumptions are made in the formulas that people don’t know about. Here’s just a few of them, via Kevin O’Brien (@the_FF_engineer):

He was right, of course. EVERY setting (roster, scoring, league, payout, owner preferences, and more) changes how some aspect of player valuation should be incorporated into the equation, but no one calculator can do this effectively. Since that conversation, I’ve been plugging away at trying to prove him wrong — my goal is to build a spreadsheet that DOES incorporate as many of these factors as possible so that the advice is tuned, customized, and actionable for every league.

This ongoing series of posts will consider the factors that can and should be incorporated into player valuation, and exploring ways to effectively incorporate that into a player valuation algorithm.

I’m most familiar with @sicknarlo’s DynastyFFTools.com and my Excel sheets hosted at dynastydashboard.com are currently based on those same algorithms. Nick’s gracious help in deconstructing and explaining his algorithms has been fantastic, and I wish I could do the same for some of the other calculators/valuations…but these things are (understandably) proprietary and typically hidden behind paywalls. If you’re responsible for one of the other tools and are willing to discuss mechanics with me, I’d love to talk to you about it!

With the other ranks hidden behind paywalls, I’m less able to work with them and how they value things, so I’m going to be approaching this from the holistic view as opposed to a reconstruction/deconstruction perspective. I’m looking forward to writing, discussing, and incorporating this information into my own sheets.

Next up in this series: ADP vs ECR — understanding the wisdom of the crowds (coming soon!)

Feel free to reach out to me @solarpool with any thoughts :)