Suggestions for encouraging trades?

[ZakHH]

40 trades in one year, let alone averaging that over multiple years, blows my mind. Averaging 10 trades a year the past three years sounds like a real healthy active league to me.

This.

I mean, how often do you find 2 teams that can make a trade both sides will benefit from?

My main league is only 5 years old, but 10-15 trades a year sounds about right. And yeah, we also have 4 rather active teams, 4 that will trade occasionally, and 4 that are hardly worth reaching out to.

One thing that I found helpful is to reach out directly to the trade partner, instead of just sending a trade offer. Send them a direct message on the league board or (better) on a messenger, or even call them, if you know them by person. I usually send the other owner a WhatsApp message (we have our group chat on WhatsApp), to tell him why I would like to make that trade, and why I think it would be good for him, too. That gets you talking. It's easy to ignore a trade offer on your fantasy platform, but no manager will ignore a polite message that's being sent straight to their phone.

Also, if you make a trade offer, make sure the other owner has an incentive to accept it. A perfectly balanced trade offer often holds little appeal. In a single QB league, I've recently been offered Tannehill and Deebo Samuel in exchange for Ja'Marr Chase. Why would I even consider such a trade offer? Tannehill wouldn't be my starting QB, and Samuel is a clear downgrade to Chase. Still, the other owner was a bit miffed when I didn't even want to discuss the trade.

If you want a top player, be ready to overpay. Last year, the owner of the best team in my SFLEX league (reigning champion) badly wanted Najee Harris. He had Henry and Kamara, but knew that both were not getting any younger, and he'd have a hard time replacing them with the late 1st round picks he was stuck on for the foreseeable future.

So he reached out to the owner of the 1.02 (the 1.01 was QB-needy and would certainly take Trevor Lawrence) and offered him his 1.12, 2.01 and Russell Wilson in exchange for the 1.02.

That deal went through, as the other team was QB-needy (and knew they wouldn't get Lawrence), but also had needs on other positions. So that trade allowed them to solve their QB issues and get 2 more quality players for the price of just one pick. That trade may not have been balanced, but it still made sense for both sides.

TL;DR - my best suggestions for successful trades:

• Communicate directly with the trade partner, ideally outside your fantasy platform.
• Don't try to win every trade; if you really want a player, be ready to overpay.
• Offer interesting players; don't try to shop off roster fillers or ageing players for top dollar.

[Mephistopheles]

40 trades in one year, let alone averaging that over multiple years, blows my mind. Averaging 10 trades a year the past three years sounds like a real healthy active league to me. Guess that just shows how different people's perspectives, opinions, and realities can be with stuff like this.

Taking the above out of the picture; I'd just like to present an alternative theory to what happened in your league as it's how I explain what happened in a dynasty league of mine over the past few years. Simply put, when your league started all the owners were young dogs. They made a ton of trades because it was new, it's exciting, and it's something to do. Over the years they've become old dogs who actually have learned new tricks. One of them is that a bad trade can crush your team, and set you back for years. So making trades frivolously for nothing more than the sake of making them is a very risky venture that can majorly impact your team in a negative way.

Back to my own experience and opinion for one last point: It irks me when people posit that not making trades makes an owner inactive. Trading is one slice of the large pie of dynasty. Drafting, working waivers, setting line ups, following injury/recover updates, paying attention to matchups, tape work, analytic work, etc. etc. are all major points to fantasy success; and in my experience, the time and effort spent in those categories have yielded me MUCH more tangible success than all the time I've spent discussing dozens of trades with owners every year that eventually amounts to nothing but frustration.

I think in a vacuum the impact of trading is one of the lower sources of success you can bring to your team when considering the time cost vs payoff, and the risk involved. And by in a vacuum, I mean not taking into account league Taco trades where someone is a clear winner and someone else is a clear loser. Obviously those will always pay off pretty good for the owner on the winning side. And not coincidentally, I think those are normally the people I hear making arguments and statements like you did in your original post. They tend to rely greatly on taking advantage of other less-knowledgeable league members in trades to gain an advantage over the rest of the league. And then get super salty when people stop trading with them lol. I'm not saying that's you at all, it's just been my experience with it. If the number 1 thing I hear accompanying most bad trade offers/negotiations is the good old "this guy sucks anyway, sell him to me" line of rationalization, the number 2 would certainly be "you can't win if you don't trade". Comments like that normally help me save my time and cut off trade talks early. I don't need someone to used-car salesman me about how their goal is to actually help me and my team with their trade offers lol.

In the end, my best advice here is the same for just about every league rules/settings issue brought up on these boards: if they paid money to run the team, let them run it how they want.

This is the best post I've seen in this forum in a long time. Well written, Dusty

[BigBawseRoss]

have you suggested adding devy to your league? start with 1 devy right per team each year that you can use instead of a rookie pick and that will breathe some life into the league and get some activity going.

[Two Cents]

I think salary cap leagues are the only natural way I can think of to encourage trading without it feeling forceful or arbitrary. I think in salary cap leagues trading at some point becomes more of a necessity than a desire.

¢¢