Week 18, Trade Deadline Fallout and What SHOULD the Standings Be?

 

Dave and Tyler rocked it on the beach recently...and then Dave's team started to rock.

• Max jumped back to the top of the Power Ranks after an 8.51 Expected Week Wins this week, a good number. Really though it's a three team group at the top of Max, Michael, and Arthur. Brian and Josh are lingering close by, but without major re-enforcements acquired at the deadline, it will likely be difficult for BJ to keep up in the Power Ranks. Of course, all they have to do is get into the playoffs and get hot for two weeks, so I am by no means writing them off.
• Dave's 11.62 vaulted his team enthusiasm back high enough for him to want to become a trade deadline buyer when the Logan Webb price seemed too cheap. More on this later.
• Dean's 2.99 this week, while yes, predictable, after selling off his best players over the last two weeks, was only the second worst week of the year to Paul's 2.83 in week 13 that pre-empted Paul's sell-off.
• Paul putting up a 7.43 after said sell-off would be the definition of bearing down, if any of us had any control on the actually energy our players put into their outputs. This mark was enough to take down top-contender, Arthur this week.
• Cory's 4.64 came at a tough time. It was a close matchup until late Sunday and by the time the matchup became a blowout it was too late to sell off any big pieces at the deadline.

Trade Deadline Review

This trade deadline is likely going to go down as turning point in Floored's year to year competition strategy. Up to this point in league history: yeah, we went to a keeper league in 2012 but it was only 3 players out of 22 or 30 that were kept, not a big deal. It was a nice boost to start the year with some extra value out of a few mid round draft picks and it was nice to keep rooting  for players that did well for you the year before. Even with the massive Dave keeper year of 2016, he got off to that hot start, but July that edge was mostly gone. But this, in hind sight, started the slippery slope of moving team talent from one year to the next that we are still finding the bottom of the hill.

Next, we integrated draft pick trading. The most draft capital ever dealt at the deadline was last year when Paul traded away 3 of his top-7 picks and Arthur acquired 8 top-6 round picks. It narrowed Paul's runway to succeed this year. He contended but after a few things went awry he decided to cash it in for the next year. For Arthur, he got off to a very hot start before falling back to the pack by around that same July time frame as Dave's 2016 pullback occurred. Before last year, we hadn't had anyone lose more than 2 top ten round picks so there wasn't notable draft capital lost leading to a big advantage to start the year.

Next year? There will be a major shift of draft picks acquired. Perhaps it was only a logical and continued evolution of our slippery slope, but I was not ready for it. Max dealing away picks, 2,3,4,6,7,8,11 while picking up a 5th and a 10th. Arthur gave up his picks in round 1,4, and 6 and picked up an extra 5th. while Michael gave up his picks in round 2,6,7,9 while picking up a 4th. Between Paul, Keith, and Dean, they have an extra 12 top-10 round picks. The latter three teams will have a major advantage on draft day....but how long will it last? We will see.

Final note, the deadline still isn't over as there is a bidding war ongoing for Logan Webb. 

For those curious, the slate of draft picks for each team for this year and next year can be seen here: https://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/b1/19163/showtradedpicks?view=next

The final thought I have about the trade deadline heading towards a playoff push, what SHOULD the standings be? We now have a stat for how many standings wins we should be earning every week (Expected Week Wins), so what do THEY say the standings should be?

Michael emerges from this chart with the slimmest of leads, but my takeaways from this are a few things: 

• the playoffs, if determined by EWW and the season ended today, would be the same as if they were determined by the Yahoo standings
• there is a relatively clear top 5 teams
• Max has way outperformed his team Expected Wins, likely due to winning more close categories than he's lost
• Dean and Keith are the opposite, likely having lost more close categories than they've won
• the methodology still doesn't add up to the same number of wins for EWW and for Yahoo, but like I've mentioned before, this is going to be due to the week to week fluctuation of league production around the standard deviation of each category. For example, league ERA was 4.28 last week...but it was 4.90 the week before. So we all look like we had a bad week two weeks ago (relatively speaking)  in EWW compared this week. The values for total wins are within 2% of each other, it's a pretty good snapshot.