T-Rock 1/22/25 T-Rock 1/22/25

Playoff Odds & Strategy

We’ve all seen it before. One minute your team is sweeping across the league like a tidal wave. The next minute, you’re down by 20 points with only Rico Dowdle left to play. Then it hits you “I’m fucked.” All of that hard work and success over the last four months has turned to shit, ready to be flushed. Panic creeps up your spine and you remember Switch’s last words from the Matrix, “Not like this. Not like this.”

Part II - Trades

Milton - “What were my words to you? Maybe it was your time to lose. You didn't think so.”

Kevin - “Lose? I don't lose! I win! I win! I'm a lawyer! That's my job, that's what I do!”

Milton - “I rest my case. Vanity is definitely my favorite sin. Kevin, it's so basic, self-love; the all-natural opiate. You know, it's not that you didn't care for Mary Ann, Kevin. It's just that you were a little bit more involved with someone else: yourself.”

John Milton - The Devil's Advocate

Free Will, It Is A Bitch

“T-Rock sent me another trade request late last night,” Kevin began.

“Was he drunk?” Milton asked.

“With his team shitting the bed, probably.”

“T-Rock’s got himself in trouble again,” Milton said. “And he wants me to save his playoff hopes. Only this time, I can't.”

“T-Rock, T-Rock,” Milton continued. “I nursed him through Twitter scandals, a Wild Turkey rehab, and failed investments into meme coin. God's special creature? I've warned him, Kevin. Like a fat guy at a buffet, he can’t help himself.”

“Take a good look because he's the poster child for the next generation of fantasy players. These people, it's no mystery why they act like this. You sharpen their appetite for rookies to the point where they can split atoms with their hype. You bombard them with analytics until their egos are the size of stadiums. You hold their hand through every trade and roster crisis. You grease their brains with gold-plated content until even the dullest dynasty players become aspiring GMs. Becomes his own god!”

“But as they’re scrambling from one deal to the next, who's got their eye on the roster? The IR is at capacity, the roster is ancient, and the breakouts never come. It’s buy draft picks, sell draft picks, but you have nothing to sell or buy with! We got a billion T-Rocks all at the dinner table, ready to order their pristine prospects to pair with their elite constructions, trying to buy a title run. Then the dinner bill comes. Championships were never on the menu. You have to pay up, Rock. You can’t orphan your team now. You're screaming in the Discord for someone to help. But guess what? There's no one there! You're all alone, Rock. You're God's special little creature.”

Deal With The Devil

Refusing to accept the Fates, you frantically place some of your best players OUT with injury on the Trade Block. With only one person responding, you desperately trade away your picks and players, praying for a miracle. Instead, things end badly for you. Game Over.

This reoccurring nightmare is all too common in the fantasy playoffs. Having already examined Seeding and Scoring in Part I of this series, Playoff Odds & Strategy, we now shift our focus to Part II - Playoff Trading.

Playoff Trades

The data for this research comes from 25 seasons of dynasty playoffs, including 12 playoffs from Lineup leagues and 13 from Best Ball leagues. Every league has 12 teams, and 4/12 Lineup seasons come from a one-QB league.

I limited my sample of trades to the teams that were ALIVE in the playoffs and had money to play for (a Top 2-3 finish, depending on league payouts). If a team was eliminated during the playoffs or the parties with no monetary stakes to play for, I did not include the trade in my sample.

The trades in my sample were limited to two windows: If the league had a Trade Deadline, I only included the Week Before and the Week Of the deadline (two weeks). If the league had No Deadline, I began my sample the week before the dynasty playoffs (Wk. 14) and included all trades throughout the playoffs for all ALIVE teams.

I considered several factors when evaluating trades:

The points scored by the newly acquired players
The points scored by the players the manager traded away
What impact, if any, did the trade make on the outcome of the playoff matchup

There were a total of 56 trades that I analyzed amongst the Seeding sample:

1st Seed - 12 trades

2nd Seed - 12 trades

3rd Seed - 8 trades

4th Seed - 8 trades

5th Seed - 7 trades

6th Seed - 9 trades

52 trades in the Points Sample (Only teams that made the playoffs have their trades included in this sample, and the top-scoring teams did not always make the playoffs):

1st Points For - 11 trades

2nd Points For - 9 trades

3rd Points For - 10 trades

4th Points For - 7 trades

5th Points For - 7 trades

6th Points For - 8 trades

Main Takeaways

Of the 56 trades, 46 trades had zero impact on the outcome of the playoffs (82.14%)

Of these 46 trades, the most common patterns include:

In 8 of these trades, the managers would have won regardless of the trade. The other 38 trades did no favors for their managers
In 10 of these trades, most of the players they traded for either didn’t make their lineup at all in Best Ball leagues or completely shit the bed in Lineup leagues
8 of these trades were for the future (the player was either hurt or not playing at all)
2 of these trades were only for depth purposes (the players didn’t even start)
In 1 of these trades, the manager would have scored more with their original players but luckily still won despite their trade

In 2 instances, I deemed the trade as a 50/50 deal

In one instance, the manager lost by ½ a pt, where 3/5 players they traded for didn’t even make the lineup in a Best Ball league. Brutal.
In the other instance, the manager would have scored more points and made it to the Final if they hadn’t done the trade in Week 16, but they needed the trade if they wanted to win the Final. Hard to fault them for that.

Finally, 8 trades did have a major impact on Winnings/Championship (14.29%).

In 4 cases, the manager needed the trade to get through Round 1/2 of the Playoffs and into the Championship where they could win money, but ultimately still lost.
In 2 brutal instances, the manager would have won the Championship with the original starting players they traded away.
In only 2 cases (3.58%) a trade had a direct impact on securing a Title!

In the first case, the previously mentioned manager who lost by ½ a point lost to the eventual Champion. Their trade for K. Allen & C. Rush came absolutely clutch in Week 16 of the 2024 playoffs.
The second case is perhaps the most impressive. This manager right before the Final executed 5 trades. He traded away:
25 1st, 26 2nd, J. Hurts, AJ Brown, 27 3rd, 25 4th, R. Dowdle, 26 1st, 25 2nd, 27 2nd, J. Bobo, and J. Brooks
FOR
G. Kittle, B. Nix, P. Nacua, Z. Ertz, O. Zaccheaus, 25 5th, M. Evans, D. Henry, A. Abdullah, and I. Likely

The Result:

An astounding 8/9 players he traded for made his lineup, scoring 154.4 more points than the original players he traded away/players on his bench that would have otherwise made his lineup
The manager won the championship by 97.56 points and scored the highest total in league history
That manager was me

Sheep Amidst The Wolves

Losing in the playoffs can be heartbreaking, but losing after trading away your future can be devastating. This research is far from Gospel - I am limited to a data sample that only includes my leagues. But even if you had access to every league on Sleeper, it would be impossible to assess the effectiveness of trades on such a scale. If there is only a few major things you took away from this article, it should be these:

The odds of a playoff trade helping you secure a Championship are extremely slim.

If you making a trade, wait until the Final and be sure your newly acquired assets have value going into next season if you lose.

Trust in the team that got you this far without meddling with it too much.

With so many playoff matches ending in double-digit wins/losses, changing the outcome through a trade is nearly impossible. With a flash of fire and smoke, your leaguemates manifest themselves as demons with pitchforks and contracts, waiting to strike a lopsided deal at your most vulnerable moment. Some may be tempted to make a Faustian bargain at the expense of their soul, but these deals usually end very badly. Accept the cards you're dealt if you're destined to lose. Save your picks for where they matter most and draft the next Jayden Daniels, Malik Nabers, or other godsent rookies at the most affordable price they’ll ever be - The Rookie Draft.

The Dossier

Image created by DK

T-Rock 1/21/25 T-Rock 1/21/25

Playoff Odds & Strategy

The overwhelming sentiment during the playoffs is to leave no stone unturned when chasing a Championship. Move heaven and earth if you must, but do not finish the season with regret wondering, “Could I have done more?” But how often do you go “All-In,” mortgaging your entire future by trading away valuable picks and players, only to be bounced early in the playoffs? These trades inevitably define your roster for the next few seasons and with no draft capital they can be almost impossible to dig out of.

Part I - Standings & Points

Three Questions

The overwhelming sentiment during the playoffs is to leave no stone unturned when chasing a Championship. Move heaven and earth if you must, but do not finish the season with regret wondering, “Could I have done more?” But how often do you go all-in, mortgaging your future by trading away valuable picks and players, only to be bounced early in the playoffs? These trades inevitably define your roster for the next few seasons and with no draft capital they can be almost impossible to dig out of.

Trades are only a piece of the jumbled puzzle. I used to believe having the highest-scoring team mattered more in the playoffs than a top seed. But with so much variance, injuries, and teams getting hot at the right time, I now have doubts.

The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of three major components of the Fantasy Playoffs:

Is there a strong correlation between Playoff Seeding and where a team Finishes?
Does Seeding matter more than Regular Season scoring?
How often do Playoff Trades make an impact?

Many dynasty players may take issue with this research, saying “Hindsight is 20/20,” “Don’t play the odds because you never know,” “Leave nothing to chance,” and “You can’t predict the future based on the past.” And all these managers would be right. But none of these managers have to suffer through fixing my roster if I sell out to win and lose. Every decision in life can be boiled down to a cost/benefit analysis. We can make better decisions if we understand our odds and what we stand to lose.

Note - You may notice that the Odds do not always add up to 100% in the Points For sample as they do with the Seeds. That is because there are multiple occasions where the Top-6 scoring teams did not make the playoffs, and thus did not have a Top-6 Finish.

1st

As expected, the 1st Seed has the highest average finish for both Lineup and Best Ball leagues at 2.17 and 1.92 respectively. Other major takeaways include:

1st Seeds finished Top-2 in lineup leagues 75% of the time in the sample.

But only 25% of these teams finished 1st in Lineup.

The 46.15% 1st Place Finish is the second highest odds in Best Ball leagues.

The only other more likely outcome was the 53.85% odds 6th Seed teams have for finishing in 6th Place.

In terms of Points For, the 41.67% odds of the Highest Scoring team finishing 2nd is the highest in the Points For sample.
The Highest Scoring team was just as likely to finish 2nd as they were 1st Place in Best Ball.
In Lineup leagues, both the #1 & #2 Scoring teams have a 3.08 average finish.

2nd

The 2nd Seed had a better finish for both Lineup and Best Ball leagues at 2.83 and 2.69 respectively compared to the 2nd Highest Scoring team, which on average finished at 3.08 and 3.23 in Lineup and Best Ball leagues. Other major takeaways include:

2nd Seed teams finished 4th at a whopping 41.67% in Lineup leagues and 3rd place in Best Ball at 38.46%
Overall, Seeding matters more than Scoring for the #2 teams

The #2 Scoring teams have a wide range of outcomes and are comparable to teams that are 3rd in Points For

3rd

Third-place teams are the Evil Twin (exact opposite) of Second-place teams - the 3rd Highest Scoring Teams finished better on average at 2.91 compared to the 3rd Seed teams, which finished on average at 3.35. Other major takeaways include:

The 3rd Highest Scoring team surprisingly finished better than the 2nd Highest in Lineup leagues and Best Ball.
Both 3rd Seeds & Points For have the highest odds of securing a Championship in the entire sample, at 33.33%

With rosters that are often comparable to the Top 2 teams, their path to a Championship includes an easy 6th Seed matchup and coin-flip 2nd Seed match. Once in the Final Round, anything can happen.

4th

We see the first major dropoff in both Seeding and Scoring when it comes to the Fourth Placed Teams. The 4th Seed teams finished at 4.18 compared to the 4th Highest Scoring teams, which finished on average at 4.8. Other major takeaways include:

Regardless of Seeding or Scoring, the 4th Place team finished in the bottom half of the playoffs 72% of the time, not great.

5th

On average, 5th Placed teams performed better in the playoffs compared to 4th Place, with an average finish of 4.05 for 5th Seeds and 3.88 finish for the 5th Highest Scorers. Other major takeaways include:

5th Seed teams are doomed for a bottom-half finish in Best Ball leagues with an astounding 92.31% odds of ending the season in 4th-6th place

6th

Finally, the 6th Seed teams faired better in the playoffs with an average finish of 4.61 compared to the 6th Highest Scoring team, who finished at 5.21 on average. Other major takeaways include:

6th Seed teams in Best Ball leagues finish 6th Place 53.85% of the time, the highest odds in the entire sample of research.
The 6th Best Teams have it brutal in Lineup leagues.

No 6th Seed ever brought home a championship in Lineup.
The 6th Highest Scoring teams never made it to the Final Round

Main Takeaways

The Top 2 Seeds and Highest Scoring Teams are the most predictable and have the highest odds of finishing in the Top 2

Having a bye-week is so critical

3rd Place teams are very dangerous in lineup leagues

Variance may have kept them from securing a bye-week in the regular season, but these are typically strongly constructed teams with one of the easiest roads to a Chip.

Not much differentiates 4th-6th Seeded Teams as far as odds in the playoffs

However, there is much more variance when comparing the 4th-6th Highest scoring teams

Outside of the #1 Team, the 6th Seed & Points For team is the most predictable, finishing 5th or 6th 52-68% of the time

Playoff Trades

Come back for Part II.

Conclusion

When I have the #1 Seed or the highest-scoring team, I feel entitled to a Championship! Experience, research, and sound strategy can take your team far in the regular season. But in the playoffs, variance can be a heartless bitch. Similarly, humans know how to build a space shuttle that can launch off the ground and into the Earth’s atmosphere. However, with the unpredictable nature of space travel, unforeseen events and Murphy’s Law can quickly take over. The fantasy playoffs are Murphy’s Law at its finest.

I’ve had Juggernauts go down in their first game after a bye and I’ve had tanking teams barely make the playoffs and run the gauntlet for a title (because I’m bad at losing). Our pursuit of improvement as fantasy players shouldn’t be defined purely by winning. If it is, you’re in for a lot of heartache. Instead, our pursuit should be a better understanding of the game and an openness to its possibilities.

Murphy's law doesn't mean that something bad will happen. It means that whatever *can* happen, will happen

Cooper - Interstellar

The Dossier

Image created by DK