If you’re looking for a dynasty fantasy football trade analyzer to help you decide whether to pull the trigger on a trade request, there are plenty of options.
But while there are plenty of sites that will allow you to plug in players and figure out whether the compensation is equal, they can’t tell you if the trade will actually help or hurt your team. Simply winning your trade might not improve your lineup or boost your chances of winning your league, and winning a trade at the expense of another player in your league might end up hurting your chances in the long run.
So before pulling the trigger on a deal, try this step-by-step process to analyze your dynasty fantasy football trade and determine if it’s the right move to make.
Before hitting the dynasty fantasy football trade analyzer, first do your homework
The most important step before making a dynasty fantasy football trade request (or responding to a request sent to you) is to analyze your own team. Determining your roster’s strengths and weaknesses will help decide whether you need to make a trade at all, and whether the trade proposed will actually help.
There are a number of websites that allow you to plug in your dynasty fantasy football roster and receive a position-by-position analysis, but most of them require you to provide login information to your fantasy football platform to allow that site to automatically find and grade your roster. This is helpful if you just want to know how your team stands, but leaves you short of fully analyzing a trade proposal.
The best site for analyzing how a dynasty fantasy football trade will help or hurt your roster is Fantasy Owner’s Grade My Team function. Not only is this site free to use, it’s also customized to dynasty fantasy football teams (which gives it a leg up over the next-best option at FootballGuys) and allows you to input your players manually.
This is an important feature. To analyze the dynasty fantasy football trade request, you’ll want to first input your current roster and then ask yourself: Is this trade addressing an area of weakness? Will I be losing a player in a position where I’m already thin? Am I getting a young player with a promising future, which is the cornerstone of a good dynasty team?
After answering these questions, go through the roster analyzer a second time, but this time input what your new roster would look like if you pulled off the trade. If the result shows an improved team or addresses a major area of weakness, then it might be time to pull the trigger — though there’s still another important consideration.
Analyzing your opponent
While it can be tempting to look only at your own roster and how the trade proposal will help or hurt your team, remember that dynasty fantasy football trades require two willing parties.
As Bob Van Duser of Dynasty Rewind explains, your league standing will tell you a lot about whether it’s best to make a trade or not.
“First thing you want to do is know where you are at as a team—are you contending, pretending, or in a rebuild?” Van Duser said. “If you’re contending, then you have a real shot at winning this year. If you’re rebuilding, then you’re looking at the top pick in the rookie draft. If you’re pretending, then you maybe make the playoffs, but you’re still not close to where you need to be to win it all.”
The next step is to analyze your opponent to understand where they stand and if they make a good trade partner. Van Duser said it can be difficult for two contending teams to make a trade, though not impossible.
“It tends to work best if a contender matches up with a rebuilder, usually the needs match up best,” he said. “It doesn’t have to work that way. If rebuilding teams only trade with contenders, then it eliminates most of the pool of teams you can trade with.”
Best dynasty fantasy football trade analyzer
Once you have a full understanding of how the trade request will affect your roster and your trade partner’s roster, it’s time to analyze the trade itself.
There are many sites that will analyze both sides of a dynasty fantasy football trade and grade it out, letting you know which trade partner is coming out ahead. But many of these sites also have drawbacks, like an inability to add future draft picks as part of the trade proposal.
For the sake of dynasty fantasy football trades, the best analyzer is the DynastyProcess Trade Calculator. DynastyProcess breaks down the total value of all players included in the trade and allows you to add future draft picks by exactly where in the round they will fall (early first, mid-third, late fifth).
There are no other dynasty fantasy football trade analyzers with that level of both specificity and deep analysis (the Pro Football Network Trade Analyzer lets you select a specific draft pick by round and pick number, but doesn’t offer the same level of trade analysis as DynastyProcess.)
The most important thing to remember about dynasty fantasy football trades
If you’ve gone through all the steps to analyze your dynasty fantasy football trade, there is one very important point to keep in mind before reaching your final decision — you don’t have to win the trade for it to be a good trade.
Russ Fisher, host of the Trade Addicts Podcast, said his guiding principle when evaluating or offering trades is to look only at what it will mean for your team in the long run. If a dynasty fantasy football trade analyzer tells you not to make the trade because you’re giving up too much value, but the trade actually improves your team, it’s OK to go against the advice and make your own decision.
