About Player Values

KTC’s Sources for Player Values

KeepTradeCut was started with a simple idea: dynasty managers need up-to-date rankings and player values year round, and those same dynasty managers are—through the wisdom of the crowd—also collectively the best source for those player values.

Crowdsourcing

To start, our player values were derived solely from crowdsourcing: every user is asked one “Keep/Trade/Cut” player valuation question per day in order to use the site, and we aggregate those datapoints via an ELO algorithm into one set of consensus rankings and values that then power the site’s rankings and tools.

With more than 26 million datapoints and counting, this system results in Crowdsourced rankings of community sentiment that update quickly, automatically, every 10 minutes, every single day of the year.

Tradesourcing

Dynasty has exploded in popularity since KTC launched in early 2020, and there’s more data available than ever before. Our Dynasty Trade Database holds millions of real trades that have been made in real dynasty leagues across several different dynasty platforms — another source of the aggregate wisdom of crowds.

Using a proprietary algorithm to derive individual player values from these bulk dynasty trades, we’ve added Tradesourced player values and rankings to KeepTradeCut alongside the Crowdsourced rankings.

Pros and Cons

Both Tradesourcing and Crowdsourcing have areas in which they excel, and areas in which they aren’t perfect. Knowing the pros and cons to each is the way to use all dynasty tools most effectively.

Tradesourcing provides objective market-driven player values from dynasty managers putting their money where their mouth is, from trades they’ve actually hit accept on. That said, trades are by definition a lagging indicator, especially with breaking news. Rookies can’t be traded before they’re drafted in leagues, and then are traded way less than vets long after that — so you end up with way less data on the players you most want to keep close tabs on. It’s incredibly difficult to identify if a future pick is Early/Mid/Late like the manager actually making the trade can, and trades don’t happen consistently during the week or the year, with some players locking once TNF games start and most leagues having a trade deadline.

Crowdsourcing via a quick question, in contrast, can sometimes look overreactive and ‘vibes-based’ and rank draft picks higher than other sources, but it is a leading indicator that helps you move quickly with breaking news, has real-time values for rookies well before the draft and throughout their rookie year, can differentiate between Early/Mid/Late picks, and works the same all day every day throughout the entire year.

In summary, both have their upsides and their downsides, if you know how to use them. But if you have both…

Crowd+Trades

Because KeepTradeCut has both Crowdsource and Tradesourced rankings, we have the ability to blend the two together for player values that are greater than the sum of their parts: our Crowd+Trade rankings.

More current than tradesourcing, less reactive than crowdsourcing, and more data combined than either of them in isolation — the Crowd+Trade values provide the perfect blend to reap the benefits of both value sources.

Your Choice

All three of the value sources have their pros, cons, and applications in which they make the most sense. That’s why we give you the control to compare and choose which makes the most sense for you, your leagues, your trades, based on all of the different factors that go into managing a dynasty team.

On all of our dynasty tools, you’ll see a dropdown to toggle between the three different value sources. Changing that dropdown will update the player values that flow through our tools and power the entire site. The control is all yours!