For me, trading and negotiating trades is the most amusing element of fantasy basketball. The season has finally started and most drafts are over, so it’s a good time to dedicate some attention to this; it is one of the most important skills GMs need to posses in order to be successful. Rarely will your initial trade offer be accepted and if it does get accepted it probably means you did something wrong. In most cases you need to be ready to negotiate. This guide will help you in that process. Coming up with trade scenarios and negotiating can take time, so if you are a casual player who doesn’t like to spend too much time on fbb you can skip this, but chances are that you aren’t just because you are here and reading this. Obviously players' values vary depending on league settings, but these simple rules should be helpful to everyone no matter what kind of league they are playing. Any examples I provide will be based on a standard 9 cat league, but the general rules I’m elaborating on still apply for any other league types.

First of all, I have to define a term: “position of strength in negotiations”. A GM that is “less desperate to get the deal done” is in a position of strength. Usually it’s the GM receiving the offer and though it’s not too big of an advantage it does help. If you do not use the trade block feature (providing it’s available and actively updated in your league) when initiating negotiation, your opponent is not keen on trading players you are targeting which weakens your position in negotiations and strengthens his. Updating your trade block to show your targets is a two-edged sword, however, as it reduces your strength in negotiations, but at the same time can help you get type of offers you want. In the end whether you should use trade block or not comes down to whether your league members are active traders in which case you probably won’t need it, or are they trigger shy and could use every bit of help to come up with some offers. From my own experience I‘d say the second type of league is much more common, so the trade block feature remains a valuable tool. Whether you’re negotiating from a position of strength or not, sending comments along with offers can be a huge help during negotiations and I’d advise you to do it whenever possible.

On to the rules:
The first and most important rule is very simple: DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, OFFER REDICILOUSLY ONE-SIDED TRADES. Why is this so important? First off it won’t go through in any league worth playing in. Even if the other manager has a moment of temporary insanity and accepts, other league members or the commish (depending on league settings) will veto it. The other, much more likely, scenario is: the opposing manager will reject it with short, but rude comment attached to rejection. Some managers take these kinds of things very seriously and will probably remove you from the list of potential trade partners in the future. So best case scenario is you cause your opponent to smile while rejecting your offer, worst case scenario is you offend him. I’ll repeat this once again: in leagues worth playing in, one-sided trades can’t go trough so you can not gain anything by proposing them. A very simple way to avoid doing this is to ask yourself: would you accept the trade if you were in your opponents place? And if answer is “no way”, chances are he wouldn’t do it either.

2nd rule: you need to have a clear goal of what you want to achieve when proposing a trade, whether it is to improve in certain area(s), to gain more flexibility in position eligibilities, or simply to trade away certain players for as much value as possible, because you don’t want to own him for whatever reason. This is a fairly obvious one. If you do not have a clear goal you can not successfully negotiate and the deal can go in a completely different direction then you originally intended. This isn't necessarily a bad thing and you can still do trades this way, but how much they will help your team remains questionable.

3rd rule: after you figure out what you want to achieve with the trade, you should analyze what your potential trade partner might want to do. This is where ADWCTA’s story of team cohesion, described in his “Tactics of ditching” article comes into play. For example: if your opponent decided to ignore blocks, Darko doesn’t hold much value to him so offering him in any deal won’t help the trade get done. You don’t have to spend hours analyzing every team in the league (though I guess it couldn’t hurt), but you have to be aware of any ditched cats and if they are in need of certain area(s) in order to successfully negotiate. This is where trade block feature can prove to be very helpful, but even if you don’t use it let your opponent know what cats/positions, if any, you are targeting in the early stages of negotiations (your initial offer, or your 1st counter offer) and find out his targets as well.

4th rule: this is not a rule as much as it is an observation and it goes like this – everyone tends to overrate their own players to some degree, while underrating their opponent’s. This is one of the main reasons why many good trades fall through and it happens because people keep imagining best case scenarios for players they’re giving up and worst case scenarios for players they are getting. That is not the way to do business. Every trade is a risk and trying to minimize it on your side while maximizing it for your opponent won’t get the trade done. Ideally you want both sides of the deal to hold similar risk and reward. There’s little you can do to change your opponent’s perceptions as most (but not all) GMs wouldn’t take kindly to you trying to convince them their players, the very same players you’re trying to acquire, don’t hold as much value as they believe. What you can do is to try not to complicate things further by overrating your own guys and hope your opponent read this article as well. Here’s a simple example: last season Jameer Nelson was considered a bust-out candidate and was picked in the middle rounds of most drafts only to fail miserably and burn many fantasy GMs along the way. I acquired him as nothing more then a throw-in in a 2-2 deal around mid-season and at a time of the trade I considered him barely worth owning. A few weeks later I entered another negotiation where I was supposed to ship him out as a throw-in in another 2-2 deal and I almost called the whole thing off just on a hope he would suddenly start playing up to his draft position. Fortunately I managed to get over it and completed a deal that helped my team

5th rule: you don’t want your initial offer to be too good to refuse. Your goal is to get as much as possible for as little as possible. So low-balling your opponent with your initial offer is ok, but only to a certain degree. If your offer is too low he’ll just reject and dismiss you (see the 1st rule). It helps if you decide exactly how much you’re willing to pay for a certain player (or combination of players) before you send your first offer. Unfortunately I can give you no help with the main problem in this department and that is how low your offer can be without killing the deal. That changes from person to person and there is no way to be sure. When deciding on this keep the first rule in mind and also if you have your final offer set, don’t go too far below it with your initial offer because chances of your opponent underrating his own players are slim to say the least (see the 4th rule).

Those are 5 main rules you need to follow to ensure you get the players you want, if it is possible. That won’t happen all of the time, as sometimes you and your opponent have too different of perceptions of player values to find any common ground, but those 5 rules will improve your chances. Now we’ll take a look at some typical trade scenarios and try to analyze them further.

Early season trades are very risky and I would have to advise against them. If you are confident that you know what you are doing and are trying to pull off a steal this is the perfect time as most players’ values are murky and you can potentially trade someone who’s starting hot but with weak long-term value for a player who’s a tier better, but starting off slow. The problem is that any trade can easily backfire on you. Most of GMs are aware of this however, and will be reluctant to make any big deals right away, opting to wait and allow players to establish their values for the current season. Also most people will like their teams after the draft and will be high on most of their picks even if they don’t pan out immediately, so that "overrating" problem is probably most evident at this time of the year. For all these reasons very few deals get done in the first few weeks of the season. Trades that do happen here are usually motivated by lack of depth at a certain position, so keep an eye out for those that ended with no reserves for certain positions as you can negotiate with them from a position of strength

Trades involving players with “upside”. The Jameer Nelson example I gave you earlier applies here. People will be reluctant to trade these types of players for fear of being ripped off. They’ll keep imagining best case scenario, for example where Corey Brewer averages 15-5-3-2-1 with 1 three pointer per game, and won’t be willing to give him for a player with significantly worse numbers (though in his last game Brewer recorded just 1blk and 1to). On the other hand, buyers will be reluctant to give up too much for “upside” alone. That’s why you won’t see many of those trades either, but where this can really hurt negotiations is in 2-2 deals where one GM is reluctant to give up a player with upside to complete an overall good deal out of fear that his “upside” player will miraculously turn it around and burn him after the trade. Most of those “upside” players never perform up to expectations though.

Two-for-one trades (or any trades that don’t involve same number of players from both sides). This is another type of trade difficult to pull-off. Many of them qualify for the one-sided category. Most people prefer to get the best player involved and are reluctant to take a trade like this even when it is good for them if they aren’t getting the 1-player side of the deal. Good managers can take advantage of this and try to trade his high pick big-name player for 2 very good players (or one very good and one very underrated player) and pull off a steal even though he is giving best player in the deal. What you have to keep in mind is that no deal is really 2 for 1 since the manager getting 2 players has to drop 1 player in order to create a roster spot, and the manager getting 1 player has to pick up another player off the FA list. This means that when offering a deal you have to consider who would be dropped by the manager receiving 2 players and if you are receiving 1 player, who is available for you to pick up. Many people come to these kinds of offers by basing them on one-sided 1-1 deals and adding a scrub off their roster to “make up for value difference in that 1-1 base”. This is completely wrong and never passes. Sometimes the throw-in scrub is even weaker then any player on opponent’s roster who would have to be dropped, which makes the offer even more ridiculous. So logic dictates that the 2-player side has to give up stats at least as good as 1-player side + worst player on 1-player side’s roster and probably more because of getting best player in the deal. Where 2-1 trades really make sense is in deep leagues. If you lose a top pick in a deep league to injury, your season is likely over, so many managers wouldn’t mind trading their stud for 2 good players in order to “spread the risk”, but same rules mentioned in the previous paragraph still apply.

Trading for “hot” players is very tempting, but also very hard to pull off without having to overpay. Owning Mike Dunleavy Jr. at the moment feels great, he was probably taken in later rounds and he is outperforming many fbb studs so far. When you draft a player like that you’re not likely to give him up just like that. I remember getting several offers for Mike Miller at the beginning of the last season that were fair at the time, but none of them looked even remotely tempting. Having a guy vastly outperform his draft position feels great and managers who drafted him are very prone to overrating him based on his current performances. The advantage of the original owner is that while he wouldn’t mind selling high if the opportunity presents itself, he has no problem keeping that player and enjoying his draft steal, or FA steal, so he is negotiating from a position of strength. Buyers, on the other hand, often tend to underrate them and are not ready to admit just how much they increased their value which makes this kind of trades extremely rare. Al Jefferson last year was great example. He had few bad seasons and wasn’t even drafted in many leagues, but once he started realizing his potential everybody wanted to have him. Yet very few people were willing to trade a top 40 player for him – it’s not easy trading your 4th rounder for somebody’s 10th rounder. This season he was drafted, on average, as the 30th player overall in yahoo leagues however, based on his last year performance more then anything else.

Sell high, buy low is a good way for a skillful manager to improve his team. He does it by continually trading players whose value has risen and acquiring players whose value is falling. Of course you only do those trades if you believe that a player on the rise won’t be able to keep up playing on that level for the entire season and if you believe a player who is falling will bounce back soon. That way you keep improving the overall value of your team and put yourself into good position for future trading. The beauty of it is that you are using the fears of other managers against them because they were willing to give up on a failing player at a discount price rather then stick with him. You have to be aware however, that this can easily backfire if you’re not the best judge of player trends. Every time you trade for a player whose value is falling you risk losing value if he doesn’t bounce back. This is not a strategy that I would advise to just anyone. I myself rarely attempt something like this because I’m not fan of taking risks.

Keeper league trades are not as straight forward as trades in 1 year leagues. Just like in the real NBA, a keeper league GM can decide at s certain point of the year that he has no chance of making the playoffs and that it would be wiser to trade some players who are performing well but are aging quickly, for young players that should improve over time. Depending on the league's keeper structure these trades can look completely one-sided in year-to-year leagues, but still make perfect sense in keeper leagues. Before using a veto in situations like these, be sure to analyze trade’s impact on next season as well as the current one.

Vetoes are a very controversial issue. There are 2 most commonly spread view-points on this matter. First one is against using vetoes except in cases of collusion between managers because it’s not up to you to protect anyone who’s making bad deals and hurting their own team. The other one advocates vetoing a trade whenever it is one-sided enough to jeopardize the integrity of the league and grant any GM a huge advantage over rest of the league by taking advantage of a bad GM. As you can see neither of those 2 descriptions is too precise. Tools available to the commish to prove that a trade is result of collusion are extremely limited, so the trade alone becomes main proof of it. On the other hand where is the border between a really bad trade and the trade that hurts league integrity? I’ll agree with the first view point that it’s nobody’s concern to protect other managers from bad decisions, but I’ll side with other one that it’s everyone’s concern to preserve league integrity. In the end it comes down to your own perception of the trade and if it is too one-sided. Whenever you are thinking of vetoing a trade try to build a case to defend it first. If you can’t find any good arguments in its defense, feel free to proceed with a veto. But if you do manage to find good arguments in favor of the trade you shouldn’t veto it even if you yourself would have never agreed to it had you been in place of any of GMs involved. As I mentioned earlier, various people have different perceptions of player’s values based on stats, injury concerns, targeted cats, playoff schedule and many other factors so you shouldn’t dismiss deals too easily. Also bare in mind that if you become too “veto happy” and use it when it’s not appropriate it can come back to haunt you when your trades get vetoed in revenge. As for the matter of league veto vs. commish veto you should go with league veto in most cases. Commissioner veto is ok only if everyone in the league trusts the commish enough to give him that power and not be afraid he’ll abuse it.

Here are some additional words of wisdom. When you are initiating trade talks it’s not enough to just come up with a reasonable offer and hope opponent accepts it. Most people will opt to pass on your offer rather then risk getting burned, so you need to intrigue them with your offer. As an initiator you rarely can negotiate from a position of strength, so whenever that opportunity presents itself in the form of a non-ridiculous offer being proposed to you, try to take advantage of it by countering rather then just rejecting it without giving it much thought.

In conclusion let me just say this: don’t let all the talk about fairness, integrity and correctness in this article blind you to the fact that your main goal when trading is to improve your team and get as much value out of the trade as possible. If you can rob your trade-partner and get away with it, more power to you. But this article was written for competitive leagues composed of experienced and clever GMs who won’t allow you to rob them. Following these rules and their advice will help you successfully trade in leagues, where deals mostly likely to get accepted are those that help both teams.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Aleksander is a column writer for RotoFreak.com. If you'd like to comment on the article, please chime in on the boards.