Fantasy Basketball Rankings: Dynasty Trade Value Chart (February 2021 Update)

We’ve made it to Week 7 of the NBA season, and it’s been a doozy already! COVID-19 has reared its ugly head, and words and phrases like “postponement,” and “contract tracing” have become the bane of fantasy managers’ existence. While we in the fantasy hoops community continue to bang our heads against the wall figuring out how to strategize our weekly-lineup leagues, we can take some solace in the fact that dynasty fantasy basketball can take our minds to a brighter future. We can take stock of our teams and determine how to build for years to come. In this spirit of planning ahead, I wanted to make an easy to use, quick comparison tool for dynasty valuation. That’s where the Dynasty Trade Value Chart comes in.

So, how were these values calculated? My initial attempt focused on:

  • Number of years remaining
  • Top-10 seasons remaining
  • Top-30 seasons remaining
  • Top-50 seasons remaining
  • Top-100 seasons remaining

There’s no way to know these things in advance, so I did my best guess work based on past success, current situation, age, skillset, and potential. After sharing these rankings with a couple of friends who really know their basketball, it was pointed out to me that I had failed to take current elite performance into account.

So, I used the initial criteria outlined above and added one more:

  • Top-10 seasons within the next three years

This helped to close the gap between older guys who will put up elite numbers now (James Harden, Stephen Curry, Damian Lillard) and guys who will hit their primes after that. Each of these criteria were given a points value, totaled, and then divided by 2.5 so the final values weren’t astronomical. The value of a top-10 season is worth more than the value of a top-30 season, and so on.

Remaining seasons was also something I had to play with a bit. I settled on subtracting players’ ages from 35 — a roundabout age that might be reasonable for players to retire. Some guys had to be tweaked to account for skills like excellent shooting (Curry) and lack of extensive injury history (LeBron James) that would lend themselves to years played beyond the age of 35. There was no exact science here, but to keep things fair, the baseline retirement age was 35.

If you want to see the entire process, you can check out the entire spreadsheet with all of this methodology: Link to Dynasty Trade Chart Google Doc

So without further adieu, let’s get to the chart. Players are listed by position, team, age, and value, but you can sort and search any way you’d like. I’ll be updating the chart the first week of each month, so if you want to know how the value of a particular player has changed since the last update, be sure to check it out.

If you have any questions or comments, please hit me up on Twitter @ZaktheMonster.

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Zachary Hanshew is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Zachary, check out his archive and follow him @zakthemonster.