44 trades? Be Careful!

With 44 trades brings us a different way to think about AFL Dream Team in 2013. New strategies including mid-pricers, fixture trading, etc… but Ingoes has sent us in an article to make sure we are very wary of what we do with all of these trades.

The significant changes made to the way we play Dream Team in 2013 have led many to devise and propose a number of new strategies designed to make the most of them. Of the numerous changes, the most important one is the ‘use em or lose em’ trades, of which there are 44. Pretty much all of the ‘brains trust’ here at DT Talk has suggested that with all of these extra trades, our recruiting policies when picking our starting squads might need adjustment. Here are some of the theories that are being thrown around:

• You can pick more mid-pricers, speculative punts and players with an injury risk because if the worst happens or they don’t work out, you can just trade them out.
• You don’t necessarily have to be planning to keep a guy you start with all year, even a premo. In the past, picking an elite player with the intention of trading them out at some stage would have been – well – stupid. This year people are exploring the fixture and looking at the likes of Nick Riewoldt as a player to start with, take four or so scores from, and then ditch.
• You can ride the DT market this year like the stock exchange – hop off guys with big BEs for guys with massive negative BEs. Timing one of these trades well could net you as much as downgrading a fat cash cow.

All of these strategies make sense and before I continue, I want to put it out there that I am going to start with both of Swan and Ablett with the intention of avoiding a price fall from one or both of them by trading them out (if necessary) for the most delicious bubble boy/s that I don’t already have, prior to Round 3. Having said that, I really do think that coaches need to be very careful about how heavily they jump into these strategies. Here is why.

We might have been given a bunch of extra trades but we can still only use two of them a week. If you ‘plan ahead’ to use trades to get rid of particular players in a set round, what are you going to do when someone you were planning to keep cops an LTI? Or, a new fast-starting rookie hits the bubble that week and one of your initial cash cows peaks? You will have to make a compromise, either sticking with an ugly duckling who just isn’t becoming a Swan, putting half a million plus worth of prime DT beef on the bench for a week or two, or missing a gold mine.

So, be careful, is my advice. Don’t lock yourself into having to make too many planned trades over the course of the season, or you might find that you have painted yourself into a bit of a corner. I think it should be remembered that the bulk of our trades should still be used to improve our squads in the time-tested manner; downgrading cows to fresh meat and turning other cows into guns. That is how the majority of my trades from Rounds 6-7 to Rounds 14-15 will be used, anyway. I don’t want to be forced to do too many other kind of trades during this period or I won’t be developing my squad the way I should be. I am going to have to get Swan/Ablett back during this time already, I don’t want to be pre-setting too many more trades.

Finally, if you do choose a few/several mid-pricers in your starting squad, give them a chance. I suspect that the new form of trading addiction, now that we are all going to be doing two a week, will be ‘revolving-door’ trading where ill-disciplined coaches hop from one mid-pricer to another, chasing scores and relatively small BE differentials. If you have a hunch that someone may be about to break out, but don’t have the patience to give them a least a month or six weeks to get going, I would say don’t pick them. Way back in 2011, many coaches started with Nathan Foley and Drew Petrie and hopped off them before they became worthy contributors and solid cash cows. It won’t hurt as much this year as you were going to use the trade anyway, but the best coaches will still be the ones who get the most bang for their buck from each and every trade.

These strategies might work really well and be a great way to continue to raise cash after the cows have dried up, but at the beginning I think restraint is required. So, do you agree? Or am I still playing last year’s DT? Do you think these strategies are a key for success in 2013, and are you locking in trades based on the fixture? I’m also interested to know how many of your 44 trades you are expecting to use/lose. If there aren’t obvious trades to do will you happily lose one or two, or is that going to seem like too much of a waste, leading you to trade for the sake of trading?

Please share your thought in the comments below!

Ingoes