The Thursday Scramble: Round 10

Our Round count has hit double figures with 10!  We aren’t too far from half way through the season. Can you believe it!  We are also just two weeks away from the byes and we also have a big name down that is going to require some trading to sort out. Let’s Scramble.

Steele Situation

The guys had a bit of a chat on Monday’s podcast about what to do with Steele. I agree with much of what they were saying and I just want to spell out a few options for you here so that you can make what is hopefully a winning move for your side. And we also need to applaud Steele for finishing out the game. He must have been in a lot of pain and by going back out we got some valuable points and he also didn’t lose as much money as he could have.

Jump straight to another top premium
This is the obvious solution. Steele is worth $892k in Fantasy and for that price you can go to pretty much anyone else you want.  My best bets would be Petracca, Cripps, Walsh or Macrae. With a bit of extra cash you can jump to Miller, Oliver, Dunkley or Neale. As I said, this is the easy decision, straight up replace a top premium with another one. This will allow you to maintain your scoring and either do another upgrade with your other trade (if you had cash from last week) or do a downgrade with the other trade as you would have anyway.

Take a fallen premium and upgrade a mid pricer
With Steele being worth plenty you could go a bit further down with your trade for him and then use that cash you have left over to upgrade either a mid pricer like Rowell or a fully priced rookie like Daicos. If you went down to a Heeney you would bank $172k or even Dusty $221k.  So if you add that money to Rowell you would have either $764k or $813k to play with. You may not get a top midfielder for those prices but you could use it to get a defender or a forward. This way you are getting two solid scorers for the downgrade of one.

Take a fallen premium and downgrade with your other trade
By doing this what you are doing is building yourself a nice big bank of cash for next week which would hopefully allow you to make two upgrades to a couple of top level premiums. It does mean that you would have cash sitting in the bank for a week and not earning you points but they idea is that you are then going to use that excess cash next week to bring in two top scorers that will allow you to hopefully make up those points you missed out on.

Hold Steele because his price won’t change
No, no and once again no.  We can afford to do this with a rookie but we can’t afford to do it with someone that is worth this much.  That is just silly. You can’t have nearly $900k sitting on the bench not making you money, so don’t even think about it.

Obviously whatever you do will be very much dependent on what you have in the remainder of your team at the moment. I don’t have Steele but I would probably try and take a cheaper premium and use the cash to upgrade a mid pricer so that I can maximise the value that I have gotten from Steele going down.

For those of you that took Steele in Draft (like I did in two of my draft leagues) you have couple of options.  Firstly you could keep him beacause you only have two games before the byes and by the time they are over he has had 6 weeks (5 weekends) until their first game post byes. So you could theoretically only be without him for 3-4 weeks at the most assuming things go well (and assuming your league doesn’t play byes). Or the other option is to look to trade him off to someone that is up the top of the ladder who can afford to give you something good and can afford to leave him on the bench for a while.

Alternate Bye Thoughts

Just the two weeks to go. I know we do focus a bit on the byes and making sure your trades suit your bye structure but there is another school of thought and that is that it is a three week period and you want to maximise your scores throughout the three weeks. This year is one that we can also take a few more risks as there are a heap of rookies that we have on the bench that are getting games still. This year we have fewer red dots on the bench than what we often have at this time of year. So you could just pick the players that you want rather than take your third or fourth choice due to your byes.  This can be risky, but it is just another option that you have. Remember we want to have the best team we have as we come out of the byes.

I know this goes against a lot of what we have spoken about previously but I thought I would just throw it out there as an option for more experienced players who are sitting in a good position.

Things to Remember

• If you reverse your trades prior to the first game make sure you have checked and rechecked your side to make sure your loops are all set up
• Just two games before the byes start
• Try and look at Steele out as an opportunity. You can restructure your side or get that super premo you are missing to cover off your opponents.

There we have it folks, just a bit of a look at the strategy of what to do with Steele. These things need to be viewed as opportunities and not problems. When the guy that has gone down is at such a high price it lets you make moves you couldn’t before.  Sorry things are a bit shorter this week but it has been a busy week.  Have a great weekend and see you next week for our last round before the byes hit.