The Thursday Scramble: Round 2

We always expect a few misses in round 1 but not this many! Players getting knocked out, injured and just having shocking games. Well, good thing is it was only round 1 and we can fix all of this with a couple of trades as we head into Round 2 and Scramble!

Should I pull the Trigger?

The biggest question we have after the first round is, who should I pull the trigger on and boot them from our team. God knows we all had a heap of rage trades ready to go and we wanted to boot more players than we had trades for. But we only have a couple of trades in AF and at most 3 in RDT and SC so we need to prioritise.

Just a word of advice for our RDT and SC players. Don’t trade players out because you feel their price will drop. In those two forms of the game the prices change on a three week rolling average. The unique thing about this is that because we don’t get prices change until after the third game, any rubbish score in round 1 is only in their price cycle for one rotation, so after they play in round 4, that score from round 1 is no longer affecting their price. So this means that Laird’s price will only have that 50 in his price rotation for one cycle. After that (and hopefully three scores over 120) his price will bounce back again. Unless he has another shocker he won’t get super cheap which makes it harder to get him back in again.

If you have selected a premium you are generally selecting them for the season (barring major injury). We say this because trades are so valuable, (but this year we do have more trades than ever before in RDT and SC) and if you do have correction trades you need to make, weeks 1-3 are the times to make them before we start to hit upgrade season. Once you reach that point, the upgrade cadence is the most important and anything that slows that cadence will cost you in the long run.

Of course, if you have an injury to deal with and a player missing, go ahead and trade them this week. The ones that most people are looking at are Stewart, Xerri and Kelly. In these cases you can go ahead and trade. Many might say that Kelly is a hold given he is only one week. But the concern here is that his 12 days only finishes the day before the game in round 3 and there is a chance that he could miss that one too.

So you are pulling the trigger, who to?

After taking in all of the above and we decide that we are going to trade then we need to look at who we should be trading in. There are a few things we need to think about.

1. Don’t just jump on the players that had the big score last week. Look at why they had that score. The ones that I am particularly referring to are the Dockers defenders who put up some huge scores, here we need to remember that the Saints have a makeshift forward line at the moment. Also look at all of the opposition people played. So for example, the Bombers won’t play the Hawks each week, North will come up against stronger opposition than the Eagles and so on. If someone had the role we wanted and they showed the level of scoring we wanted or better against a solid opponent then they are the ones we should pick.

2. SinceIGotGawn on Twitter asked me “Should I be trading in the Underperforming Breakouts or the Missed Rookies?”. Firstly, thanks for the question and great to have you back on board this week. This is a really good question and for me the first thing that I would look at is the Missed Rookies. These are the most important players in our squads at the moment. These are the ones that will make us the cash to ultimately help us finish our team by doing our upgrades. The other side to the question is the Underperforming Breakouts. For me the answer is in the name. We have all made the assessment that this player will breakout and hence we are assuming that they have underperformed because they didn’t reach our expectations. So the answer is, Missed Rookies for me.  Number 1 candidate? Harry Sheezel

3. Billy Elsum asked the question, do we go for Value players (Gulden or Green) or do we chase points (such as Cogs or Brayshaw)? Here I always go back to the GOAT of AFL Fantasy, Selby who always puts it out there that we should be looking for value. The reason for this is that we have a limited amount of funding and we need to squeeze that orange as much as we can and extract the most amount of points that we can. So what we want to do is look at spending our cash on the guys that are cheaper but are scoring well rather than spending top dollar (unless you are Calvin) on the guys that we know are at their peak price. So for me it is those guys that present value but are still scoring well. Green for me is a must have.

Where to from here?

So what do we do now? Well the first thing is that we need to have a look at the team sheets tonight and see exactly who is missing. For example, does Liam Jones get up? Once we get these teams we need to then assess who we really need to trade out. We will certainly have to do some shuffling as there is likely to be some of our rookies that will either miss or be the sub. Just check this and then make sure that you have appropriately moved players on and off your bench. Don’t worry, you will get some of these choices wrong, we all do every single year. Rookies are incredibly unpredictable so don’t panic when you get one of these decisions wrong.

Things to Remember

• It was just round 1, don’t chuck it all in just yet.
• Laird played in very hot conditions, don’t judge his season on just one game.
• Remain agile with your rookies as the weekend plays out. Be ready to switch some around on the fly.
• Don’t judge every player on what they did in round 1. If they did that in round 18 would you be just as ready to dump them?

Let’s hope we have a much better week. After listening to numerous podcasts and reading a lot of articles this week I have discovered that it wasn’t just me that made a few poor decisions and this then leads me to think that the research was there and we all read the signs the same way. Sometimes things just don’t work the way we think. So don’t beat yourself up over it get up and play on.

Good luck for round 2, most of your leagues will start this week so hopefully you can get some W’s and when we get back here next Thursday we will all have stories of celebration and we don’t look back at this week’s scoring ever again!!  Now get out there, open your team and Scramble!!