The best and worst part about playing fantasy sports is that it can often appear like you’re surrounded by pure chaos.  It would be great if injuries affected everyone equally, but doesn’t it always seem like your team gets disproportionately afflicted every season.  There isn’t anything you can do over the course of a season to fully insulate yourself from the randomness, but what you can do is inoculate yourself from any one doomsday scenario, even if it comes at the expense of a little value and a top-end ceiling.

Teams are rarely able to run at 100% efficiency/effectiveness and if you are constantly carrying hurt players or lose a stud at a key moment; you are going to find yourself very quickly looking forward to next season.

Every league has its own strategies and approaches to creating a super team, but how often does the best team actually win?  How often is it just the team that survives with the least attrition? I’ll take death by a thousand cuts over a guillotine any day.  This week’s theme is about diversifying your assets and building a team that might not have the highest ceiling, but the safest floor.  Building to last is the same as building to win.

For instance, I have longed coveted Mikal Bridges and often call him pound-for-pound the best fantasy player there is.  Bridges has played in 336 of the 336 eligible games over his career and while he might not post eye-popping numbers, he’s currently a top-30 player on averages and a top-15 player on totals for the season.  Now sure, Bridges could get hurt tomorrow and this whole point remains moot (furiously knocks on wood), but the best indicator of future performance is past performance.  The goal should be to fill your team with as many Mikal Bridges as possible and ensure that when the cruel hand of fate looks for someone to crush, you are nowhere in the vicinity.

We are going to mix it up a little this week and introduce two new concepts: Buy-High and Sell-Low.

These are two of the hardest triggers to pull because either you’re paying top dollar for a player potentially overachieving or you’re taking a hair cut on a player you previously thought would have a great season.  You could make either version of these trades and the next week your worst nightmare is revealed.  Like most angles in fantasy, whether to overpay or cut bait depends on your perspective.  The only two top-10 players that you can truly trust are Nikola Jokic and Jayson Tatum.  I can’t imagine what it would cost to pry Jokic off someone, but maybe Tatum could be had, as long as you are willing to overpay and offer the crown jewels along with some magic beans.

Safety is a luxury of the wealthy and the higher up in the standings you are, the more motivated you should be to divulge yourself of as many potentially crippling assets as possible, and vice versa.  If you are clinging to the bottom and desperation is sinking in, it might be time to swing for the fences and trade for a Paul George, Kawhi Leonard or (gulp) Anthony Davis.

Buy-High

Jayson Tatum

The good news is that Tatum has never played less than 64 games in a season and furthermore he’s clearly made another leap in his overall game.  He’s ranked inside the top-10, contributes across the board and has no weaknesses.  The bad news is that whoever drafted him already knows this.  If the GM who drafted him is in the top-3 of your standings, it is probably going to take a miracle to pry him away, but if he’s flailing near the bottom, he might be interested in taking three top-50 players for Tatum or two top-30 studs.  Acquiring Tatum is going to be my number one goal the rest of the season, but it’s not going to be easy or cheap.

To pull this off you will likely need to offer one legit stud like Jrue Holiday/Darius Garland and one riskier stud like Trae Young, Kyrie Irving or Bradley Beal.  Two of those might get it done and then you get to swap gold bullion for some shiny silverware.  Or if you nailed your draft, maybe you just overwhelm the GM with value.  Offer two players overachieving and one that might turn it around.  Something along the lines of Tobias Harris, Evan Mobley and Kawhi Leonard might peak their interest, but realistically you might have to up the ante.  In this trade, you get to sell-high on two of your players and sell-low on one of the most toxic assets in the league.  Obviously, very few teams have those three guys, but it’s a general framework of how to approach trading for a super stud.  Lastly, a 3-for-1 trade only makes sense for your opponent in a deep-league, so keep that in mind.

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