Now that we’re three weeks into the season, some of the cold starts and obvious hot streaks have faded and a good chunk of the league is around where we expect them to be. There’s a few players who are way out of line still, and those guys will be very hard to deal — it takes a lot of time for someone to move the goalposts, and there’s nobody out there in your league (hopefully) that really thinks Nikola Vucevic is about to be a top-15 guy. You’re probably not getting any reasonable trade talks about guys like that because everyone knows you’re buying or selling extremely low or extremely high.

For everyone else, you are starting to get a good sense of what things might look like for most of the year. It’s still very early but many managers are embracing what’s happening as the new “normal,” more or less. And that’s where you get to strike. The samples are small, but enough has happened that opinions are starting to anchor. If you can find a few players who look like they’re performing reasonably but have one or two things under the hood that aren’t adding up, that’s your time to act.

For the uninitiated, buying low refers to the act of acquiring a player at a discount because their recent performance — which is below their standards/expectations — has changed their perceived value for the player’s current manager. Essentially, it’s trying to trade for a player that you know is going to be a lot better than he has been lately, and capitalizing on his current manager’s anxieties to do so at a lower cost than you would normally anticipate.

On the flip side, selling high is the opposite; trading away a player at the height of their perceived value thanks to a recent run of good fortune. That could be the result of several things, but at the end of the day you’re trying to get off at the top and extract more value than you would normally anticipate from your trade partner. It’s a simple concept but hard to do, especially if you’re playing with seasoned competition who know the tricks of the trade.

Please note that the stats and values here are accurate as of November 11, prior to games starting.

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