“Trust the process.”

It’s become a common refrain among fans of rebuilding teams across professional sports ever since Sam Hinkie coined the usage for the Philadelphia 76ers during their stretch of futility accumulating first overall draft picks to acquire top end prospect talent (while more-or-less openly tanking). Hinkie isn’t the only to utilize such a strategy but he is among the first names we associate with it – how come? In my opinion, it was his ruthlessness and singular focus on winning a championship that set him apart. Many before him had been willing to take half-measures but Hinkie saw overall value as his guiding principal while charting his team’s next ten to fifteen years and stuck to his core beliefs until the bitter end. Unfortunately for Hinkie, the patience for such an approach from fans and ownership evaporated as the toll of the constant losing quickly took hold and caused him to get the boot from ownership before being able to see his plan come to full fruition.

Unlike in real life (ignoring the rare case of the Dallas Cowboys), the owner and manager of your fantasy team is thankfully the same person so you’ll never have two differing opinions on how to best lead your squad to the promised land. To me, that’s the key – making sure your plans are consistent and clear. Most importantly, you need to understand what timeline your team is operating on because in the midst of the chaos of drafting your team, it can be easy to lose the forest for the trees. You may have reason to be excited about your team as whole, due to a balanced mix of both veterans and prospects alike but take a step back and you’ll see that you’ve handicapped your team’s championship window before even setting your first starting lineup. Why’s that?

Well, championship are notoriously difficult to win at the best of times, let alone when you’re dealing with the peaks and valleys of three or four different timelines. To give yourself the best chance at success, you need to employ the famous “Extra 2%” mindset and grind out every advantage presented to you, no matter how miniscule, and that includes lining up as many of your drafted players’ peak contention window as possible. Take a look at the chart below from FanGraphs, with research on the average aging curve between the 2011-2020 seasons that shows the delta (or difference) between the league-average wRC+ (represented by the dotted line at 0) and how a specific age cohort (age-23, age-27, etc.) has performed compared to that average.

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