Player Trade Comparisons
As teams approach the trade deadline, they’re faced with a number of questions. Should we trade for a player? How much would we need to trade to fill out performance gaps? How have those trades typically worked out in the past? It’s a time of high stress, short deadlines, and constant planning. To help our client teams over the summer, SumerSports was busy building new features, models, and data sources into our NFL products. A feature we introduced to our customers this year is the Player Trade Comparison tool.
This tool references every NFL trade back to 2011 and finds similar players based on several player attributes. You can think of the tool as a historical comparison machine that considers what you think is most important and returns trades that most closely match your personal weightings. The results update as you change the weightings in real time, allowing you to compare different hypothetical weightings without needing to gather more data or wait hours for answers. With our tool, you get these comparables in seconds.
Below, the default attribute allocation is set by our team, however customer teams can modify the weighting of each of these attributes to match their view of what is important when comparing players. In future versions, customers will also be able to add more context to customize the responses based on what matters most to their specific team.
The Weighting radar chart feature of the SumerNFL product.
Performance
After the launch of the Player Trade Comparison tool, there were 10 trades registered in the NFL. To assess the performance of our tool, we assumed a draft pick was worth (in Jimmy Johnson points) the average number of points for that round, i.e., a 5th round pick this year is worth 27.4 points, a 6th 10.4 points. We did this because these trades are occurring mid-season and there is uncertainty going forward on draft order.
While there are many draft charts to choose from, including some of our own we have developed internally, we recognize that Jimmy Johnson points are the common currency of the league. Additionally, most trade charts differ significantly in shape from the JJ chart in the top 100 picks. As no players were exchanged for picks in the top 100 of this year’s draft, we feel the overall behavior here is acceptable.
The trade with the largest gap between their comparable and what occurred was Jonathan Mingo at 56 JJ points above what our tool would have surfaced to our client users. A 56-point miss is equivalent to the 119th overall pick in value.
This trade raised necessary improvements for our internal team. For the customer to get the fullest picture possible, we will need to add contract information; as Mingo’s years of club control may explain some of the gap between his trade and that of N’Keal Harry in 2022. This tool is built to identify league wide trends and is not meant to be a measure of trade efficiency necessarily, but an indicator of how much capital has been needed to trade for similar players in the past. Factors such as individual team needs and positional scarcity in a particular year may cause deviations from historical comparables.
The trade with the smallest gap in our tool was that of Cam Robinson coming in at 0 JJ points. Our tool identified Ryan Clady’s 2016 trade to the Jets as the most similar player based on our default weighting. It should be noted however that Clady was involved in an April trade and not a mid-season one. In our future development, timing of the trade will be included to the tool to reflect sound analytical processes and minimize coincidence from the data.
Overall, our comparisons provided high-end accuracy with a median miss of just 4.7 JJ points, the equivalent of a late 6th in pick value. We are already integrating feedback from our existing customers and planning improvements to make the next version of this tool more accurate and flexible.
SumerNFL
This is just one feature within the SumerNFL suite of products, built by a team combining over 600 years of NFL experience with elite data scientists and engineers from leading tech companies.
SumerNFL is our flagship NFL product, which allows you to access our football platform from anywhere in the world, on any device that is convenient for you.
Some additional features include:
- Professional scouting reports on every active NFL player and the top 800 draftable players.
- Advanced analytics by role on every player in the NFL and FBS.
- Our proprietary FootballAI tracking data model powered position specific metrics.
- Detailed, up to date NFL contracts information for the entire league along with rework analysis.
- Every league transaction and league news.
To find out more about what SumerSports can do for you, reach out at FootballOps@SumerSports.com
