Are You Down With ADP?

After sites like Mock Draft Central launched and league hosts like Yahoo! and CBS have added the information, Average Draft Position data has become all the rage. I have read so many articles referencing ADP, and yet, the majority of the time I still have no idea exactly what the author means or how owners utilize it. I recently read a line from a column about mock draft strategy that called ADP’s employment being overrated. Huh? I don’t get it. And how many times have I read that drafter X “reached” on a player? I am confused exactly what is meant by a reach. So let’s try to get back on the same page, while also figuring out exactly how the heck ADP data is actually best used.

First, the most important thing to understand is that an Average Draft Position list should never ever ever be used as your rankings to draft from. Seriously, do fantasy owners actually do that? If you draft everyone at value (assuming for a moment that ADP does in fact represent a reasonable estimate of a player’s projected value), you will have an average team and will not finish in the money without a heaping of luck.

ADP is simply an ordered list indicating when every player gets selected on average in leagues drafting on the site the list was from. It is not a list of rankings in descending order of projected dollar value. If Mike Stanton is being drafted ahead of Andrew McCutchen, it is not because his projected 5×5 stat line yields a higher value than McCutchen does. It is because, on average, the drafters on Mock Draft Central are drafting him earlier. Of course, this implies that they actually do project him to out-earn McCutchen. To believe they are right, though, would require a leap of faith that regular Joes are good at not only projecting player performance, but also at valuing that performance given their specific league settings. Forgive me if I simply do not have the confidence that the average Joe has such number crunching ability.

So if you absolutely should not be using ADP to actually draft from, there must be some other use, otherwise the data would cease to be published and every fantasy site would be scraping for ideas on topics to write about in the off-season. Before we find out what that use is, it is imperative that you have the ADP list by your side during the draft if yours is online through one of the sites that provide their own ADP. If your draft is live, some extra work is required and a simple average of the ADPs for each player would work better than any single site’s list. Along with that ADP list is the even more important item- your own ranked list, in descending order of projected dollar value.

When I have participated in snake drafts, I make an extra column on my cheat sheet (all players are ranked in descending order of projected dollar value generated from my projections) that includes the player’s ADP. It then makes it extremely easy to spot who I value higher than the average Joe and who I think is overvalued and assume won’t be drafting. What this allows me to do is maximize the value of my picks, and hopefully in turn, my projected team stat totals. This helps you avoid the dreaded “reach”, which brings us to the real usage of ADP. Uh oh, there’s that head-scratching term again.

When I read draft analyses, I rarely finish without reading how this owner reached on this player and that owner considered reaching on that player. Then I hear from others about how it’s okay to reach sometimes. Now I’m shaking my head in utter confusion. What does reaching for a player even mean? I can think of two different definitions of a reach:

1) Freddie Freeman’s ADP is 122, or round 11, pick 2. You draft him in the 7th because “I haVE To HaVe FrEdDIE FrEeMAn…he’S SO awESOme!!!11!1!!” And you wanted to “make sure” you got him, so you took him well before he is being selected on average. However, you acknowledge that you reached in the post-draft analysis after panicking over a first base run.

2) Your dollar values project Alex Rios to be worth a 9th round pick, and you select him in the 14th, despite him having an ADP of about 219, or round 19, pick 3.

So when someone claims they reached, are they admitting they overpaid, like in scenario 1, or did the owner value the player much higher than the rest of the league and still expects a nice profit, despite taking said player much earlier than his ADP, like in scenario 2?

Before I attempt to answer those questions, the entire point of having an ADP list is to predict where a player will be drafted. Leagues are won by the teams that generated a ton of profit by the end of the year, but since we don’t have crystal balls, all we can do at the draft is accumulate the most projected value we can. The team with the highest projected total team value after the draft is usually the one who would be projected to win if you run the projections for the league, assuming the owner didn’t punt a category and drafted a relatively balanced team. And if you overpay for enough players, you just bought yourself a ticket to the cellar. So taking advantage of profit opportunities is the way to go.

In the first reach scenario above, unless you get a bonus for having a certain player on your team, there should never be a player you are willing to pay whatever it takes for. Everyone has a value and projected stats to contribute to your team and if you draft them too early, you’re passing up on other players who can provide more. Paying the equivalent of $20 for a $15 player is a losing proposition. The player then has to produce that much more than expected just to break even for you.

In the second scenario, this supposed reach is actually not a problem at all. In fact, I personally wouldn’t even consider it a reach and do it all the time in leagues because my values sometimes differ significantly from ADP. You are still banking a projected profit and taking Rios in the 14th round essentially allows you to draft two 9th round values on your team. ADP seriously comes in handy here because you don’t want to take Rios exactly where you value him. Without that precious ADP list, you could potentially wipe out any profit opportunity, and again, you cannot win by drafting a $260 team.

So back to the top and the issue of the employment of ADP being overrated. I am still not sure what that means, but I think using ADP correctly is one of the biggests key to having a successful draft. Without it, I’d potentially be drafting Alex Rios in the 9th, Brandon Morrow in the 8th and Chris Sale in the 12th. Though it makes me look good for being right if those players do earn those values, it does my team no good in terms of winning the league since I paid for those stats.