Value Over Replacement

How much more a player is worth than a freely available replacement-level player in the same sport.

Value over replacement measures the gap between a player and the best player you could realistically pick up for nothing — the replacement-level player. A star is not valuable because his raw numbers are big; he is valuable because of how far he sits above the replacement you would otherwise have to start.

On The Expert Sports the idea is computed with the house trade value curve. Each sport's replacement value is defined as the trade value at rank ⌈0.75 × pool size⌉ of that sport's redraft list — the player three-quarters of the way down the published pool. A player's value over replacement is then simply his trade value minus that replacement value.

That subtraction is what makes cross-sport comparison possible at all. Raw trade values top out at 1000 in every sport, but a 439-player basketball pool and a 49-player softball pool do not mean the same thing at rank 30. Subtracting each sport's own replacement level puts every player on the shared yardstick the UPM board ranks: how many points of value a player adds over a replacement in his own sport. One honest property of the definition: deeper pools push the replacement rank further down the curve, toward zero, so the very top of the cross-sport board leans toward the biggest pools. The site prints that caveat on the board itself rather than hiding it.

More house terms: trade value · value over replacement · dynasty vs redraft · UPM · all house terms