Why does Franchise Value matter?
Player pricing at Salary Cap Sports is designed to make it hard to assemble a team at the beginning of the year with the $50 Million of Franchise Value you're allotted. The fact that it's difficult to assemble a top quality roster is the reason why it's so important to increase your Franchise Value as quickly as possible. There's no magic formula to know the exact point at which you've made enough money and can start chasing points but you certainly will need to concentrate on Franchise Value for the first several weeks of the season no matter which sport you are playing.
Which player's price is going to increase?
Increasing your Franchise Value requires you to have several players on your team whose price should go up in the future. Determining which player's prices are going to go up in the future is dependent on a lot of things but here are a few examples:
- Change in position on the depth chart. Players can move into a starting lineup due to excellent performance, through an injury to a teammate, or perhaps a team wants to give a young player a shot to see what he's got. Whatever the reason, players who suddenly start receiving significant playing time are often under-priced compared to what their future output will be.
- The player was under-priced to begin with. If a player is simply performing way beyond their price, then the odds are that most managers are going to see this and start buying the player. Players like this can have their value increase for many days in a row and if their price still doesn't match their production then the price increases can hold for the long term as most managers won't want to sell the player at all.
- Excellent schedule. Schedule matters in all sports but each sport has slightly different ways to take advantage of the schedule:
- In baseball, schedule is especially important for starting pitchers. When you select the Schedule view from the Player Listing for a pitcher, you can see when their next start is and extrapolate their next few opponents. Several light hitting opponents in a row for an excellent pitcher is a dream scenario.
- With football you can easily see a player's next few opponents and make a concerted attempt to buy players with great medium term schedules.
- In basketball, when you select the Schedule view in the Player Listing, you will see the next 21 days of schedule. The schedule is shown with highlighted sections based on how good or bad a player's schedule is. If there is a player who has a really good schedule for the next 3 to 4 weeks, is productive, and is dependable, they likely will have a nice price increase even if they seem to be fully valued. Managers will want to own them based on how good their schedule is.
- Hockey is similar to basketball, though really nice schedules are not as easy to find. For goaltenders it might not be as easy as checking the schedule. If there is a heavy schedule upcoming then that might mean more starts for a backup goalie.
Players to avoid
While trying to increase your Franchise Value, it's important to avoid burning trades on players who can't be held for a reasonable amount of time. As an example, if there is a player who usually is on the bench and scores an average of 10 SCS points per game but suddenly has a game where they score 55 points mostly in garbage time, there certainly will be some managers who see their 55 points scored and think they should buy the player. The player's price will probably go up the next day, and if their price goes up enough, then other managers might pile in. The player's price might go up for two or three days in a row, but after their next game in which they come off the bench and score 10 points again, all those managers are going to rush to sell. He will have made a little bit of money, scored only 10 points, and you will have wasted two trades. This is not good! If you do this a couple times early in the season then your team is going to be low on trades and have zero roster flexibility.
Preseason plan
You should spend a little bit of effort thinking about which players are likely to be bought in the preseason. If you read an article on some website about a hot new player who is likely to have a great season, but has never produced in the past, and their price is low on SCS, then you might be able to assume that a lot of managers are going to buy this player. Perhaps in the SCS forums some teams have posted their rosters and those teams all seem to be buying the same low priced player. If this is the case, then the player is going to be highly owned, and like a stock in the stock market that everybody owns, there's nobody left to buy it. So when the season starts, if the player doesn't perform exceptionally well then some managers are going to get bored and start to sell. The player can over perform their price, but their price is actually going down because there are simply too many managers who own him and want to sell. It might be wise to avoid players who you think everyone else is going to buy in the preseason.