Not that this is specifically offense/defense related, but I am a big fan of tailoring my trades to specific teams. I've never seen the point of those "Anyone want DeMeco Ryans?" league-wide posts. Find a team who is weak at linebacker and strong where you need a guy. And then add some stats to your argument: "Although you'll be losing 2pts/game by sending that player my way, you'll gain 5pts/game with this new guy" sort of thing. And I have found that other owners are wowed by volume. Trade two for one or three for two, and toss in a guy who was never going to get off your bench anyway (I just threw Torry Holt in with a deal last week).
Just some random thoughts--good luck!
I'm not hatin', but I personally have never had a 2 for 1 or 3 for 2 trade work. If I see somebody trying to "bundle up" some of their players for 1 or 2 of mine, I almost immediately have rejected it in my mind before I even look at it because it means I have to dump somebody off of my roster for starters.
That's because, I'm guessing, your teams don't suck! I try to trade with folks at the bottom of the barrel where they really need help in bunches. They usually have one or two good players and you go for those. And their team does get better, and probably by a wider margin than yours did--but that helps them climb from the cellar to second-to-last. I just got Patrick Willis that way this week.Getting back on topic, I figure the value of a player by calculating (please don't laugh at me!) the amount by which their scoring exceeds the mean at that position and I measure that in chunks of standard deviation. In figuring the mean at that position, I take how many players we have to start times the number of teams. In my league, for example, we have ten teams and we each start two linebackers. So, I measure a player's value by his performance relative to the top twenty linebackers (or you can go top thirty if you want to count one backup or something). If Patrick Willis averages 15 pts/week by your scoring system and the average of the top 20 is 10, then that gives you 5. But, you then need to divide that by the standard deviation of those top twenty so that you get a better sense of how much higher that is, plus it gives you a number that you can compare directly to qb's, te's, db's, etc. in your scoring system.
I'm sure I am very strange (or so I've been told), but in response to the original poster's question, that's what I'd to do figure the value!