humpback said:
squistion said:
humpback said:
Concept Coop said:
humpback said:
Stable from where it was, or stable from here?
Stable from where it was. Like Peterson, Charles, Thomas, RG3 - naive or foolish, maybe - but I'm expecting guys to bounce back faster than expected and very close to 100% of what they were pre-injury. Even Tommy John isn't what it was a decade ago.
For the record, I am not a Crabtree guy. Didn't have him on a single roster pre-injury. But after the injury, I really like his new pricetag.
Even if he comes back to 100%, his value has to be lower than it was because you know you are getting a zero for the majority of a season, most likely an entire one.
I bring it up because people have said this a lot lately- "his short term value drops but long term stays the same". That doesn't add up to me, since long term value incorporates short term value.
Take a season away from anyone and their long-term value has to drop some.
Yes, but it depends on the time line dynasty strategy you have. I use a 2-3 year window with 50% of value the coming year, so from my perspective, this injury (even if he fully recovers) is still a big hit on his value. Someone like Adam/SSOG looks to a much longer time line, up to 10 years (from past comments he has made) so the loss of the coming season detracts little from Crabtree's perceived value.
I get that, but even if you look out 10 years, and weigh each year equally (which would be ridiculous IMO), taking 1 year away would mean he's only 90% as valuable. That's not insignificant.
I agree completely, but Mr. Harstad may not.
In a perfect world, if we all had crystal balls, a player would enter a season with a value of "X", would accumulate "Y" value during the season, and would leave the season with a value of "X-Y". In a perfect world, if we all had crystal balls, every player's value would be at its absolute highest before he ever took a single snap, and it would slowly and gently decline over his entire career until he reached the end.
In the real world, we have replaced our crystal balls with a glut of imperfect information and misleading clues. Instead of a player's value slowly declining as he uses it up (as in the perfect world), a player's value can decline for a number of reasons- he might use his value up and age, or he might give us new information that suggests we had him overvalued in the first place. Likewise, his value can actually increase if he gives us new information that suggests we had him undervalued.
As a result, whenever I rank a player, I rank him based on a risk profile. There are plenty of things that a player can do to decrease his value, from age to injury to underperformance. At a certain point of the career arc, though, age is by far the least significant of those things (when weighted against the others). A 26 year old WR is much more likely to lose value because I was wrong in my evaluations of his talent than he is because he aged a year and used up a certain percentage of the allotted value for his career. Given that, if a player is sufficiently young, his age plays very little role in how I value him. If Percy Harvin was a year older or a year younger, it would have basically no impact on how I value him today (even though, theoretically, the difference between N+1 and N-1 represents a potentially huge amount of value over Harvin's career).
So yes, from a high-level theoretical standpoint, it's impossible to say that a player's short term value decreases but his long-term value remains the same. From a dirty, messy, practical standpoint, though, it's a reasonable statement. If I value 27 year old WRs essentially identically to how I value 26 year old WRs, then the fact that Crabtree is going to lose his 26 season doesn't necessarily make a big impact on how I value him long-term.
This isn't to say that Crabtree's injury hasn't caused his value to fall. Obviously there is some time-value to production. I disagree with how large that time-value is, but I don't disagree that it exists. Obviously any injury presents new risks that didn't exist before, risks that the recovery doesn't go as planned, risks that his team's plans change. I think Michael Crabtree post-injury is less valuable than was Michael Crabtree pre-injury. I'm just saying the reason I think he's less valuable has little to do with the fact that he's going to enter his next productive season at age 27 instead of at age 26, as I originally anticipated.
Edit: I think a reasonable analogy is this: imagine that news broke that a player's birth certificate surfaced and a mistake had been made, and the player was actually born exactly one year before everyone originally thought. Imagine nothing else about that player changes. How much does this news cause you to alter your rankings for the player? For a guy like Brady, or Andre Johnson, or Adrian Peterson, this news would cause a definite shift in my rankings. For a guy like A.J. Green, Robert Griffin, or Trent Richardson, this news would cause me to shrug and yawn. In theory, this news means both guys are "losing" a year of their career from what we thought they had left, but if a guy is young enough, that additional year is so distant and uncertain in the first place that it doesn't make any difference to me. That's what I'm getting at when I say the fact that Crabtree will be 27 instead of 26 at the beginning of his next season doesn't really matter to me. I'm happy to downgrade him because of the time-value of the production loss, I'm happy to downgrade him because of the additional uncertainties that his injury raises, but he's so young still that I'm not really worried about him "losing" one year of his remaining career.
