What Portends Profit?

I saw the following post on Twitter (X) last week and it got me thinking: if volume is a proxy for production, the most relevant question is what leads to more volume.

Because if projected volume is largely (let’s guess 60 percent) priced in, then there is no advantage to targeting players projected for high volume. (Actual volume itself is 82 percent correlated, so projected volume at 60 would be pretty good!) In fact, in savvy circles, I would almost expect projected volume to be over-accounted for, and in less savvy ones, more people chasing speculative upside.

But either way, you win leagues by drafting players at a profit and avoiding losses. So it doesn’t do much good simply to know what’s correlated with success. You need to know what correlates to success in a way that’s incommensurate with draft-day cost.

I don’t have the answer, and I don’t think this kind of “what overall stat correlates with what” will yield it. Unfortunately, the only way to find the players that will outperform their cost and avoid the opposite is to study the player pool and team context, hone your instincts and pounce when you figure out that someone is mispriced.

I wish there were a shortcut, but I don’t think it exists.