Keeper Value Engine

The Keepers tab on the League page ties player valuation to your league’s actual keeper costs. It reads your draft results from ESPN, puts each player’s market value and their keeper cost on the same draft-round scale, and computes surplus value so you get a ranked keep/cut list for every team.

Who sees it

Keepers is a keeper and dynasty feature. It is hidden entirely in redraft leagues.

Your league must be set to Keeper or Dynasty format for the tab to appear. Set this in League → Admin → League format (creator only). If your league is really a keeper league but is still marked Redraft, flip it there first — otherwise the Keepers tab stays hidden.

The surplus model

Everything is expressed as a draft round so value and cost are directly comparable:

Value round — the player’s market value. We rank the player in the format-relevant consensus pool and map their rank to a round: an Nth-ranked player is a “round ceil(N ÷ teams)” talent. Dynasty leagues value against dynasty consensus; keeper leagues value against redraft consensus (keepers usually play the coming season), with dynasty shown as context.
Cost round — what it costs to keep them, from your draft. The base is the round they were drafted. Keeper picks escalate: each year kept moves the cost earlier (harder) by your configured amount. Undrafted / waiver adds use a configurable fallback cost.
Surplus = cost round − value round.
- Positive surplus means you’re keeping the player cheaper than they’re worth — a round-2 talent at a round-8 cost is +6, an elite keep.
- Negative surplus means you’re overpaying — let them walk back into the draft.

Each team’s roster is split into a Keep list (surplus ≥ 0, best first) and a Cut / Let-walk list. If you set a max-keepers limit, the top keepers up to that limit are highlighted as recommended, and any extra positive-surplus players are flagged as over the limit.

Hot/cold vs value

A small ▲ / ▼ badge can appear next to a player’s consensus Rank. It compares their consensus value against their current-season production (the same signal that powers effective-rank blending elsewhere in the app): ▲ means they’re materially outproducing their consensus value this season; ▼ means they’re materially lagging it.

This is informational only — it never changes value round, cost round, surplus, or which keeps are recommended. Surplus stays a pure consensus-vs-cost calculation; the badge just flags when that consensus value looks stale so you can factor recent form into your own keep/cut call. It only appears once a player has enough current-season sample to be meaningful, and only when the gap is large enough to matter — small swings stay unflagged.

Configuring keeper rules

Keeper rules vary from league to league, so the league creator configures them in League → Admin → Keeper economics:

Escalation rounds per year kept — how many rounds earlier (more expensive) a keeper’s cost moves for each year they’ve been kept.
Max keepers — how many players each team may keep (blank = no limit). Drives the recommended-keeps highlight.
Undrafted cost round — the cost assigned to free-agent / waiver adds that were never drafted (blank = last round + 1).
Track keep-years — surfaces the per-player “years kept” column.

Sensible defaults apply before anyone configures anything, so the tab works out of the box. Only draft results are read from ESPN — the ruleset is set here, not auto-detected.

Limitations

Auction keeper leagues aren’t supported yet. The v1 model is round-based; auction-cost valuation is planned separately. Auction leagues show an “unsupported” message.
Multi-year keeper contract chains beyond a single per-year escalation rule are out of scope for now.
If ESPN has no draft data for the season yet (e.g. a brand-new league), the tab reports that keeper values will appear once the draft has run.