MLS Draft Primer and Draft List

by Andrew Crollard, @Crollaa

FANTASY MLS DRAFT IS A THING AGAIN!

Okay, so DraftMLS.com created a draft version of MLS Fantasy for us to enjoy. The scoring and scheduling is exactly the same as the regular FMLS game hosted by MLS. The big difference is that you don’t need to worry about any salary cap and each player can only be owned by one team. Awesome, every single player is a differential and we get to test how deeply we know the league beyond the same tired 40 players that are in everyone’s lineup in the regular game. I got together with 9 other regulars of the chat room here on MLS Fantasy Boss and we drafted our teams. (well, 9/15 of our teams as the server crashed in the middle of our draft). I’ve drafted other sports for over a decade and have won my leagues about 50% of the time, which is way better than would be expected. Most of the advice below comes from my experience drafting those other sports.

All of the following advice is assuming you’re in a 10-team draft. So, here’s the strategy for drafting your MLS team:

1. In the first round, just pick the best attacker available. Do not pick a defender or a keeper.
2. In the second round, pick the best midfielder or forward available – the opposite position from your first pick.
3. Defensive midfielders actually matter. They can’t be over priced since there is no salary cap, which is their main downfall in the regular fantasy game. They can help decrease your team’s variance – especially if you get one of the elite dmids like Dax, Alonso, Trapp, or Laba. The reduced variance will help your team have a higher floor and win you more weeks. Because of this, I prefer defensive midfielders over wingers of roughly the same PP90.
4. We still prefer center backs over outside backs. Their high bonus point generation will help increase your team’s floor and reduce variance.
5. Save keepers for later in the draft. The last round will pretty much be everyone picking their backup keeper. Our draft had only 2 keepers picked in the top 100 players. You really don’t need to squander an early round pick on a keeper because the difference between an elite keeper and an average one is much smaller than the difference between an elite forward/midfielder and an average one.
6. Do not pick a third forward until late in the draft. UNLESS you luck into picking 3 big-time forwards early. There’s a noticeable dropoff in quality forwards after about the 4th round and your third forward can wait until the end of the draft where you can pick up someone like Davies, Zardes, Bruin, Doyle, Valdez or Oduro, who all went undrafted in my inaugural draft.
7. Try not to draft more than 2 players from one team. Having too many players on one team will increase your variance and if that team just sucks one week, your team will suffer greatly.
8. While drafting, try to identify a couple players you want to take on your next pick while other people are picking. This will help you find better needs for your team.
9. There’s a common draft strategy called “streaming” where you replace the worst player on your roster with someone who has a good matchup that week. Doing this with players who have a double gameweek can pick you up a couple extra points that might make the difference between your team winning that week and losing.
10. Actually set your autodraft list. You never know when the server might crash or your internet connection might die. You don’t want to be stuck drafting guys that are injured, not starters, or aren’t even in the league any more. Even if it is just a very rough outline of an auto pick order, you’ll be happy you did it and didn’t get stuck picking Obafemi Martins in the 7th round.

Here is a rough draft list that my group didn’t stray too far from. So with that, have fun in your fantasy MLS draft!