About Nickknowsball
A fantasy football toolkit built around mutual-benefit trades, league-aware rankings, and recency-weighted manager grades.
Who runs it
Nickknowsball is built and maintained by Nick — someone who has spent more than a decade running and playing in fantasy football leagues across ESPN, Sleeper, and Yahoo, and who got tired of every popular trade calculator ignoring the things that actually matter: superflex slots, TE premium scoring, dynasty contracts, playoff schedules. The site started as a personal spreadsheet that grew into a full toolkit for trades, rankings, manager evaluation, and now NBA shot charts.
The work is hands-on: every model on the site exists because the off-the-shelf version of it left a real question unanswered for one of my own teams. The trade finder came out of weeks of failed mid-season swaps. The manager grades came out of trying to settle a home-league argument about who actually drafted well. The rankings format-toggle came out of running a half-PPR league and a full-PPR league side by side and needing one tool that handled both.
Why this exists
Most fantasy tools treat every league the same: a generic PPR ranking, a static trade value chart, a one-size-fits-all draft list. Real leagues are not generic. Superflex changes QB scarcity. TE premium flips tight end value. A 12-team half-PPR league plays nothing like a 14-team standard league.
Nickknowsball builds rankings, trade suggestions, and manager grades that respect your league's actual scoring, roster slots, and history. The trade finder ranks mutual-benefit deals where both rosters improve. The rankings adjust to your scoring format on the fly. Manager grades are recency-weighted across draft, trade, and waiver decisions over every prior season your league's history allows.
How the data works
Player projections blend ESPN's in-season projections with consensus rankings and nflverse weekly data (snap counts, target share, carries, red-zone usage). Manager grades use historical draft, trade, and waiver outcomes from every season your league exposes via the ESPN or Sleeper API. The trade engine starts from each team's starting-lineup expected points (SLEP) and surfaces packages where both sides gain at the right position.
Read more on the articles page — posts there explain the models in plain English, including mutual-benefit trade ranking, recency-weighted grading, age curves, and target-share predictive power.
Get in touch
Feedback, bugs, or feature requests welcome — head to the contact page or email nick.knows.ball0@gmail.com directly. I read every message.
Try it on your league.
Connect ESPN or Sleeper and the trade finder runs against your real roster.