Salary Cap Draft Mastery: Part 4, Nomination Strategies

Photo: USA Today Sports

2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-par2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-part-2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-part-2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-part-2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-part-t-If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to go back and read the first three parts of this salary cap draft series before you dive into nomination strategies.

Part 1, Basic Concepts
Part 2, Building Your Skill Set
Part 3, Preparation

The nature of a salary cap draft is that they are unpredictable. There are so many variables you can’t control that it is even more critical to maximize your edges on the things you can control. Nominations are one of those things. Managers in a salary cap draft notoriously give very little thought to who they will nominate and why. If you want to take your salary cap draft skills to the next level, you must become intentional with your nominations and think about what you’re accomplishing with each nomination you make.

Opening Thoughts

As you work through a salary cap draft, you’ll notice that drafters tend to treat nominations as a minor inconvenience or speed bump during the draft. It’s not a conscious thought that they don’t care about who they nominate, but since they’re allowed to bid on anyone, their minds tend to treat nominations as an afterthought. If they can bid on anyone, it doesn’t matter who they put on the block, right?

Wrong!

It matters a lot. Have a reason for every nomination you make. Liking a player isn’t a good enough reason. Contemplate what the nomination does for your team, cap, and pre-planned draft strategy.

Think of it like this: In a typical salary cap draft with 16 roster spots you only have 16 chances to decide who you want to be bidding on at any particular time (that number can vary a little bit, but the point remains the same).  That number of nominations is both small, and powerful. Don’t let yourself blow off one of the few times you have total control over what is about to happen in your salary cap draft.

The draft will take on a personality and a shape as it continues, and your job is to assess what’s happening and make the right nomination for your situation based on a few different factors. You should be watching your cap situation, other managers’ cap situations, your roster, other rosters, and the player pool scarcity both overall and within position groups and tiers. Calling out an ill-timed nomination because you didn’t consider someone’s cap situation can lead to losing a player that you might’ve landed had you played it differently.

Your salary cap draft nominations have the power to force others to react, provide clarity on your attack plan, or steer drafters away from positional runs. For example, you find yourself in a casual salary cap draft league where you can only start one quarterback in your lineup. You had planned to roster two cheap quarterbacks later in the draft, but you realize that managers are inexplicably starting to nominate and roster backup quarterbacks. If you had intended to spend $6-$8 on a couple of guys like Trevor Lawrence, Jared Goff, and Kirk Cousins, you should start to figure out how you can stop this quarterback run, or your plan is in danger. Drafters tend to get nervous about a positional run during a salary cap draft just as they do in serpentine drafts. They’ll see others rostering a backup quarterback and think they should do it, too. You can stop that cold. Go to your Nomination List that you prepared (see Part 3) ahead of time and pick a big shiny object like Malik Nabers to refocus everyone’s attention to another position.

This is an example of the power of a nomination. This is just one example, but your nominations will take on different forms as various situations present themselves while you draft. Here are some ideas about how that will look in the different stages of your salary cap draft.

Early Nominations in a Salary Cap Draft

There is a common salary cap draft myth that you should begin all your drafts by nominating expensive players you don’t want so you can drain cap from other teams. While the logic is fine, in practice this strategy doesn’t work like people think it does.

The first problem with this idea is that in a typical 12-team league with 16-man rosters, there will be $2,400 in cap space to be spent during the draft. Calling out Saquon Barkley (no matter how much you don’t care about having him) and seeing someone spend $42 on him doesn’t appreciably change the available cap remaining. Instead, you’ve taken the first chance you have to make a nomination and wasted it on something with zero impact on the rest of the draft.

Further, when a salary cap draft starts, most of the people in the room are excited to start bidding on the top players. You don’t necessarily need to nominate a top player you don’t want because they’ll be nominated soon anyway. For example, let’s say you are out on Puka Nacua this year. If there are two or three managers (or more, he is a Top 10 wide receiver in ADP after all) in the room that want Nacua then he is going to go for around $40-$45. If you nominate him you are correct in thinking that someone has just spent a big portion of their cap on their top wide receiver and it lowers the competition for future elite pass-catchers.

But on the other hand, if three people are interested in Nacua you are actually tying up $40 in the minds of all three managers who want him. You’ve effectively tied up $120 instead of $40. But when one person lands him, you free up the other two to bid against you for a different wide receiver. Also, ask yourself, “How long is Nacua going to last before he’s nominated by someone else?” Usually, it won’t be long. Managers in a salary cap draft love nominating the top players. So let someone else do it, and then use your nomination for something else.

A better thing to use your nomination for early in a salary cap draft is defining where your draft is headed. If you read Part 3 in this series you have a few par sheets ready to go before the draft. With your first nominations, you should be laser-focused on finding out which par sheet you are using. If you don’t figure out what your strategy is until 30 or 40 players are gone, then you may lose the ability to shift your strategy effectively. For example, let’s say you want a top quarterback, and if you don’t get an elite guy, then you’re going to pivot to a top tight end. If you wait on Josh Allen or other top quarterbacks, you may have to watch Trey McBride and Sam LaPorta go off the board while you wait. By then, it is too late to adjust. Defining your draft quickly is one of the most crucial things you can do early in a salary cap draft. Use your early nominations to try to accomplish that goal and push the draft where you want it to go.