The previous article looked at the trades Ireland made involving the 2013 draft. The conclusions was that he had a +550.2 net gain in points based upon the traditional draft value chart. Before I move into the recent work that people have done I decided it would be good to get a greater picture of how good +550 points is.

I used espn draft trade tracker to catalog all 26 trades executed during the 2013 draft. I summed all the positives and negative points of every trade.

For trades involving future picks, I made the assumption that a pick one year out is worth one round less than a pick this year. For example, if you receive a 2014 5th round pick, I used the value of the middle pick of the 6th round to assign the future pick a value. There was one trade involving a 2015 7th round pick. I assigned zero points to that pick. I honestly can't believe people haggled over the value of a trade using a 7th round pick, 2 years out.

Since I cannot assign a reliable value to players traded, I took them out of the equation and summed the points. Then I report who the team traded for and/or traded away.

Here are the results for 2013:

There were 28 teams that made some kind of trade on draft day. 15 of them wound up plus or minus 8 points. The first pick of the 7th round is worth 8.6 points. So they did not really gain or lose much value in the trades, just jockeyed position. Ireland notched +550.2 points but traded away Devon Bess. He absolutely blew away the field. The next closest was San Francisco with +142.8 points.

Obviously the trade with Oakland was a huge trade that makes up most of the points (520 out of 550.2). However, even if you take away the Oakland trade, Ireland still accumulated 30.2 points, minus whatever you would assign to Devon Bess. For comparison, 30.2 points would still put Ireland at #4 on the list.

I even went back and assessed every trade for the previous 4 years (2010-2013 drafts). Ireland's score of +550.2 is by far the best trade over that period. Even better than St. Louis' trade down which gave Washington RGIII (only +135 points).

Using the traditional draft value chart, it is very clear: Ireland did an overall superb job of trades on draft day this year. Even though most of the points came from one trade, it was a huge gain in value for the Dolphins. I will offer a caveat: There are issues with the draft value chart, which is what the updated version I will present next seeks to improve upon. The new version will offer a different evaluation of everyone's bartering skills.

Be sure to download our browser toolbar for Firefox, Internet Exploder, and now Google Chrome. We keep it updated with all the current links that keeps us informed.

Download the Free Phinfever Browser Toolbar