Fantasy Football Trades Week 12: DeVonta Smith, Rachaad White, Garrett Wilson, Amari Cooper, Mike Evans

We are getting close to the end of the fantasy football season, and some leagues may have already had their trade deadlines. If you’re reading this article, hopefully your league is still allowing trades as we enter Week 12 (although I used to read fantasy articles even after all my teams had been eliminated, so I won’t judge if you’re just here for the takes). Any fantasy football trades made now can have a huge impact on your team’s championship hopes, so it’s more important than ever to make sure you get good value.

That's where FantasySP's tools come in: We can use the FantasySP Fantasy Assistant to find players that have the most Expected Trade Interest (ETI) and then cross-reference with the Trade Value Chart to see how much those players are worth. Here are this week’s leaders in ETI:

DeVonta Smith leads the way, as the Eagles’ WR2 has been a thoroughly disappointing fantasy asset in recent weeks even as Philadelphia looks like one of the best teams in the league. He is followed by Rachaad White coming off the Buccaneers’ bye and then three star receivers all tied at 15% ETI. Let’s break them all down.  

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Best Fantasy Football Trades To Make Week 12

Sell Low On DeVonta Smith

This is a move that might be hard to make. If you can’t get anyone to bite at even a fraction of his name value, the best plan may just be to hold Smith and hope something changes in Philly. However, I'm hoping that Smith's high ETI indicates that there is at least some sort of market for him in fantasy football leagues.

Smith is still a very talented receiver, one of the best WR2s in the league. There are just multiple structural issues that are making him essentially non-startable in fantasy football right now. The most important is that the Eagles have turned into the most conservative offense in the league. Since returning from their bye in Week 5, Philadelphia leads the league by a solid margin in pass rate below expected with a brutal -8.7% average. They have been below expectation in every single game and at least 7% below in every week but one. And, with a suddenly elite defense and an explosive run game, their expected pass rates tend to be pretty low to start with. Jalen Hurts is averaging just 21.8 attempts (15.3 completions) over the last six games.

This issue is compounded by the fact that Smith shares the field with one of the best receivers in the league in A.J. Brown. AJB ranks fourth in the NFL with a 29% target share and fifth with a 36% first-read target share. On an already low-volume offense, that doesn’t leave many targets to go around. In seven games with Brown active, Smith is averaging a 21% target share, which equates to just five targets per game. He still has the talent and big-play ability to have quality days with that usage, but it greatly reduces both his floor and ceiling outcomes. The Eagles do have decent matchups coming up, but I would still look to move Smith for a player in a more fantasy-friendly situation.

Sell High On Rachaad White

Since returning from a foot injury that caused him to miss Week 6, Rachaad White has been on fire. He has scored double-digit Half-PPR points in each of the Buccaneers’ four games since then, including two separate weeks in the top 10 fantasy running backs. However, I don’t expect him to keep up that level of production. The most obvious reason to predict regression for White is touchdowns, as he racked up five touchdowns (one on the ground and four through the air) in those four games. That’s not likely to continue, especially given he is by no means a red zone bell cow: In those four games, he played just 57% of the Buccaneers’ red zone snaps.

That final stat points to the bigger issue with White, which is that he is stuck in a committee with rookie Bucky Iriving, who has been one of the best pure rushers in the league this season. Since White’s return from injury, he has actually been significantly outcarried by the rookie, 38 to 29 (Sean Tucker also has 10 carries in that time, but he has been phased out completely of late). To be fair, White is the clear leader in the passing game, with a 47% route participation rate and a solid 14% target share. His role on passing downs also means that White has the edge with a 56% snap rate. 

However, the Buccaneers’ remaining schedule and team situation projects better for Irving’s role than White’s. For one, the return of Mike Evans will likely mean fewer targets to go around for RBs, cutting into White’s main source of value. For another, five of the Buccaneers’ six remaining matchups in the fantasy season are against teams they should be able to easily beat: the Giants, Panthers twice, Raiders, and Cowboys. Three of those four teams also rank in the bottom six in EPA allowed per rush. I know it seems odd to use a good rushing schedule as a reason to sell a running back, but I simply don’t see White, who has been a hugely inefficient rusher for multiple years, being the one to take advantage of these matchups. If you can use his recent hot streak and the juicy schedule to move him, I’d do it. 

Rapid-Fire Wide Receiver Takes

Normally, I cover the three leaders in ETI, but this week there is a three-way tie for third in ETI between three talented wide receivers. Here are my quick takes on what to do with these guys in the fantasy football trade market.

Sell Amari Cooper

Even with Keon Coleman sidelined by a wrist injury (and Dalton Kincaid out, too, for good measure), Cooper posted just a 49% route participation rate in Week 11. He has been making plays fairly consistently when he is on the field, with 2.18 yards per route run since moving to Buffalo. But the Bills simply don’t seem to have space for him to run a full route share. There is some chance he gets there eventually — he was trending up before suffering a wrist injury that caused him to miss Weeks 9 and 10, so maybe his limited usage in Week 11 was still a result of that injury. But the Bills are on bye in Week 12. Assuming it then takes him a few more weeks to lock down a full-time role (if he ever does that with Coleman healthy), the first week Cooper would be trustable in fantasy lineups is Week 15, already the fantasy football playoffs. Every week matters right now, so it’s better to have someone you can trust in your lineup right away, even if they come with a theoretically lower ceiling. 

Buy Garrett Wilson

I am a long-time Garrett Wilson hater, and this isn’t a super hard stance — I wouldn’t pay top-tier prices to acquire him. But I think the vibes surrounding the Jets’ offense may finally have gotten so bad that Wilson is actually undervalued relative to his potential production. After all, Wilson is coming off back-to-back miserable outings, and the Jets are on bye this week. Their GM was just fired, and we’re getting reports that New York’s owner Woody Johnson wanted to bench Aaron Rodgers. This season could hardly have gone worse for the Jets as an organization. But none of that really matters at the end of the day for fantasy football. What does matter is that, even if we only consider games since Davante Adams arrived, Garrett Wilson is averaging 8.2 targets per game. He has a 25% target share and a 44% air yards share in this offense in that time frame. And even I have to admit that he is a hugely talented young receiver. Wilson is going to turn all that volume into points, and it’s worth trying to see if you can add him to your roster at a discount.

Hold Mike Evans

I originally considered having Evans as a Buy, but I’m not convinced anyone is really looking to move him. We just got news today that he will be returning in Week 12 from a hamstring injury that has caused him to miss the last three weeks and be heavily limited in the two weeks before — no fantasy manager who held Evans through all that wants to let him go before he even sees the field. However, I’m certainly not recommending you sell Evans on the hype, either. Baker Mayfield is playing incredibly this season, and Evans should see a massive target share now that Chris Godwin is done for the year. He's only at 335 yards for the season right now, which means he’ll need 665 yards over the final seven weeks (95 per game) to keep his streak of 1,000-yard seasons alive. Can he get there? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes it close. 

Ted Chmyz is a fantasy football contributor for FantasySP. Find him on Twitter @Tchmyz for more fantasy content or to ask questions.