How to Value Suspended Players in Drafts

              It’s August of 2025 - you’re on the clock in the 6^th round of your draft and you want a WR – options include Zay Flowers, Calvin Ridley, Jaylen Waddle, and … Rashee Rice. With Rice facing a six-game suspension, your head is spinning trying to balance the six zeros he will open the season with and his potential benefit to your roster down the stretch. Deciding if he is worth the pick seems to be arbitrary and calculus at the same time. How do you value a suspended player?

To start, it is important to understand what you were giving up when drafting Rice. Every draft pick in a fantasy draft carries an implied value over replacement player (VORP) associated with it. A replacement player represents the baseline player you can plug in at a given position (which we will define as QB12, RB24, WR36, or TE12). At Rice’s ADP of 65.5, you are expecting 0.61 points per game above replacement.

This means that for the first 6 weeks of the season, while your league mates would start a player providing 0.61 points over replacement, you will be forced to play an inferior, replacement level player (who would provide zero points over replacement). How much does this hurt you? How good does Rice have to be after the suspension is over to make up for it?

The following calculations use scoring history from my main home league dating back to 2018. It is a 10 team 1 QB PPR league with 2 flex spots as well as a DST and kicker (I haven’t won the battle to remove them yet). The scoring distribution has been slightly skewed right, centered around an average of 135.79.

If you play on ESPN and would like to customize these numbers to your league, you can use this this tool, which was created by a user by the name of “droans” on reddit. Note – this tool does not seem to be working for the 2025 season, but can still pull data for all other years.

Keeping all else equal, during Rice’s suspension, while your league mates would be projected 135.79 points per game, you would expect 135.18 (135.79-0.61). This yields a win rate of roughly 49.4%.

Although this sounds relatively meaningless, if Rice came back and simply performed how other players around his ADP did, our odds of winning the championship would fall from a pre-draft expectation of 10% (1/10) to 8.64%. This is because his missed games hurt our chances of making the playoffs, but more notably, our odds of getting a bye fall by about 1-1.5%. It is hard to overstate the value of a free win in the playoffs. For reference, if you are given a 50-point lead to start a game, you will win roughly 90% of the time, you’d still lose 1/10!

By simulating thousands of seasons given a 49.4% win rate for the first 6 weeks, focusing on the percentage of the time we win the championship, we can calculate how many PPG Rice would need to score after returning in order for our championship odds to breakeven at 10%. Doing so balances the weeks missed with the importance of the playoffs, giving us a much better idea of what drafting him truly entails.

At an average draft position (ADP) of 65.5 and a suspension of 6 games, Rice needed to score 1.82 points over replacement from weeks 7-17 to return on his draft. That equates to what we would expect from someone drafted in the middle of the 4^th round (ADP 42). The WR36 is expected to score 11.53 points per game, so Rice needed to score 13.35 after returning.

In Rice’s 17 previous games between 2023 and 2024, he had been averaging 16.3 PPG. While other complicating factors were influencing his ADP, namely recovering from an LCL injury and what looked like potential breakout of fellow WR Xavier Worthy down the stretch in the 2024 season, the market was likely overstating what his 6-game suspension meant.

This is not to say that every suspended player will be a value in fantasy drafts. It is all relative to when they are drafted and how many games they will miss. Thinking about suspensions in this way is simply a way for us to frame how we should think about these players and put numbers to what we are asking them to do.

The same logic can be used to evaluate injured players in draft season, although the added uncertainty regarding their return to play, ramp up period, and reinjury risk add complexity difficulty different to project. The table below contains players who were suspended headed into a season during the last 10 years. There appears to be no meaningful indication that players returning from a suspension will start slow the way we may worry an injured player would, making them much easier to value.

Note: ADP averaged across Sleeper and ESPN per FantasyPros

Attached is an excel model that calculates the post-suspension PPG being asked of a player at a given ADP. To use it - input the players position, ADP, length of suspension, as well as the number of teams in your league and how many make the playoffs then click the green run buttons! If the model does not find an answer run it again – it may take a few attempts for it to converge on an answer.

Please note - the calculator works better for players drafted with and ADP at or below 78. Past that point, VORP falls below zero, making a draft pick's impact on your lineup difficult to project.

In order to use the calculator click file - create a copy - download a copy. Macros must be enabled in order fo rth ebuttons in the workbook to be functional.

Calculator Here