There’s no question the draft is a very important part of playing in a season-long fantasy league. Have a bad draft, and it’s unlikely you can recover and finish in the money. But having a good draft doesn’t guarantee you a championship either. It will be the moves you make during the season that will be the difference between first and third or the difference between finishing in the cellar and finishing respectably in the middle of the pack.

In-season moves can be broken up into different periods of the season. What you do and, perhaps more importantly, what you don’t do in the first month or two of the season are key to improving your final standing. Then how you choose to address your team via trades and waiver pickups in the second half of the season are critical.

Early in the year the key is to avoid overreactions. First, it’s probably best to ride it out with any player you drafted in the top half of the draft who struggles early on. Understand that weird things happen in small sample sizes and, more often than not, players will end up performing at a level reasonably close to what you expected over the long haul.

Make sure you have an understanding of statistics like BABIP, strand rate and home run rate so you know when players are simply being unlucky. Also, understand statistics that reflect a real change in skill and talent level, strikeout and walk rates being the most reliable of those stats and the ones that tend to stabilize the quickest. Only when you see significant variations in numbers like that over at least a sample size of a month should your opinions of a player begin to change substantially.

Where you can make moves early in the season is at the bottom of your roster, and you can do so fairly aggressively. Little is expected of players at the bottom of your roster, and predicting breakouts among players drafted in the back half of a draft is difficult to do. You’re often looking to catch lightning in a bottle at that stage of the draft, so you should not hesitate to make waiver claims when an undrafted player flashes upside early in the season. Consider the stats mentioned above to gauge a player’s long-term viability, but it’s OK to gamble a bit on those types of players. There’s not a lot of risk involved.

Once you get into the season a bit, it becomes more about what your weaknesses are and whether you can deal from your strengths to affect those weaknesses. So many fantasy conversations revolve around which player is better than another, but those conversations often lack specific team context.  A player’s total contributions in all relevant fantasy categories may be greater than those of another, but the other player might have more value to a team in need of production in a specific category where the other player excels.

When it comes to trading in the back half of the season, it is important to evaluate trades in the vacuum of your circumstances. If you can acquire a player who will help your team in an area where it struggles, it may be OK to trade away a better overall player to acquire the payer with the specific skillset you need. You obviously don’t want to give away a much better, well-rounded player just to acquire a player with one specific skill. But as long as the overall contributions of both players are reasonably comparable, it is OK to trade away the player you think might be slightly better overall if the player you’re getting in return will directly address a need.

When it comes to waiver moves late in the season, addressing specific needs is the most important consideration. Waiver moves are just turning over the bottom of your roster, so anyone you’re cutting should not be a significant overall contributor. In that case it’s certainly OK to cut a better overall player to acquire one that addresses a specific need because the player being cut isn’t a significant contributor.

The larger point here is that you should be well prepared for your draft and rely primarily on your preliminary projections for a player. Believe in the guys you believe will be big contributors, and don’t be afraid to move on from those who don’t have high upside.