Cap exemption for players with less than 10 NHL GP

[JetsGM (Jacob)]

A topic that's come up for discussion quite a bit has been how to handle prospects (under 10 GP) in FA. Main argument has been that once free agency opens, there's going to be teams who immediately bid "3 years @ 2,000,000 per" offers on the top prospects leftover in FA and no one can counter it. The only downside to that is that once the prospect is called up, he will have a 2 million cap hit (which is 1.25 million above league minimum, so not a huge issue).

To counteract that, I've laid out a few options:

1 - Up the limit to a higher amount for players with under 10 GP. This would allow more flexibility for bidding on these prospects. Keep in mind, that contracts for players with less than 10 GP slide, so once they make the NHL and are called up, the contract signed in FA will be honored. In the poll, I placed it at 5 million per season, however if you think it should be a different amount, can add your comments in this thread.

2 - Players under 10GP with contracts above 2 million per season only have the amount ABOVE the 2 million count. For example, Player A signed for 2.5 million per season only has 500K count towards the cap. I avoided this with the original rule to avoid tracking problems when calculating contracts over 2 million. My preference is still to avoid it, but if the league feels this is the best option then we can implement it.

3 - Keep everything as is. Free agency will be crazy and it's first come, first serve on teams offering 3 years @ 2,000,000.

If anyone has a better suggestion, please add it in the comments below. Thanks!

[Deleted]

  I like most of option 3, but with a twist.


  Could we limit the number of contract offers per day. Let's allow only 5 initial offers for FA's per day.

[Jim Rutherford/Pens GM]

I think anything under 3ish million shouldn't count, 5 is a lot and lots of good players make 5 million.

To avoid teams cleaning up on fa, especially prospects, there should be a maximum amount of bids a team can make for 24 hrs, perhaps 3-5 (for prospects only or players in total).

This will spread out the talent and force GMs to make decisions rather than signing players left and right.

[Devils GM(Colin)]

I was thinking maybe not a bid/time limit, but just only be allowed to be in say 5 bidding wars at once. The time limit gives the advantage to whoever lays down the initial bids.

[Deleted]

I feel 5 bid is a tad high. The way I would go is have a limit of let's say 3 bid for anyone who's consider a prospect (10 games or less) and have no limit for the rest.  I would aslo prefer anything over 2M count toward our cap instead of counting the full cap because that player cap is 100K over the 2M mark. I understand it's harder to track but we (the staff) are here to help out.

[Smashville / PredsGM]

I'm with Washington, Option 3 but I would prefer something like you can only have three leading UFA prospect bids at one time.

Also, if we were to do the $5,000,000 rule. You could enforce the first resign at something like a %75 minimum of the players previous contract with a minimum 2 year deal.

[Deleted]

as mentioned previously, a limit to how many prospects a GM can sign either per day, or even go as far as per team

a limit is a good idea

[chris - Hartford Whalers]

Smashville had an interesting concept of resigns have to retain at least 75% of previous contract value

[Devils GM(Colin)]

Thing is, if a guy is good, hes worth that, if hes not you just let him walk. I mean i'm sure there will be situations in between those two extremes, but in general it won't scare many guys off

[Edmonton Oilers]

Yeah I agree that there should be some sort of limit on how many bids you can place per day. If its just a free for all and its first come first serve, the managers who have obligations irl will be at a huge disadvantage.

[Devils GM(Colin)]

As a GM that has a lot of free time right now, I completely agree.

[Deleted]

the bid limit per day idea on players with less than 10 nhl gp sounds like a good idea to me, i'd be in favor of 4-5.
I think it should be counted as bids in which you are currently the high bidder-(if the limit were 5 and you make 5 opening bids at the beginning of a day and someone raises you on 1 player immedieately, you would then have 1 more bid you could make that day(could be to re-raise or to bid on a different player)

we would need to define "a day" - would it change over at midnight? a different time? what time zone?

[Devils GM(Colin)]

A day would just be 24 hours since the last bid was made and whenever a bid is made it resets. We don't want an ebay auction style.

Also like the idea of bid limit counting as the leading bid. Not fair to punish a guy for making a bid and then deciding to not pursue him anymore once you've been overbid.

I also like the idea of the cap hit counting only for the overage of 2 Million and not going from nothing to 2M in one bid.

[JetsGM (Jacob)]

So to recap and I will create separate Yes/No polls for each issue:
- 5 leading bid limit on players with less than 10 GP
2 options here I would say.
1) Say 5 leading bids total until you are outbid or it is closed (24H) you cannot have a 6th
2) Say 5 leading bids per day (you can lead on 5 on Sep30, then add another 5 on Oct1)

My preference is for option 1 just because it requires a lot less tracking (I can simply look at latest post as opposed to looking at latest post + date since there's going to be a ton of bids at once)


- Instead of just for players under 10GP, for all players, we only count the overage on 2 million (Ex: Player A is paid 5 million and sent down, only 3 million counts against the cap) - this would be accomplished by adding a new field in rosters and Google Sheet called "Minors cap overage" and when a player is sent down who has a salary greater than 2 million, it will be split between 2 million and the overage. I'll set up the formulas to include this overage.

Ex:
Joffrey Lupul 5,000,000 waived to minors
(Clears)
On roster:
Minors cap overage:
Joffrey Lupul 3,000,000

Minors:
Joffrey Lupul 2,000,000

If you prefer to only have the overage applied for players under 10GP, please indicate so below.

For the polls, I want to set it up to be simply Yes/No votes and majority rules, so would prefer everything laid out and properly understood before I create them

[chris - Hartford Whalers]

To make it easy how about you can only initiate 5 bids per day on players < 9GP as it will be incredibly difficult keeping track of who is winning bids as this could be rapidly changing.

Can you also put preds option as a poll... Increase exemption to 5m for prospects and all RFA cannot be resigned for less than 75% previous contract value.

[Smashville / PredsGM]

Take it to the polls! Some good points have been raised

[Devils GM(Colin)]

I think the easiest way to is the leading bid thing, it wouldn't be that hard if we assigned all the mods too check periodically. 5 bids per day seems like a bit restrictive and may cause Free Agency to go for too long. It also would require going into every thread and counting each persons bid and checking the time stamp,that would be very frustrating.

[JetsGM (Jacob)]

Yeah, winning bids is easy to keep track of because I can see it directly from the thread summary page (last post), only need to be on the ball for cleaning up invalid posts or withdrawals. Needs to be simple enough to track at a glance. Think 5 leading bids at a time will be easy to track, and it forces GMs to be more strategic in who they target. Again if it's strictly leading bids, could up the limit higher to 7-10.

So far we will have 3 polls:
- Restrict amount of active bids
- Minors cap overage for all players over 2M
- 75% re-sign rule for 2-years for prospects (which tbh, if we aren't upping the limit, I'm not sure is really required)

[Devils GM(Colin)]

Is the minors overage over 2 Mil mean that if a guy makes 4 Mil and sent down he will only cost 2 instead of 4?

[Deleted]

This may seem too simple but why don't we just continue the dispersal draft but only for guys with less than 10 GP? That way, we can bid away on real NHL guys and there is no "cap" and for prospects it allows for a relatively fair and equitable distribution of the remaining prospects. We could easily go another 10 rounds for a prospect only draft.

Does that make sense?

[Jim Rutherford/Pens GM]

Sept 26, 2016 14:38:48 GMT -5 @ltcompton said:

This may seem too simple but why don't we just continue the dispersal draft but only for guys with less than 10 GP? That way, we can bid away on real NHL guys and there is no "cap" and for prospects it allows for a relatively fair and equitable distribution of the remaining prospects. We could easily go another 10 rounds for a prospect only draft.

Does that make sense?

Problem is time

[Edmonton Oilers]

^^All depends on if we could fit it into the schedule,but a prospect only draft would be cool. It would be controlled and might be the fairest option......and let's face it. Everybody loves to draft!

[Deleted]

I like the idea of the 5 limit bid on under 9gp and the $2M overage. don't know if the 75% rule is necessary is we add the overage rule. just my thoughts

[Deleted]

Two hour windows and we could bang it out (a prospect draft) in a couple of days, the bidding system for prospects just feels like we are trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. No one is going to make or break their team based on the next 10 prospects that they draft so we assign two hour windows and crank it. Frank (Edmonton GM) and I are in another league together where we use this system and it works great, there is no griping about waiting, if you miss your pick, you make it up whenever you get to it, in the meanwhile the draft continues. Salaries are based on actual salaries or we use the 750K rule for those that don't meet the league minimum or don't yet have a contract. That way, we don't have prospects making $4-5 million, which would be way out of whack with the salary structure for the rest of the league.

It's so much easier and more equitable than a free for all and tracking overages and so forth, if its a free for all I'm going to have 10 bids ready at 1 second after the free agent window opens and post them all simultaneously, it doesn't seem like a very equitable system, that's all. A fast dispersal draft for prospects is much easier to administer and more equitable plus we could even do it on Fantrax if we wanted.

[JetsGM (Jacob)]

Sept 26, 2016 16:48:56 GMT -5 @ltcompton said:

Two hour windows and we could bang it out (a prospect draft) in a couple of days, the bidding system for prospects just feels like we are trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. No one is going to make or break their team based on the next 10 prospects that they draft so we assign two hour windows and crank it. Frank (Edmonton GM) and I are in another league together where we use this system and it works great, there is no griping about waiting, if you miss your pick, you make it up whenever you get to it, in the meanwhile the draft continues. Salaries are based on actual salaries or we use the 750K rule for those that don't meet the league minimum or don't yet have a contract. That way, we don't have prospects making $4-5 million, which would be way out of whack with the salary structure for the rest of the league.

It's so much easier and more equitable than a free for all and tracking overages and so forth, if its a free for all I'm going to have 10 bids ready at 1 second after the free agent window opens and post them all simultaneously, it doesn't seem like a very equitable system, that's all. A fast dispersal draft for prospects is much easier to administer and more equitable plus we could even do it on Fantrax if we wanted.

This idea intrigues me. You must freeze the clock during the night with a selection window that small. From what, 12AM EST to 8 AM EST?