kyuss wroteCOLON
That doesn't mean we can't further improve.
(See my next post when it comes, if I manage to put it together before having to leave)
Later than I hoped for, but here is what I was hinting at yesterday.
There is one obvious big difference between what we are doing and how the NHL work: free agency.
So, if we want to give bottom teams a chance to improve a bit more quickly than today, that's what we should work on (usually they have more cap room than other teams).
I know FA is considered not do-able in BBKL, but it's only impossible to do it the way the NHL does (we don't have players' agents and we don't want to manage open biddings). I think implementing some sort of FA is actually possible.
In the past I thought about something along these lines (keep in mind this is the basic idea, which could be developed & polished as we prefer):
- the new contract an UFA get in real life would be the final request the player's agent would make to our team.
Just like in real life, teams could resign or lose their UFAs depending on their cap room.
- we would record rosters at the trade deadline. Impending UFAs would not be tradable from the deadline till all of them of such bbkl team have been signed in the NHL, or until our September deadline at the latest, see following point (btw, how many times a NHL team trade an impending UFA between season's end and September? at most they trade the rights to talk with that player, no big deal difference.. )
- all UFAs signed in the NHL within September (or whatever date we choose) can be resigned by their original team if updating his salary that team can stay under the cap when considering their deadline roster. When an UFA gets his new contract his BBKL team has X days to decide whether to keep that player or let him go. If adding his new salary to the deadline payroll the team exceeds next season's cap, than the player gets automatically released.
If the player is retained, the deadline payroll is updated accordingly. When another UFA of that team is signed
the available cap room to fit him in will be already reduced by the previous signing (something that obviously was to be taken into consideration by the GM when deciding whether or not to retain the previous player. Teams can kind of choose which UFAs let go, like it works in real life).
Those (together with the ones left unsigned in real life beyond the established date) are the players that would become real UFAs in our league.
This would give some control to GMs and we would not depend on the fact in real life the impending UFA gets resigned or not by the original team before indeed becoming a UFA.
Even if the player gets resigned before the end of his contract, he still becomes UFA for our purposes.
BBKL GMs would be the one having to care about having enough space to resign them (guessing the NHL unrestricted free agent's new salary would also become a useful skill/exercise in bbkl, way more than now). They could decide to keep more cap room for their impending UFAs while entering the playoffs, or they might choose otherwise; and once unable to resign some of their eventual UFAs, they could still decide who let go and who not (if they can retain any of them).
When a RFA gets signed his cap hit gets updated in the deadline roster, affecting its payroll and the room for the remaining UFAs to be resigned as a result. RFAs can be traded after the deadline though, if that happens their cap hit on the deadline roster will remain the same it was back then.
I think it would be a good thing to have a limited number of UFAs any team can sign each off-season, to increase the chances there will be some UFAs available.
The trades after the end of the season would still go on as far as all the non UFA players (assets) are related, but the cap space teams would gain could only be used to later 'sign' new players (other UFAs), not their former players. To resign our own UFAs only the cap room available in the trade deadline roster would count.
As for who gets priority to sign UFAs that are not retained by their previous BBKL team:
my idea would be using the Pro-Draft (that's how I would rename the now called Waiver-Draft).
When a team gets on the clock, it has the chance to choose between picking from the waiver draft pool or the available UFAs.
I'm sure we would need to discuss details and think of things I didn't think about, but it's not like we don't have the time: we are the only ones deciding how soon we would implement this..