Saturday, August 9, 2014

Open Comment Thread for Potential Rule Change - Cash Trades: Fixing It

Let's say in the thread about cash-only trades the overwhelming sentiment is that change needs to be made (or regardless of comments, I decide to change it unilaterally).

What would be a good fix?

Things to keep in mind:
  • Avoid as many different rules for different times of the season as possible
  • Avoid unnecessary difficulty and complexity for the website and general administration of the game
  • Avoid a lot of extra steps on the part of owners
  • Maintain options for teams...including how to get some extra cash if needed.
Some possibilities, with one or more of the above concepts in simplicity violated in each suggestion:
  1. Eliminate cash-only trades altogether.
  2. Disallow cash-only trades after Week 15.
  3. A pass-through-waiver system for cash-only trades after Week 15 - or maybe all trades for the last few weeks of the trade season. (But the weekly free agent pickup process is our real implementation of a waiver system).
  4. An auction system for cash-only trades after Week 15 - Team puts up a player on the blocks within the first 1-2 days of a transaction period (kind of like our current flurry of broadcast email messages) - and teams have until the transaction deadline to submit a blind bid - highest bid wins.
  5. Some minimum fixed cash amount required to be sent in the trade - say, $500..or $1000 (pick a number).
  6. Some minimum cash amount required to be sent in the trade based on player salary - say 10% or 25% of the player's salary must be offered up to get the player.
The auction system goes to the highest bidder...but provides no control to the team trading away the player - you might prefer to trade him outside your division or conference.

Either minimum cash proposal actually funnels even more cash back to the team dumping the player, but perhaps limits the pool of possible buyers or makes them think a bit more about it (pay more cash + pay the pro-rated salary).

Other suggestions?  Or thoughts on these?

4 comments:

Rob Elias said...

I'm against limiting cash trades, but I love the idea of the auction system. If you had that as an option, I think it would see a lot of use. Everyone would get a shot at the guy and the sellers would do even better. I'd install the auction system -all year- regardless of whether we change anything.

Phil said...

I like the auction idea a lot. Gets the seller more money and discourages collusion. Gives guys like us who can't check our teams everyday a chance to get the player.

Tom Twomey said...

Agree 100%. I have had some people give me more money than I've asked for in a cash trade scenario so I would take their offer. I think if the team with the player he wants to trade for cash opts to put him into an auction that would be great! It's rare but there are some occasions that I don't want to sell my player to a particular team who is in my division for competitive reasons. An auction takes that away.

jason said...

I agree with Tom that there are sometimes situations that you don't want to trade a player to a particular team because of competitive balance.

Also, with an auction style you would have to wait the full time you set for it and I know that there are plenty of times that I want a trade to go through as fast as possible in order to be able to move on to whatever my next move is for the week.