MiniFubbles Ep. 21 - They Took Our Jobs!

[MubbleFubbles 1,290]

 

Talking about the situation @nurxbrought up about active players not having teams.

[Spartan 4,402]

So I definitely agree that the league has been slow to react with some of these issues. I have said before that I think depreciation and salary brackets/cap/contract structure should have been handled with the E rollout, but just weren't. We've tried to get some of these pieces done, but with all the time into hybrid attributes right afterwards, the BoG ended up becoming quite sluggish for a couple seasons. Depreciation was changed on a timeline later than initially planned which has definitely factored into the issue today. Contract structure and cap changes have been fairly conservative areas since we hoped that addressing TPE inflation sources and depreciation would cover some of those issues. 

 

From a personal perspective, I'm quite hesitant to make aggressive cap changes since a lot of the time, I can identify ways that I would so to speak "abuse" said changes to make a more competitive team. We are discussing some contract structure changes, and have discussions on long term salary changes as well that make more sense with 9 season careers and TPE inflation. We are also discussing how to get actives prioritized over IA's without disproportionately helping teams who commit to egregious contract lengths or values, and getting them out of cap issues of their own makings. 

 

I also don't love abolishing the IA re-signing aspects mainly because of the positional fits. I think this season's issue stems from an excess number of forwards, but we also see teams with a shortage of defensemen. I wouldn't expect forwards to be re-signed unless they were still semi-active like Robert Wilk in D.C., but I do get teams re-signing or claiming IA defensemen like Juice Box and Harkat Mulds. Mulds has been a popular player to bounce around teams as an IA D-man, but to one of your points, he was never re-signed by the team he initially went IA on. It's not a case of a GM reaping the rewards of not doing their job developing the player. It's just that teams had a need for a 4th d-man and he was a piece that got retained or moved. Also if we just dropped IA re-signing entirely and didn't have an active FA class like this, like most other seasons, it'd essentially be rebuilders claiming IA's with their high priority to flip them right back to contenders. Or a different contender might pick up the same player. I just don't think there's a reason to reactively drop that rule because of this one offseason.

 

Overall though, your podcast was good food for thought and hopefully the above provides some clarity and transparency on where my head's at and what we're trying to do in the BoG. I think we could get some solutions out for the current and the future fairly soon, just depends on Blue approval and ease of implementation.