Alternative Salary Cap Structure

[omgitshim 902]

So one thing I see at times in these forums (and really in most sim leagues) is that players want to go into free agency to get into a bidding war and teams don't want to pay more than the minimum otherwise their team is now at a disadvantage. What if we had a way to do both? My idea is to add a second pool of money (let's call it, bonus bucks for now) that every team can use to pay players more than their minimum. For the most part, the current salary cap system would not change, the only difference is that every player will be required to sign their minimum cap amount. Instead, every team will have bonus bucks (let's say $10 million for example purposes) that they can use to either give players on their team extra money or use to bid up free agents. Let's say for example Randoms has a minimum salary of $5 million. Everyone that would want to sign him must sign him with $5 million of cap space. However, teams can use their bonus bucks to bid additional money on him. Maybe one team only offers $2 million in bonus bucks but another team can offer $4 million. Bonus bucks cannot be used to pay for a player's base salary; if you are already maxed on your salary cap, you can't use bonus bucks to sign another player. Every player's minimum value (which could now just be known as salary hit since it's normalized) must fit in the salary cap regardless of how many bonus bucks have been spent. Here's an example:

 

Toronto has $3 mil cap space and $5 mil bonus bucks

Calgary has $5 mil cap space but $0 bonus bucks

Vancouver has $4 mil cap space and $0.5 mil bonus bucks

 

Randoms has a salary hit of $5 mil

JB Rift has a salary hit of $4 mil

John Frostbeard has a salary hit of $3 mil

 

For Randoms, Calgary is the only one that can sign him because they have $5 mil cap space (Toronto has $8 mil in total, but they can only use $3 mil on the salary hit).

For JB Rift, both Calgary and Vancouver can sign him at $4 mil, but Vancouver can offer him $4.5 mil (While Calgary has $5 mil in cap space, that $5 mil can only be used on the salary hit, not as bonus money (though that can be a different conversation later))

For John Frostbeard, all three teams can sign him at $3 mil, Vancouver can offer $3.5 mil total while Toronto can dump the whole $8 mil onto him.

 

Bonus bucks can also be used to just give your current players extra money. No free agents to bid on? Just give all your actives an extra $1 mil for the season!

 

This might be a way to recoup some of the extra money that was floating in the system from the failed brands experiment (or maybe store prices may need to adjust upward a tick to account for the inflation). Overall I think this is a good way to give players the opportunity to engage in bidding wars without feeling like they would hurt the team in the long run.

[Rayzor_7 741]

So while you're mentioning this I'll drop mine in as well. You have a good idea and I had planned to look at working it into the one I had made but got busy.

 

 

[McWolf 3,115]

whatever to make FA interesting, tbh