Free Agency madness

[Kings GM (Jesse)]

I don't think I'm alone in the frustrations involved with FA bidding. I had a couple thoughts; some a little wacky, but interesting perhaps.

1) Clarify language regarding bidding. Active (winning) bids CONNOT exceed team's current cap + $5M offseason allowance. These bids are immediately invalid and bidding stops at the offending teams initial bid, preventing the price to be driven up unnecessarily.

2) Silent auction style bidding.....with a twist. Bidding is open for 48 hours from initial posting. After the time is up, an average $/term is calculated, and the bid closest to that wins the player. Keeps FA bidding reasonable and probably much closer to market value. Also prevents ridiculous albatross contracts being created.

No team can win more than 2 players per position. If they bid on multiple, and happen to win more than 2, preference will be given to the players they bid on first. Like waivers. The 2nd closest to the AVG bid would win the player after that.

I think it's an interesting idea; definitely worth discussing.

Thanks

[Avalanche GM (Robert)]

Understandable of frustration with this but not sure what is best route to take ... Blind bidding prob best ... but do each position one at a time and reset salaries before next fa bidding takes place so teams know how much can be spent and if positions available on roster to continue bidding ... but see what happens in thread

[Sharks GM (McBitter)]

Not sure personally about blind bidding but all for the idea of 2 winning bids per position max for each GM!

Mostly i find way too many loopholes for certain GMs to manipulate cap dollars and roster spots! Biggest loophole is offseason IR!!! If a player is projected to miss the start of the season it should be allowed however if a player is having offseason surgery and is projected to be ready to go before the season begins then we should not be allowed to place that player on IR gaining that cap and spot for FA bidding! Things like that contribute to the madness that free agency has become! Work within your confines! I am fine with pending RFAs not counting towards an offseason roster spot! I also think every GM should be responsible for planning ahead where as if waiver drops are done that GM should take into acct the 48 hours it takes to take effect therefore if a waived player doesnt clear before winning bid is awarded your bid is invalid due to insufficient cap space

[Deleted]

for new gms like me trying to build from the bottom up,having restrictions would be a big turn off to be honest.i know I had to have multiple bids, but there was a method to my madness.i do understand the frustration, but coming from experiance , that's just free agency in any league.

[Kings GM (Jesse)]

Well as it stands, I'd guess probably 50% of the league is already turned off FA or don't participate at all.
Most in this league are in or have been in multiple leagues, so we understand it too. I'd sooner see something that entices more of the league to consider joining, rather than watch an annual race to the bottom.

[Flames GM (Beamer)]

Will definitely look into all suggestions here for certain. I know I missed all the stuff from Saturday onwards (still out in the boonies until next week when i hit Ottawa), they I'll finally have semblance of a normal bit of time to update rosters, etc.... sorry timing of the vacation was at the worst time. Blame the Mrs.

[Deleted]

I think number 1 is a must and agreed about IR. I'm in disagreement on the limits of how many players you can have and blind bidding wouldn't be fair as some GMs will need to see that value. The increase in salary cap increases bids.

Some people aren't into free agency and some aren't into the draft and some aren't into waivers as well...is what it is unfortunately.

[Blues GM (Wood)]

FA has become clusterfuck...only in terms of going over roster space taking away from other GM's trying to add on.

Personally I'm not fond of RFA not counting against roster space.

[Kraken GM (Mike)]

I agree with the mass.. The rosters dealing with IR and waiver drops needs to be done prior to draft... The idea here is to have a clear picture of dollars team have.. Not to be a bad guy here.... but with this crew and experience within, we might look into dropping the 5 million rule and follow hard cap like irl..

I dont want the bidding to stop when teams get frustrated with the process.. As Beamer stated.. All suggestions will for sure be looked into ..

[Sabres GM (GameFace)]

Hello everyone

I’ve been on vacation and catching more fish than all Jesus’ disciples combined, so hadn’t checked out this thread till this morning. Jotted down a few notes, but the list of all this is that I’m confused by the perceived problem. In my view, Free Agency Frenzy went extremely well. Not just for Mighty Buffalo, but the league in general. I thought it was managed effectively and that some very shrewd contracts were given out.

I’m new around here and this was the first Free Agent Extravaganza Man Auction I’ve been through in this league, so keep that in mind and understand I have no authority, nor perspective on how this league’s Male Yard Sale is supposed to flow, but if we’re all throwing our thoughts in the wishing well, then I’ll dig into my pockets for some change.

With all the power of Grayskull, I STRONGLY urge you not to adopt a blind bidding process. Like communism, it can be a tempting idea that conjures visions of an effective, and even fun, method for managing a populace, but the only times I’ve ever seen it actually applied, it’s been a disaster. Thats anecdotal, and I’m sure others have seen it work beyond an alluring theory and in actual practice but, in my experience, it leads to larger, more untenable contracts because owners only have one crack at ‘their guy’ and they don’t want to miss out so they put in a bid that’s higher than anything they think another owner will go. Most owners will have a max in their head of how high they’re willing to fly to own a guy. Making the process blind would make each owner go to their max immediately and, at least in some cases, higher than their identified max because they’ll get night sweats about another owner bidding more. I think blind bidding would be an absolute nightmare both during the process as well as after as we’ll see a generation of FA contracts not based on bidding, but on an owner’s panic over missing out. It would also rob us of the ability to score a guy cheaper than we expected, because it robs us of the opportunity to lowball and bid less than our max when we don’t know if other owners aren’t that excited about the guy we’re excited about.

I appreciate the IR loophole has caused some concern. I used it myself with Jordan Martinook to free up 2M in cap during The Process. However, I question who would be the man put in charge of determining whether a player will be ready for the first week of the season. Everyone responds to every injury and surgery differently and, in a world where every matchup win/loss counts, every owner has a right to want to win Week 1. In some cases, it is obvious. There are players who have surgery and we know, WE KNOW, they will be out for weeks or months into the season (See noted cat enthusiast, Roussel, Antoine)There are also guys we think, WE THINK, will respond perfectly to their offseason date with Nurse Joy (See the aforementioned Martinook, Jordan) We can’t know though. Even if we do have medical professionals in this league, unless they’re the medical professionals actually performing the player’s surgery and monitoring his rehab, we just cannot know for certain. There are always a handful of players whom the Internet is sure will play the first game of the season and wind up missing the first week or so. The owners of those players need to be able to do whatever they can to win that first week, because missing the playoffs by one game is a very real thing that happens to great men. Who among us has the ability to determine which hurt players will play, and when, in a world where science is imperfect, injuries affect the afflicted differently and all powerful men respond differently to rehab?

Additionally, in the same vein that we do not know how any individual player will respond to a lingering injury carrying over from the past season or recover/recuperate from an offseason surgery, we also do not know which RFA will sign by the deadline. We can have solid knowledge based on adequate research that begats a foundation for thought and an idea of which RFA’s will be on our team and signed in time for Week 1, but we cannot know and to transform that thought into fact would be not only a foolhardy exercise, but an irresponsible action for any owner. For example, I do not think Brock Boeser will sign before the September deadline. It’s a gut feeling. He’s American, so the lure to Europe is likely less with him. But I don’t know what he thinks of Europe or how much he wants and I just don’t feel like Benning is going to be able to reel him in without a holdout. I think Marner will sign, but many on the Internet aren’t sure. I could be and likely am wrong on one or both those specific RFA’s. Owners needs to be able to at least have the option to Feng shui a contingency plan together.

In my view, the be all end all rule to rule all rules is the one that demands every owner must all be within the cap and roster size confines by the first day of the season. This rule is reinforced by the very smart ban on trading signed FA’s in the offseason we sign them. That’s a smart rule because not only does it mean each owner needs to make it their beeswax to have plans in place to be cap compliant, but also deters ‘bidding up’ a player in the hopes of just trading him. Smart rule.
Regardless of any loopholes an owner may lurk through to achieve greatness, there’s no escaping The Dean when he struts through the hallways swinging his flashlight menacingly on Season’s Eve. Mismanaging FA carries a worst case of scenario of not accruing points and I don’t think we have any owners who don’t take that seriously.

Attached to all of this is the fact that we all know, appreciate and abide by: it is vitally important to have a strategy in all things always. We need to remember, though, that in this specific fantasy we all share, it is often equally vital to keep that strategy as much of a secret as we can to maximize the effectiveness with which we steer our respective and respected franchises.

Individual owners will make moves with full knowledge of the corresponding moves that move will make consequential. We need to trust that those moves are being planned out in good faith and allow individual strategies to play out in pursuit of The Process. Doing away with the 5M offseason overage is likely a very good idea to keep tensions down, though that does take us a step back from the IRL our collective fantasy is designed to emulate. Preventing owners from bidding on more players than they have roster spots for is also prudent, though I believe that’s already a rule and I do think a little leeway can be given when it comes to a guy having a scale dude on his active roster rather than his minors list, when it’s clear they can just send that guy down to make room for the man he’s trying to buy.

I also find it overly punitive and unproductive to force owners to wait 48 hours for Minor League Uselessness to clear before making a bid. The 48-hour waive window, in my view, is not for the owner waiving the player, it is to give time to owners wanting to claim that player to do so. It’s all well and good to say owners should plan ahead, but we all know how paramount it is for owners to also have the flexibility to adjust and adapt based on real-time market fluctuations. If a dude waives a dude you want and claim, you can’t plan ahead for that. If an owner has waived players to free up the cap needed to bid on a strong man they yearn for, I don’t understand what the point would be for forcing that owner to wait 48 hours for those moves to become official while FA bids expire.

I can’t see how a rule demanding only two active winning bids at a time would make sense as some years some teams will have more than 2 holes and I see no reason not to let them bid on players they have room and cap for. If you need 3 centres, and can only buy two, how does that compute with creating a competitive team? I can see how an owner who’s been around for a while and has had time to build their own roster so as to avoid having multiple holes at the same position would want it, but it would absolutely hinder anyone trying to compete with an incomplete roster.

This is all postfaced by my confusion about what the problem is. Again, new here so maybe I’m missing something, but I absolutely do not see a clusterfuck. Where is it? What are the abundance of terrible contracts that have led to this thread? This was the first Free Agency Frenzy I’ve participated in in this league, but I’m also old and have seen my fair share of Free Agency Frenzies. I found this one we’re currently in to be extremely reasonable with smart bids being made and shrewd rosters assembled cunningly. It is an extremely impressive league with smart owners IMO and my opinion of it was strengthened by the restraint and the cleverness shown during this period.

I could not disagree more wholeheartedly or vehemently with the suggestion that high prices scared owners away from bidding or participating in Free Agency. I think the owners who didn’t participate simply didn’t want to. Either there was not any men available that were attractive to them, or there playing the very common strategy of waiting for FA to play out and then trading for the guys they like. It’s a way to add a 5M guy by trading a 3M guy and only increasing your cap by 2M instead of buying the 5M guy and increasing your cap the full amount. I don’t play that, but I can see how it could be a smart thing to do.

If we review the Bought Men, it’s easy to see that the Top players quickly became unaffordable for most:

Matt Duchene was the consensus top C available and was signed to a massive 11.5M five year contract.

Anders Lee was, in my opinion and seemingly many others’, the top winger available and was signed to a three year 11.5M contract. A case could be made for Pavelski being the top W eligible player, he went for 9M and two years.

Sergei Bobrovsky was unquestionably the top G available, he was signed to a five year 10M contract.

The defencemen didn’t really have, IMO, a clear top guy. From a quick look at the spreadsheet, it looks like Jake Gardiner scored the highest contract in the group at four years, 6M.

Those are all very big contracts, but the top guy at a position is always, ALWAYS, going to get a big contract in a fantasy league free agent market and it’s hard for me to see any glaring albatross here.

Matt Duchene plays a premium position at C and should, by all accounts, do at least reasonably well in Nashville. If we ignore the apparent upside of being a 2nd line centre on a very good offence and a key contributor on a power play where he faces no competition for Top Dog, we still can see that his point totals only need to stay stagnant to his average output and his face off wins only need to come in at a reasonable 48 per cent clip, for this contract to be helpful and worth it while also being high. Good players cost money and good owners keep room for one big contract amongst their more reasonable ones.

Anders Lee is risky because he kinda sorta smells like Lucic to me, but again, he’s a clear top guy at a position and with the contract only being three years, that takes a portion of the risk away. Lee is not going to turn into a pumpkin this season or next, IMO IMO IMO, and his point totals from last season, especially when you consider his hits/goals output, easily make him worth a significant percentage of a team’s cap. Again, not a contract I’d have signed him to, but I can’t argue with someone wanting his CAT contributions enough to pay him this and the fact that it’s only three years helps limit the likelihood of an albatross. Shrewd signing. Ditto for Joe at 2 years. He’s a solid player and will probably put up big points this year, at least that’s just as likely as any other player doing well so he’s as reasonable a dice roll as any for those wanting to spend big cap on a champ.

I do not believe any owner went into this experience expecting to sign the above guys for a ‘reasonable’ dollar amount. They were always going to be expensive.

Goalies all went for more than I was expecting. Goalies are an absolute premium here. I know this because I took over a team that didn’t have one and learned VERY quickly how hard they are to acquire. Bobrovsky was very far and away the best goalie available and owners must consider how rare it is for a team to be able to land a top goalie without giving up any assets other than cap space. Bobrovsky also raises an interesting consideration in a fantasy league and an ethos I’ve always held: top players should almost always yield higher contracts in fantasy than in real life. If bobrovsky is worth 10 M for seven years to the panthers, he’s most certainly worth 10M for five years for a fantasy team. That’s my opinion and I understand anyone who might disagree, but you should never expect to sign a guy for less than his IRL value IMO. I appreciate not everyone follows this ethos, but, in my view, if you can score a top player for a contract better than his IRL one, you’ve earned a champion’s honour.

Our beloved Canucks owner gave Bob a Bigtime Contract, but when you look at what other top goalies like Price and Fleury have been traded for, each carrying similar AAV’s, landing Bob for this price looks akin to a coup.

We don’t know what team Gardner will be on yet, but as the D squad’s Tom Man, again, he was going to get money. Nothing else to say about him, I’m just happy the IRL Canucks didn’t sign him. 6M is what I’m thrilled to be paying Edler after his real life signing at the buzzer, Gardner is ranked higher than Edler on multiple lists.

Those are the top guys. The best of the best of this year’s crop of unowned men. It makes sense that owners might have been scared off from pursuing them knowing they would be the most expensive options available at their position.
If we take those guys out of the equation, we’re left with an assortment of affordable, lesser-than, options. Where my issue with the notion that big contracts scared owners away from signing anyone is in the next tiers of perfectly capable players.

If you needed a D and balked at paying Gardiner 6M, fine, but I won’t believe an owner who tells me Tyler Myers’ 4M AAV was the boogeyman. Canucks bias and all that, but Myers is at least an average D before you consider the massive longterm IRL contract he just signed. He is guaranteed to get ice time in Vancouver, IF HEALTHY IF HEALTHY IF HEALTHY, and has shown durability during his career. We know what his floor is and his ceiling is a bit higher now that he’s on a team that, by all accounts, values him more than the team he played for last year. We have to at least feel safe in assuming his ice time will go up and there’s no reason to think his other CAT costs will drop significantly. A team in desperate need of a D to fill a hole would have done well to bid on him. And, a team in need of a D had to assume one would cost cap capital. Did any owner really get frustrated that Myers was valued at 4M, a full 2M less than his IRL contract? What were people expecting to pay for adequate D-men?

Any owners who needed a D, but who did not want to commit to a longterm deal could not possibly have thought they’d be able to pay less than 3M a one-year rental with the CAT potential of Kris Russell, who went for 2.7M. Anyone in the market for a D that was unwilling to spend 3M for one year of a guy who has more than proven himself to be what he is, isn’t too frustrated by the FA process to participate, they’re simply not into signing FA’s as part of their strategy. Which is completely fine, Anthopolous, the second greatest MLB GM of all time, also did not believe in free agency, preferring the trade market for building and, again, trading for FA’s other guys signed is absolutely a reasonable strategy.

I was not in the market for a D beyond testing the waters to see if I could steal a guy, but I think Ben Chiarott at 4M for three years and Jordie Benn at 3.2M for two years are very intriguing, smart, signings, but that’s cuz I see significant upside there and I’m trying to keep my own hockey opinions out of this exercise. The point is, there were affordable, good, defensemen that any team actually and actively trying to buy men could easily have made room for and found value in.

It’s very legitimate that savvy cap-strapped owners who didn’t feel like smashing their balls against the wall for Duchene. But C is a premium position and anyone with a hole there had to expect they’d be spending at least 3M to snag one, IMOIMOIMO. Outside of rookie contracts, C’s make good money for good reason and not every GM can convince Sissons to take a tantalizingly team friendly contract.

Here is the list of Centres who went for less than 3M in this league’s Free Agency Frenzy:

Nate Thompson 1M, one year.
Jason Spezza - 3M, one year.
Brian Boyle, 1M, one year.
Nick Shore, 1M, one year.
Pierre-Edouard Bellemare - 2.5M, two years - VERY jealous of this one.
Greg McKegg - 1.8M, two years.
Derick Brassard - 1M, one year.

My love of Bellemare aside, there’s no superstar in that group and I completely understand you don’t want to commit to a guy you’re not sure about, but if you’ve got a hole at C and you’re actually trying to buy a man to fill that hole, then you get one of the guys above and hope for the best. No one should realistically have been scared off by besting any of these bids.

Because I participated in this positional frenzy myself, I can offer some additional insight. I needed one C and once I realized Duchene was going to be too scary high and ran away screaming from him, I bought Kevin Hayes for 6M. Maybe you hate Hayes, but that’s a smaller investment than his IRL team made on him and I was prepared to engage in a bidding war higher than the price I ultimately paid. I was ready to spend $NoneOfYourDamnBusiness more if needed. If Hayes’ price had risen above my mountainous reach, I would have moved to Bellemare who, as I alluded to above, I think went for a steal of a contract. There is always a guy a tier below the guy you’ve been outbid on that you can bid on and win. I don’t see any clusterfucks.

I wanted to buy Anders Lee sofa king much, but I didn’t want to go five years on him because of the aforementioned Lucic possibility. Apparently that’s a view shared by others because he ultimately went for three years, which is a damn shrewd move because even his biggest detractors have to expect solid CAT conts for the next two years and a third is nowhere near farfetched. I didn’t get him because he went too high for me and I was ‘scared off’ of him. HOWEVER, there were SO MANY less pretty girls to go home with instead of just going home empty handed after the hot girl turned you down!
I needed a F and wound up scoring two. I got Connolly exactly where I’d targeted him at and I got Chiasson for $NoneOfYourDamnBusiness less than I had written down as my final number. Anyone who needed a W and legitimately tried to get one, got one. The contract I’m most envious about missing out on is Richard Panik at $4.2M for four years. Good player, very good CAT conts.

You didn’t want to commit 4M for a forward but needed one? May I present you with the opportunities you had:

Vladmir Sobotka - 2M, one year.
Riley Sheahan - 1.9M , two years - just saw this one, add him to panik on my list of god damnits.
Patrick Maroon - 3M, one year.
Bobby Ryan - 3.5M, three years.
Alex Chiasson - 3.5M, four years.
Justin Williams - 1.2M, one year.

Any owner who needed a forward, actually legitimately needed one and earnestly tried in good faith to get one, would own one of those guys. Getting scared off Simmonds, did not prevent you from signing Bobby who also hits guys and gets prime time on the PP. For owners who didn’t want to spend money to get a forward, no rule change made in haste to facilitate participation will help I don’t think. There is no Free Agent system we can produce that will lead to free players that don’t require a contract.

Goalies are voodoo. You either spend a lot of cap to get one, or trade a ton of capital to get one. There’s no use in breaking down the goalies because, who knows? You need one to compete and sometimes they forget how to play the position they’re paid to play.

Here is a list of contracts that I don’t like and that people can point to to tell their fanbases that they couldn’t buy anyone. But, you need to pay to fill a position hole, not buy a specific man that someone else threw $TEXAS at.

Wayne Simmonds, 5.5M, five years. To be fair, this contract wasn’t necessary. The bid immediately before this one was 1 year, 4.9M. Islanders came in with a shock’n’awe strategy that could pay off because Simmonds at least has the potential to still be a PP force and he’s on a team that SHOULD score A LOT of points with the additions they’ve made this offseason.

Mats Zuccarello, 4.8M, five years. - There’s an easy case to be made here that this contract has value, but he’s too old to have given five years to IMO. Great player though and, like, Lee, probably has at least three years of decent hockey left in his magnanimous thighs.

Jakob Silfverberg - 8M, four years. Gross. But the guy who bought him likes him this much and other owners had other options.

Joonas Donskoi - 6M, five years. I guess? I think he went high because of the timing. By the time he was won, if you hadn’t bought one of the cheaper guys and really needed a winger, you might have been inclined to desperation here and bringing him in to say you brought someone in. Could work out, there were cheaper options.

The above contracts are scary but I do not think they reflect the market as a whole. There are plenty of examples above of men who were purchased for more modest prices. It is my prophethization that no rule change will stop contracts like the handful of bad ones above from occurring because there’s always guys guys like more than other guys. I also do not think a position’s Top Man will ever receive a lower than expected contract just because the best always get paid the most. Nothing could have stopped Top Men, like duchene, Anders and Bob, from getting paid.

Players were available to anyone who needed one. So, my question is, what are we trying to prevent from happening that happened during this Free Agency Frenzy and what is the ultimate goal of preventing whatever that is? Where is the clusterfuck? What were teams expecting to pay for Free Agents? Are there teams that are way over the roster limit?

Agin, just some notes i jotted down while day drinking this morning, definitely don't mean to offend anybody. i think every owner here is wonderful and that this league is the best managed league I've ever participated in ever. So, please understand that any offense contained within is purely accidental due to haste and vacation brain.

[Flames GM (Beamer)]

You lost me at hello