Concessions for new owners of dead teams

[SultansOfSquat (Man)]

After discussing this previously w/ a few team owners and then also w/ Brian, I have come up w/ the following concessions for new owners of dead teams to help them get back into reasonably competitive shape. Let me know asap if anybody has a real problem w/ these concessions.

After some careful consideration of their current rosters, it seems to me that we have 3 tiers of new (or relatively new) owners who need some help in starting out.

There's one tier of very weak, dead teams that will have new owners starting this offseason:

1. Redondo Blues (formerly The Admin team)
2. MikeHawks -- this is actually the weakest team, and I'll probably give the new owner a nice trade for a little bit extra help

Then there's a 2nd tier of moderately weak, dead teams w/ new owners, and these teams have a decent core of players, but are rather depleted beyond that core:

3. Indians
4. Hounds of Hell (formerly GreatChampino)

Finally, there's a 3rd tier of moderately weak teams that were dummy teams taken by new owners at midseason 05 and had an opp to start rebuilding in the 2nd half of 05:

1. MaybeNextYear
2. Very Bad News Bears

To help them out, I'm proposing that we run a supplemental pre-draft for these teams that goes before the normal FA draft. I'm thinking that we could give the two tier 1 very weak teams 3 rounds of picks in this pre-draft, the tier 2 teams 2 rounds and the tier 3 teams 1 round in the supplemental pre-draft. This would give them extra picks at the top FAs to help them get started and going beyond what we normally do in the normal FA draft -- and they will also start at the top of the normal FA draft as well.

So the supplemental pre-draft will go as follows:

Round 1:
1. Redondo Blues
2. MikeHawks

Round 2:
1. Redondo Blues
2. MikeHawks
3. Indians
4. Hounds of Hell

Round 3:
1. Redondo Blues
2. MikeHawks
3. Indians
4. Hounds of Hell
5. MaybeNextYear
6. Very Bad News Bears

These teams in the pre-draft will be allowed to drop as many players as necessary (but not more than that) in order to make their picks.


Also, I'm proposing to change the way we assign waiver priorities to be based on reversed standings of the prior year (ie. 2005) just like the initial order for the normal FA draft, instead of what we did in 05. This should give the weaker teams an extra help for the future w/ the ability to claim upcoming top prospects like Delmon Young and Stephen Drew, if they choose. Please note that this might only apply for this year -- we might consider going w/ a lottery for the top few waiver priorities, if we go w/ lottery for the top few picks in future FA drafts in 07 and onward, which is still under consideration.


If nobody has any real objections to these concessions, we will move forward w/ them. Please offer your feedback w/in the next 7 days (or forever hold your peace ).

_Man_

[The Birds (Davey Johnson)]

The revised draft order looks good.

Can you clarify whether and how many players each team is allowed to drop before the draft?

[SultansOfSquat (Man)]

We hadn't discussed the specifics of dropping players before the draft, but I imagine it'll be something similar to last year.

Last year, we were allowed to drop upto 3 players if we had rosters of 20+. And upto 2 drops if we had rosters of less than 20.

Also, I'm not sure how everyone feels about it, but I'd like to not use the Yahoo Can't Cut List going forward. Firstly, the list doesn't really reflect value for our point system, but is based on standard 5x5 roto. Secondly, it doesn't reflect how our keeper rule works at all (and thus how players might need to be valued overall), which makes it a real pain in some situations.

On the plus side, it does prevent serious mistakes from happening and also preempts the possibility of someone dumping his roster for whatever reason. But is this little bit of protection worth it? I'm not sure. What do y'all think?

[The Birds (Davey Johnson)]

The specifics of dropping players before the draft don't matter much to me since I probably only have one player that needs to be dropped. However, the drop limits seem a little bit restricting in an artificial way, especially for teams like the old admin and mikehawks, which appear to have quite a bit of dead weight on them that the new owners were not previously responsible for. I don't see the harm in letting all teams drop as many players as they wish prior to the draft, at least for this year.

The Yahoo Can't Cut List does not seem that meaningful one way or another. I have no objections whether you choose to use it or not.

[prhood]

I agree about the "Can't Drop" list. It seems of limited value. I remember last year that it wouldn't let me drop Javy Lopez for several weeks after his injury.

I can sympathize with the previous post although dropping players is not a major issue - almost all of my losses were to FAs. At least this year, new oweners should be given an extra degree of latitude in restructuring their rosters.

This brings up the questyion of when rosters must be finalized? I'm sure it's in the rules somewhere but didn't see it.

[Imnotcreative2]

These sound good to me.

[Imnotcreative2]

Also I agree with davyxxx

Why not let people drop more than 3? There is no advantage to the limit. The only thing that does is force them to do a mass drop and add a few days after the draft. Why not just extend the draft as long as necessary?

[SultansOfSquat (Man)]

I personally have no problems w/ allowing as many drops as each team owner wants before the draft. I'm actually not sure why there was a limit last year. I too probably won't drop more than 1 or 2.

[Old BIG WOOD (Adam)]

i agree with lettin the people have extra picks but not that many. not tosound mean but with this years free agent crop down a little bit i think that once u let some teams hav 4 pikcs before everyone else there wont be anything worth alot of value to get. i kno there teams arent as good staticics wise but doesnt mean there team is a complete joke every team has some talent and givin them 4 picks @ he top free agents only makes there team more dominat than others. i say i round then the draft sratrs is fair but not 3rds then they still get 1st pick.

[SultansOfSquat (Man)]

Actually, the arrangement of the supplemental pre-draft only results in a total of 12 picks prior to the normal FA draft. That's essentially 1 round of FAs removed from the normal draft even though the two weakest teams have 3 supplemental picks.

Considering how seriously weak those 2 teams are, they really need the help -- and they still won't be that competitive, if at all, in 06. The next tier of 2 teams lost a lot of players to FA and did not get the opp to make roster moves to prepare for their losses late last year. And the 3rd tier of moderately weak teams are only getting 1 supplemental pick each.

And as you say, the FA crop isn't very good this year. But if it isn't very good, why fuss over this? ;D Even if we only gave these teams 1 extra pick each, everything that's left after they're done w/ their 2 picks won't be substantially different in quality anyway. Yes, there will still be some differences in quality, but probably nothing too big to quibble over, IMHO. Afterall, you already have Ryan Howard on your team probably for the next 5-6 years, if not longer.

[Old BIG WOOD (Adam)]

i get what your sayin but you are giving teams 3 nd 4 shotts at the free agents nd the 1s theyll take will help conserderbly lik 1 team could end up gettin burnett furcall matsui nd that alone can take team from last to 3rd to last not includint here other picks. i say @ most 2 cuz then they are also gettin the 1st pick nd the actually draft.

[SultansOfSquat (Man)]

There was an interesting, alternative suggestion emailed to me that would unify the pre-draft and the normal draft. Seems like an interesting way to go that could potentially speed up the rebuilding process for the weaker teams while also offering all teams a better shot at regaining a highly desired player lost to FA. It certainly adds a bit more strategic potential to the whole keeper/draft situation.

Instead of the pre-draft + normal draft, we could go w/ a normal draft that works like this:

1. Each team is allowed to drop as many players as it wants. The act of dropping players will be done via PM sent to a separate official forum account, and the PMs will not be opened by anyone until all such PMs have been submitted by a certain deadline. This will keep each team's move to drop players for the draft secret until after the deadline for strategic reasons that will become obvious once you understand how the draft will work.

2. The sole team w/ the most open roster spots will get to make as many picks as necessary until it is no longer the sole team w/ the most open roster spots, ie. it's tied w/ some other team(s) for most open roster spots. If there is no "sole team" for this, then proceed to step 3.

3. All the teams tied for the most open roster spots will participate in one round of drafting w/ their draft picks ordered according to their reversed 2005 standings.

4. Repeat step 3 until we're done w/ the draft. Note that each time we repeat step 3, there might be more teams added to the new round of drafting due to the way the "most open roster spots" criteria works.

NOTE that this would completely replace the need for the pre-draft and could become our normal annual draft process if it works well.

Let me know what y'all think.

_Man_

[Imnotcreative2]

Another way to put it...

By dropping 3 players you get picks in the last 3 rounds of the draft.
By dropping 5 players you get picks in the last 5 rounds of the draft.

I like this idea a lot and think it is the best way to go. It will encourage more player movement and while still letting people keep players they really want to keep. It also adds more strategy to the keepers.

[prhood]

I like the Sultan's concept. As I 8understand it, the result would be to encourage teams to drop borderline players in the hope of getting better players by having more early round picks.

[SultansOfSquat (Man)]

In a sense, this makes the act of dropping players (and opening up roster spots) to some extent an act of bidding for the top draft picks. It also gives teams who lost stud players to FA a chance to reaquire some(?) of them if they are willing to pay the "price" and/or make the right moves whereas there was really no shot at that w/ the old method unless they had finished very low in previous year's standings. This approach is probably also better at helping out the teams that really need the help rather than teams that just happened to finish low in the standings -- finishing low is not always a good indicator of actual talent on the team due to various factors that affect actual team strength, especially as the league achieves good competitive balance from top to bottom. This approach would basically leave it upto the individual team owner to decide how good his team is and how much help he/she needs from the draft.

This approach probably also eliminates the need to consider the lottery idea for determining draft order for the top few picks in the future.

[The Birds (Davey Johnson)]

I like this new proposed draft plan much better than the original one for the following reasons:

(1) It removes a level of subjectivity from the decision making process of the commisionner. No team gets preferential treatment by getting specially allocated draft picks to help boost their teams, so no team can feel slighted for not getting the special draft picks.
(2) It succeeds in helping the weaker team more than the stronger teams, which was the goal of the original concessions plan, simply because the weaker teams have more scrubs to drop to be able to secure the more valuable draft picks.
(3) It does not shut out the better teams from participitating in the process. Every team is free to decide for themselves whether it is worthwhile to donate more of their players back to the draft in order to secure better draft picks.
(4) It can work as the standard draft methodology for the league in the future. The original concessions draft plan was obviously a one time kludge for this year only.

[SultansOfSquat (Man)]

All Rosters have been loaded.

We will tenatively set the player drop deadline for 1am EST on 3/20 (Monday) until further notice. Please submit your list of players to drop via PM to The Commish Office no later than the deadline. You do not need to finalize your list until the deadline. If you send a PM w/ your list and then change your mind before the deadline, just resubmit the new list and delete the old PM from your outbox -- just make sure that your new list is submitted by the deadline to be valid though.