Quoting: A_K
you can trade anyone (UFA rights included) after the SC finals voting and before the UFA bidding begins (excluding a few days of a trade freeze for the Expansion Draft). UFA extensions will have to be finalized before UFA Bidding begins (tentatively June 13th)
We haven't talked about the UFA bidding process but we will try to use as much from last year as possible. The only issue I remember from last year was the winning deals with obnoxious term. If we eliminate that issue (we plan to set term ranges for each UFA), I'm not sure what else needs tweaking. Personally, I think scheduling a variety of positions each day makes the most sense; it gives teams a second chance to fill needs rather than if, for example, we auction all of the RHD on one day, a team could potentially miss the boat on all of them and be SOL.
IMO teams should get a small advantage of having the player's rights. The 8th year doesn't seem to help with that much though, as teams would try to give their depth players 8 year deals at 675K or whatever the minimum is. Here would be my suggestion:
Maybe give the original team an extra 20% or so of the amount per season (20% is just a random number, could be a different percentage). So, the contract they offer counts as that plus 20% or whatever the number is, but the team signs the player to the contract without the 20% if they win the bid. It's like the player is taking less money to stay with his current team.
Example:
Let's say Seattle wants to re-sign John Smith for 2,000,000 over 2 years. Houston decides to offer him 2,300,000 over 2 years. Seattle's offer counts as 2,400,000 (2,000,000 + 20 percent (400,000) = 2,400,000), so they beat Houston's bid. If those are the 2 highest bids, Seattle would win the bid, but would only have to pay Smith 2,000,000 over 2 years.
If Seattle offers John Smith 3,000,000 over 3 years, and Houston offers 2,500,000 over 4 years, Seattle would still win the bid. Houston is offering 10,000,000 in total, and Seattle is offering 3,600,000 per year (3,000,000 + 20 percent (600,000) = 3,600,000) X 3 years = 10,800,000 in total. Seattle wins the bid and pays Smith 3,000,000 over 3 years.
If Seattle offers John Smith 1,000,000 over 1 year and Houston offers 1,300,000 over 1 year, Houston wins the bid as Seattle's offer counts as 1,200,000 over 1 year. Houston must pay Smith 1,300,000 over 1 year.
If we do something like this, we'd have to figure out what to do if there's a tie after adding the 20%. Also, 20% might be a bit too high. Maybe more like 10 or 15 percent?
Also, to stop teams from offering players 7 year contracts at the minimum salary, we could do what we did in v1 where we made amounts per season that a contract for a certain number of years must be. Example:
1 year - 675,000 to 2,000,000
2 years - 800,000 to 4,000,000
3 years - 1,000,000 to 5,000,000
4 years - 2,500,000 to 7,000,000
5 years - 3,250,000 to 8,000,000
6 years - 3,750,000 to 9,000,000
7 years - 4,250,000 to 12,000,000
8 years - 7,000,000 to 15,000,000
I'm not suggesting those amounts, just using them as examples.
Both of these are just suggestions to think about. What do you think?