11-04-2021, 09:49 AMsköldpaddor Wrote:

11-04-2021, 09:44 AMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: I'm not sure which aspect of the rulebook you are referring to exactly, maybe you can quote it here. But if a trade is deemed "illegal" for breaking the retention rules, isn't it technically irrelevant which team was the one trading away the player and which one took him on. Aren't both to blame here both because the rulebook doesn't specify in which direction a punishment is to be levied, and because both teams did get an advantage out of the illegal trade (Team A gets to pay less salary, Team B got higher trade value for their player because of the lower cap hit)?

Well that's my point - it's not in the rulebook. There's nothing to quote because there is no rule about punishing the receiving party for an asset that was illegally traded. There are some punishments specified for other types of illegal trades, though, and I think that is where you reasonably have to start here (even though like you said, and as I have mentioned in another post, I don't think this is exactly the same thing as trading a pick one does not possess due to the seemingly irrevocable nature of the trade).

Extrapolating from the "no trading picks you don't have" rule and making a judgment here seems like the right call to me (although I think there would have been grounds for a harsher punishment here using that as a starting point). But I don't think you can just say "okay we're going to start issuing punishments to both sides of illegal trades now even though we've never done that for any other illegal trade in the past"

So there is nothing in the rulebook here that the team can't be punished then. I mean I get your point of course and our two approaches here reflect the two different philosophies you can have towards such a ruleset. But as the past has shown, new gaps in our rulebook pop up every time and we have to deal with them as they appear. However it is indeed unfortunate that HO has somewhat set the precedent in recent years that sometimes these situation are resolved with the "there is no rule against it, so no punishment" argument and sometimes with the "there is no specific rule against it but you broke the spirit of the rule and therefore get punished". It's a unfortunate double-standard that has crept in.

Yes, extrapolating from the "no trading picks you don't have" rule sounds tempting but ultimately isn't sufficient imho, because the responsibilities are distributed differently. In cases of double-traded picks, there is only one team who can realistically be expected to have double checked if the pick is legal (the team that has it) and the same team is also the only one that benefits from such an illegal trade because they get to trade away an asset that they don't actually have. So they are both the team where the oversight happened and the one that benefitted from said oversight - hence why they get punished. In a case like this one here however there are both two teams who can realistically be expected to catch the illegality of the action and there are also two teams that benefit from said illegal trade, as outlined in my previous post. This is why in this case they share the responsibility much more than in the case of a double traded pick.