Quote:Originally posted by Grapehead@Jan 4 2017, 11:24 AM
Forcing the contract up every offseason (assuming they move up a tier) isn't the best solution in my mind. Having the ability to lock up a player for a few years at a bargain is all part of the real salary cap fun. However, locking them up for 20 seasons is garbage. I think just having a max term on contracts and eliminating the hometown discount would solve a lot of problems.

If we make it so everyone's contract is upgraded when they hit a new tpe tier then we might as well just scrap contracts and give players a fixed salary based on tpe. Why sign a player for 6 seasons and get yourself locked into a contract with a player who may go inactive or something? There's no benefit to the team or the player to have a mutli season contract at this point because the player will always make a base salary and they can never make less. There's no creative contract negotiations and no creative cap trades.

I like the idea of a one-time re-adjustment to handle old contracts, but I don't think doing it every season makes sense. Just limit contract length to ~4 seasons; then you have a built-in adjustment for each contract signing. (You'll also need to do something about the extreme length contracts - either make them continue to auto-update every 4 seasons, or cut their length.)

That being said, past a certain point, money doesn't serve much of a purpose in this league. There's not much incentive for a player to negotiate for a higher contract other than just wanting a higher number in their bank account anyway.

I also agree that the purpose of the salary cap is to maintain some degree of parity in the league, and it sounds like it may need to be lowered to achieve that end, even with these changes. Or switch to a TPE cap as Grapehead is suggesting, which is an interesting thought but would take a lot of work (and some time of disfunction while we work out the kinks) to be successful.