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*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - bovovovo - 02-13-2018
It’s been a little over one sim-year since I joined the management of the team formerly-known-as the Legion, and I was looking back and reflecting on some of the trades and moves I’ve made. Trying to learn from the whole process retroactively, I guess.
I figured this would be a good opportunity to highlight this tumultuous time for the team for those who aren’t intimately familiar with what was going on, and to talk about my own thought processes as a GM for those that are interested in that kind of thing.
CONTEXT: How we got to where we’re at
So everything in this section happened before I showed up. I was co-GM with the Wraiths at this time.
This could actually be a really long section, but instead I’m just going to start with an infamous day that many around the league remember: The Legion Mass-Retirement.
Long story short, a ton of Legion players decided to retire from the league at one time. By my count, 6 of the 9 active or semi-active players on the Legion retired on the same day.
Here’s a list of the players that announced their retirement:
Connor Tanner – TE/WR – 270 TPE
Jon Ross – WR – 292 TPE
Wyatt Fulton – LB – 393 TPE
Vinny Cox – DT – 335 TPE
Big Bot – DE – 277 TPE
Wayne Gooney – K/P – 167 TPE
Additionally, Philippe Carter – CB – 614 TPE wanted to retire but accidentally didn’t because of a technicality, and Jimmy Cox – DE – 169 TPE was going to as well but I was able to convince him to just go inactive instead when I arrived.
To make matters worse from a management perspective, the Legion’s #1 WR, Alexandre LeClair, publicly stated that he wanted to be traded to a different team.
During this time the Legion GM was actually on a multi-month long vacation, and Connor Tanner was the co-GM. So the Legion had a mass-retirement, no acting GMs, and the S5 free agency and draft right around the corner.
In steps cosbornballboy, who volunteered to take over as GM of the Legion. Spoiler alert for how this went: He was GM for approximately 60ish hours.
During those 60 hours, the Legion made the following two trades, first to acquire his own player from his previous team, the Hawks:
ReceiveAlexandre LeClair – WR
S5 Otters 1st round pick (#8)
ReceiveRicardo Sandoval – DT
Brian Wheat – WR
S5 Hawks 2nd round pick (#11)
S5 Hawks 5th round pick
Two birds with one stone here. Give up LeClair, who wanted to be traded, and get your own player (Sandoval). As the now-Legion/NOLA GM, I’m of the opinion that this trade was quite one-sided in the Hawks’ favor (even at the time I thought it was one-sided), and if I were them I’d be very pleased with it. The teams basically swapped active star players, and the Legion moved back 3 draft spots for an inactive WR and a throwaway draft pick.
With this trade, the Legion lost a 1st round pick which could have been used on Michael Tillman, an active LB, to help a bleeding Legion defense. The 2nd round pick that the Legion acquired would later be used on Fresh Booter, an active WR who has played a very important role in their offense so far. (Side note, the Hawks later traded that 1st round pick to the Otters who used it to get Tegan Atwell, CB)
ReceivePhilllippe Carter – CB (Legion will pay for the contract)
Legion’s S6 2nd round pick
ReceiveJoseph Askins – TE
Wraiths S6 4th round pick
Francois LaMoreux – OL
Another one-sided trade (in my opinion) not in the Legion’s favor. At the time, I was actually on the benefiting side as I was still co-GM of the Wraiths. Francois was a cap-dump, as he had a pretty high cap hit in S5. The Legion gave up a 600 TPE inactive player, lots of cap space, and a 2nd round pick in return for an active player and a 4th (throwaway pick). Askins had requested a trade to the Legion, as he wanted to help the team out. I love Askins and he has been a tremendous asset to the Legion locker room and on the field, and I am very grateful to have him. Ever since our time together on the Wraiths, I've considered him one of the best teammates out there. This one isn’t so bad, but still somewhat one-sided from a value perspective in my opinion.
The S6 2nd that the Legion gave up turned into Glenn Mcpoyal, TE. If the Legion/NOLA still had it, it would have had to been used on my player, Borkus Maximus III. But the bigger side effect of trading this pick away was that at the time we actually didn’t have any 2nd round picks, so we had to go out of our way to acquire one with which to pick Borkus, or we would have had to use a 1st.
The S6 4th that the Legion got was a throwaway and was skipped.
Somewhere around this point, without going in to too much detail, there was a lot of conflict in the Legion LR against cosbornballboy, who started publicly bashing his own team. He soon stepped down and I left my co-GM position with the Wraiths and became interim GM of the Legion.
LEGION TRADES
So this section was my main motivation for looking into all of this. I was going to look into all the trades that I made during that time and see how they panned out.
The situation I walked into was basically this: The Legion had a ton of players who were going to be retired after the S6 season, the LR was a ghost town, and the team had almost no draft capital left after the previous GM (who was there for 60 hours) traded it all away.
My main focus during this time was to scavenge whatever value I could from what was left. We were obviously in a heavy rebuild, but typically when you enter into a rebuild you have some capital that you can trade away to build up future value. That’s the idea of a rebuild, you trade away short-term value to get long-term or future value.
In this case, Legion didn’t really have any current value.
We had the GM’s player, Savea, an RB who hadn’t updated in a while because the GM was on vacation, one active safety Blackford Oates, an active TE Askins, and an active Wallace Stone QB. We didn’t have hardly any draft picks, and we had a bunch of retiring inactives.
We also had Sandoval, who the Legion players hated and who hated the Legion, so I could start with trading him away at least. This leads me to the first trade, which was a threeway.
Receive****A. Hayden - CB (from Yeti)
F. Wozy - DE (from Yeti)
D. West - WR (from Yeti)
Receive****R. Sandoval - DT (from Legion)
E. Gustavsson - DE (from Outlaws)
B. Wheat - WR (from Legion)
Receive****D. Evans - WR (from Outlaws)
S5 R2 pick (from Outlaws) S5 R4 pick (from Outlaws)Just from Legion’s perspective, this was a good one. We moved Sandoval (who was basically demanding a trade at that point) and an inactive WR for one of the better WRs in the league in Evans, a round 2 pick, and a round 4 pick.
Wheat has actually been kind of semi active now, but with how empty the Legion’s LR was I didn’t have lots of faith that I could get him active again. Evans is a guy that I am extremely thankful for, both on the field and in the locker room. He’s up for a contract extension this season, and if we can extend him I’ll be even more happy with this trade.
The S5 round 2 pick didn’t work out super well unfortunately. I would use it on Conall O’Sullivan, a receiving RB, with the hopes of grooming her to be a deadly slot receiver. Coming from the Wraiths I saw this “Kennedy emergence” coming, and I knew having a good receiving RB would help our offense immensely. Unfortunately Conall would shortly go inactive after the draft. The S5 round 4 pick would be used on Jeff Winter, who was an inactive and has recently recreated.
receiveVinny Cox – DT (Salary paid for by the Legion)
receive S6R3Ragnar Kronen – S
So this is what it looks like when you try to take something that has pretty much zero long-term value (a high-ish TPE inactive retiree) and try to get some long-term value from it. Kronen is an inactive 230ish TPE safety, who I wanted because of how bad the Legion defense was after the retirements (and how bad the secondary was after Phillippe Carter was traded away). He’s been a good stand in so far and because he’s IA I don’t have to worry about him leaving in FA or having to pay him much. The S6 3rd turned into Antonio Legion, WR, who I am expecting will be IA but may surprise me by being semi active.
In hindsight, I probably could have gotten more for Cox if I had asked around more. I think I felt some pressure early on with almost every team asking about the retirees and talking to three or four different teams at the same time about different deals, and I kind of got overwhelmed a bit and my negotiating suffered because of it.
I also went with the “shot gun” approach. I was betting on the S6 draft to be a deep one because of the newly revamped recruitment team which I saw as doing a very good job at recruiting so far. You’ll see this in some of the other trades, where my strategy was trying to get a ton of late draft picks in the hope that the draft would be deep enough. The league had just had an outrageously shallow S4 draft, so I knew lots of teams thought R3 or later picks would be useless, and I was hoping to capitalize on that in the hope that the draft would be a deep one. More on this later.
Somewhere around this time I officially retired my own personal player, Bork Bjornsson, DE, who was still on the Wraiths. I did this because I knew the Legion were obviously in hardcore rebuild mode, and we would need to start grooming a QB so that our QB’s peak coincided with a finished rebuild. So we position switched our QB Wallace Stone (who was active again after being fueled by rage at the previous GM) to an LB to help out our defense. The Legion also frankly didn’t have any capital left that would have been equal to Bjornsson’s value (who was I think 600 something TPE). So it was a mix of not having enough to trade for him and needing a QB that prompted me to instead just recreate as a QB to help the team.
ReceiveWyatt Fulton – LB
Andreas Waiters – DE
ReceiveOutlaws S5 4th
Outlaws S6 1st
Outlaws S6 3rd
Just before this trade I realized that one of the Legion’s DSFL send downs, Andreas Waiters, was logging into the site again. As I mentioned before, the Legion LR was almost a ghost town so I didn’t have a lot of faith that I could keep him active. Going back to what I said before, I also thought the S6 draft class would be deep enough that the S6 3rd pick would be a useful one. The S5 4th I knew would be a throw away. So Legion turned a high TPE retiree and (what I considered to be) a semi-active at best 110ish TPE DE into a 1st round pick and another hopeful active. I think at the time this was a good trade for Legion.
Looking back on it, Watiers has indeed been active and had a great year last year. I’m genuinely happy for him, I figure he wouldn’t have been happy with the Legion so I’m glad he’s enjoying the league. The S6 1st turned into Poopyface Tomatonose, TE, who so far has been absolutely fantastic in the locker room and I am very happy with him. The S5 4th was a throw away that it later traded away, and the S6 3rd was also later traded away. I think this was a pretty even trade where both teams walked away with what they wanted.
ReceiveLogan Noble – QB
ReceiveOutlaws S6 3rd
So we needed a QB after position switching Stone, and Noble was almost literally the only other QB in the league at this point. I probably gave up too much for a one year stand-in here, especially for a year that everyone knew the Legion probably wouldn’t be able to win more than 3 games in anyways, but my thinking at the time was I needed to do what was best for the team, to put the team in best position to win now. I think as a GM it’s unfair to your players to not do so, and we weren’t going to just waste away the season all willy nilly.
That S6 3rd turned into Storm Woods, an inactive CB.
ReceiveConnor Tanner – TE
ReceiveSJS S5 4th
SJS S7 3rd
This trade was one of those instances where Connor Tanner had basically zero value to anybody except the Sabercats so I had to take what I could get. No other teams were really even interested in him except SJS so I after some negotiating and holding out I had to accept something, even really late draft picks that will probably be throwaways anyway, rather than nothing and just hold on to Tanner for a season before he’s officially retired.
The S5 4th turned into Victor Ball, an inactive that’s not on the team anymore.
ReceiveJon Ross- WR
Big Bot – DE (Legion will eat 4m of Big Bot’s 5m contract)
ReceiveLuke Washington - LB
After the Tanner trade I realized that my strategy of shot gunning it and trading away retirees one at a time probably wasn’t the best way to go about it. So in this trade we had two retirees packaged in a deal where Legion got Luke Washington, an inactive 250ish LB. I’m happy with this trade, as Legion got some longer term value out of some pieces that were useless to us but useful to someone trying to make a push at an Ultimus (like the Liberty were).
In hindsight, I definitely think I should have gone after more trades of this nature. I think it would have been much better to package the retirees together in a way to kind of “artificially” create more value where none really existed. I took a risk accepting just a bunch of late draft picks, and unless that pans out better than expected, it probably would have done the Legion better to do trades like these. Maybe I could have even done all of the retirees as one package where the Legion covers all of their contracts and traded it to the highest bidder? I may have gotten a 1st or more from a team like SJS, the Liberty, or the Wraiths who were looking for something to put them just over the edge for an Ultimus run.
I don’t really regret those trades, just something to learn from going forward. It’s hard to scrape value out of pieces that don’t really have any value, and the goal was to help the Legion pick of the pieces after all the retirements and not-so-good trades.
receive6m S5 cap considerations
S6 Legion 3rd round pick
receiveLowest of Wraith’s 2nd round picks at time of draft
I needed a 2nd round pick to grab Borkus with, otherwise I would’ve had to use one of the Legion’s 1st round picks to do it. So this is basically Legion paying $ to the Wraiths to swap picks. I probably could have pushed harder on not giving up a 3rd for this, but considering our situation it wasn’t too bad I think. Wraiths got the better end of the trade from this one I think, but like I said, we absolutely needed a 2nd otherwise we would've had to use a 1st on Borkus so we didn't have lots of bargaining power here.
That S6 3rd was traded to the Outlaws who used it to draft Robigo Anderson, LB who seems somewhat active.
CONCLUSION
This has turned out to be longer than I thought it would… but I hope somebody found it interesting. In the drafts, we were all about building a strong locker room, as it was previously dead after the retirements. We had to build not only a team all over again, but a culture.
In S5 we got Terrell Brister, who served as interim co-gm for a bit as well as being the recruitment head, who has been absolutely fantastic in helping new players feel welcomed and in helping the LR feel alive. Fresh Booter has been a solid and reliable player for us on the field and he and I go back to our Wraiths days. Brian Mills and Poopyface Tomatonose, both S6 1st round draftees, have similarly been great in helping jump start the NOLA locker room, giving it more life and excitement. What gave Mills the bump over the other top prospects in S6 for us was his locker room and discord presence. Same with Tomatonose.
It’s been a slow and sometimes stressful process, but I knew that it would be when I walked into it. It’s challenging picking up the pieces after a mass retirement to an already lower-tier team, but I think going forward we’re starting to get some pieces in place to really turn this franchise around. Even if my “shot gun” approach to dealing with the retirees hasn’t really paid off as well as I had hoped it would.
(3055 words)
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - sapp2013 - 02-13-2018
(02-13-2018, 02:28 PM)bovovovo Wrote:That S6 3rd turned into Storm Woods, an inactive CB.
Sopath might have something to say about that :ninja:
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - PDXBaller - 02-13-2018
Amazing insight and great summary of where the organization is now. I really appreciate reading these types of media.
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - manicmav36 - 02-13-2018
I find this incredibly interesting, love hearing your thoughts and hindsight. Thanks for writing this up.
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - SwagSloth - 02-13-2018
(02-13-2018, 02:49 PM)sapp2013 Wrote:Sopath might have something to say about that :ninja:
Their last update was a month ago to the day. They only logged in 4 days ago to see the draft results and haven't returned since. They're technically active in that they've logged in over the last 2 weeks, which matters for contracts, but until they start updating and doing tasks again, they're practically inactive by any other measure.
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - SwagSloth - 02-13-2018
Excellent article. It's always tough to reflect on your own decisions, but you took risks and I respect that. It's going to take a very long time to get the organization up to par. They've been a struggling team since inception and were hit with a devastating blow to an already below-average roster. However, when you guys finally do have a winning season and/or make it to the play-offs, it's going to feel very good for both the GMs and the team. Stay strong, my friend. Do the NOLA name proud.
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - Roly - 02-13-2018
Incredible write-up and super interesting read. Great stuff, love the article
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - tbone415 - 02-13-2018
You know, there was another player we traded for, played a few games, retired and was cut.
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - sapp2013 - 02-13-2018
(02-13-2018, 03:54 PM)tbone415 Wrote:You know, there was another player we traded for, played a few games, retired and was cut.
Are you talking about the trade right after the draft between the yeti and legion? Hmmmm. Wonder why that was omitted lol.
*Reviewing Legion's S4-S5 Trades - Molarpistols - 02-13-2018
You've got your work cut out for you, but I think you're making the best of a bad situation. I think you're definitely the right pick for the job at hand, and that NOLA will make a comeback sooner than many would expect.
:cheers: Go Bovo!