Make Money Mean Something

[speculadora]

I don't really understand why everybody hates players taking minimum contracts so much.  At the higher TPE levels, the minimum contracts really start adding up.  Otters are looking at some fancy footwork staying under the cap after S6 if we want to keep everybody as is.  That's with most of the players taking minimum for their TPE.

I get it, a lot of our high earners taking minimum is why the Otters are 2x Champions with a good shot at a third this year, but if our players want to play here, I don't know why the league wants to make that impossible. Every other team in the league has the option for minimum contracts too.

Eventually there'll be enough players in the league with high enough TPE that there won't be enough cap space around to keep all the higher earners on rosters, even at minimum contracts.

I don't know, just my thoughts.

I dislike it because the minimums, even at the higher levels, don't create a huge problem. Yeah you won't be able to fill out an entire roster of $1M contracts but $4M is nothing to pay players who are close to maxing out their builds. On top of that the rule is flawed in a way where you don't sign a guy to 3 years at "minimum money", you sign him to 3 years at whatever the minimum at the time is. So, if you're clever enough, you can pay a max earner $1M per season until he hits 800 TPE and then $4M per season for the rest of his career. Seriously, $4M is roughly 5% of a team's total cap space. That's not exactly a challenge to fit into your budget. Plus, when it comes time to make decisions on who you guys have to let go the decisions are simple and position changes make them ludicrously easy to get past.

I really don't have a problem with good players taking pay cuts to play somewhere they want to or where they can win. The problem is not a result of the players as much as sim league design. The fact that players have gigantic supplementary incomes be it through jobs or media/graphic payouts AND the team is not on the hook for any of that money AND that those players are actually capped in terms of what they can spend creates a situation where by players can accept a minimum contract and be no worse off for it. Really the only benefit to taking a gigantic contract right now is to either avoid having to do point tasks or to stockpile money so you can avoid doing them in the future. The problem is that even if a player wanted to do that the cap is so tight that nobody would give them the time of day. In reality that situation probably doesn't arise because nobody is really looking 10-20 seasons into the future here. Basically the idea (that I'm now coming around to) is that uncapping the amount of money player's can spend helps dissolve the competitive balance issue that the current structure creates/is capable of creating and creates a more realistic free agent market place.

I'm really not sure about this last point. I don't think there's much of an argument to be made that there is already a lack of incentive to take a big contract for most players. Even as more players approach high TPE totals I don't foresee guys clamoring for big contracts because of it. If anything my expectation would be that you'll just have more players who are fine on the minimum until they have to keep up with regression. I'm not an expert and don't know enough about the regression system to really make a compelling point here, though.