*Minimum Contracts: What to do?

[timeconsumer]

Okay. I get that. Two things. 1) If they mean so much to the team in terms of scouting an strats, they should be rewarded for it with a larger contract for the work they put in. I'm not trying to dissuade people from loving their favourite team. And home town discounts should be a thing. But when have we every heard of Tom Brady taking a minimum contract to help out the Patriots. He does plenty of strategizing and other tasks team wide. 

2) The top guys taking minimums to help their team defeats the purpose of a salary cap or money in the first place. Why don't we just let people choose who they play for if no team is gonna be put in a cap crunch from "team players" that take minimums. See Tom Brady point above.

I get that you're saying that these players want to take low contracts to help the rest of the team out, I get that. But it's not fair to teams that pay their players a decent and fair wage because they don't have a league job, you know?

I get the fairness argument, and I agree with it. Caps are there for a reason and they make sense.

But let's not use NFL as an example. This isn't real money. I can't go buy a house with it. I can't pass it to my children. You will never get the same incentive with league money as real money. Full stop.

Instead I am trying to tell you not how people should act in order to maximize the competitiveness of the game. I am telling you how they do act. We can't view this thing in a vacuum and assume people will do what is best for the entire league. They will do what is best for them which in this case of this league and this game sometimes means taking a cheap contract. Winning is fun. People play this for fun. Cheaper contracts can mean more wins. More rings. More fun!

So I like the idea of having some sort of outside incentive that contracts can add that you can't get elsewhere. I don't want it to be TPE because of reasons I've discussed in earlier articles. Contracts need to come with an incentive that isn't TPE but is something else of significant value. And I think something like the idea we discussed above of having a "token" to skip a PT attached to your contract value. Either a ratio like 1 token per $2m in contract or one token per $1m taken above the minimum cap hit....you get the point. This gives people not only cash to skip media/graphics, but also tokens to skip PTs. We appeal to people's laziness. They can be max earners for less effort simply by using the market to its full effect.