Contract Incentives
As a member of the budget team, one thing I sympathise with GMs on is the fact that any bonus incentives offered count against the cap at all times, even before they've been achieved and no matter how unlikely. For example, if I promise a player a $1M bonus if he records 100 sacks in a season, I can no longer use that money all the way up until the point where 100 sacks is no longer possible, so after the end of the season, at which point there's no other applicable use for the money any more.
This makes planning other uses of the salary cap like trades, salary extensions, position changes and OL bots quite tricky to navigate when you're not sure how much you have to play with. As such, a GM might be reluctant to offer their players incentives so that the money doesn't get locked up for a season, and eventually wasted. This might be why some teams, COL for example, don't seem to offer any contract incentives.
A change I will be proposing at next year's rule summit to try and tackle this is that all incentive bonuses count against the following year's cap instead. So for example, if a team has $10M of potential incentives to pay and only $5M ends up being achieved at the end of the season, they simply start the next season with $5M less on the salary cap. Alternatively, maybe the team could have the option at the end of the season to either use what's left of this year's cap to pay them, or to apply it to next year's cap. This way, there's never any ambiguity around how much cap you have left to play with, and no worrying about offering out unrealistic contract incentives.
And this wouldn't just be beneficial for the GMs. This would also mean that teams don't shy away from offering incentives, and end up locking up a load of money that ends up getting wasted at the end of the season. More incentives = more fun for players!
As a member of the budget team, one thing I sympathise with GMs on is the fact that any bonus incentives offered count against the cap at all times, even before they've been achieved and no matter how unlikely. For example, if I promise a player a $1M bonus if he records 100 sacks in a season, I can no longer use that money all the way up until the point where 100 sacks is no longer possible, so after the end of the season, at which point there's no other applicable use for the money any more.
This makes planning other uses of the salary cap like trades, salary extensions, position changes and OL bots quite tricky to navigate when you're not sure how much you have to play with. As such, a GM might be reluctant to offer their players incentives so that the money doesn't get locked up for a season, and eventually wasted. This might be why some teams, COL for example, don't seem to offer any contract incentives.
A change I will be proposing at next year's rule summit to try and tackle this is that all incentive bonuses count against the following year's cap instead. So for example, if a team has $10M of potential incentives to pay and only $5M ends up being achieved at the end of the season, they simply start the next season with $5M less on the salary cap. Alternatively, maybe the team could have the option at the end of the season to either use what's left of this year's cap to pay them, or to apply it to next year's cap. This way, there's never any ambiguity around how much cap you have left to play with, and no worrying about offering out unrealistic contract incentives.
And this wouldn't just be beneficial for the GMs. This would also mean that teams don't shy away from offering incentives, and end up locking up a load of money that ends up getting wasted at the end of the season. More incentives = more fun for players!
