Poor ruling imo and I have literally no connection to Minnesota, in fact this happening to a conference team is a huge advantage. Beneath the rule in the rulebook there is a post for clarification. It reads:

Quote:Alright so there were some good points in the thread yesterday that not a lot of people understand where the line is when it comes to tampering. The rule as I plan to interpret it, is when a player or GM from another team seeks another member outside of the SHL public forums with the intent of asking them to try to join their team. (so this would include pms, other websites, messengers etc.)

The reason I say outside of the public forum, is because what do you actually gain by posting something about wanting someone to join your team in a place where everyone can see, what advantage does it give you? There's a big difference between something you are willing to say in front of everyone and something you say outside of the league's eye. What the league doesn't want is people behind closed doors colluding together or trying to gain players in a way that is against the rules.

If you guys take it too far and outside of the realm of fun, we'll have to take it in a stricter sense but I hope that's not the case. Please everyone take tampering seriously, because I know a lot of people were like well everyone does it, hopefully letting people know they can say things in the public forum is totally acceptable hopefully that will eliminate all the "back room" tampering that occurs in the league. Which is what we really want to get rid of.

Summary:

• Purpose of the rule is to prevent "back room tampering" which we can all agree 100% this is not.
  
• It clearly states the rule should be interpreted as "when a player or GM from another team seeks another member outside of the SHL public forums with the intent of asking them to try to join their team."
  
• The interpretation even includes later re-visiting the rule if people "take it too far" which almost 100% of us agree this did.
  

While it would be nice to say this is unreasonable, it's not supported by the interpretation linked in the rule book. I'm all for re-visiting the rule, and in fact that's what the rulebook says we should do if the current system is abused. The rulebook does not say to punish that team with tampering. Daco is an asshole for what he did, but you can't punish someone for being an asshole when the rules are in their favour.