05-10-2022, 08:12 PMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote:

05-10-2022, 07:56 PMsköldpaddor Wrote: Right, so - I agree that it's unfortunate that people can't necessarily just go to whatever team they want willy nilly (although to some degree they can still control it - people can still wait until their desired team is up in waivers order, and if it's a significant enough personal connection, the rest of us J gms are not going to claim somebody's significant other or extremely close friend etc. if we're told it's very important to them, within reason). HOWEVER, the free agency system was, in my opinion, creating an imbalance to the point that our other systems were kind of just nerfed. When a team can just pick up 3-4 free agents post-draft, draft position, draft picks, begin to lose their value. A team could just trade all of their draft picks to go into "win now" mode and then easily sign enough free agents for it to not even matter. Do you know how discouraging that is for a team that's working through a rebuild? It was very much a system where the good teams just stayed good and it was harder for teams further down the ladder to climb their way back up.

It is really unfortunate that it takes away some player agency, but the agency of players who are open to going to other teams, who ultimately get screwed over by the same teams being good over and over again and staying there because we had an uneven distribution of new talent, those people's experience is important too, and we have to be mindful of that. We don't want people to end up miserable in their whole J career because none of their teammates knew enough casual buddies to recruit to all sign with the same team, we don't want GMs to burn out because they pour themselves into a team for season after season, managing the assets they have as best as they can just to get burned over and over again by other teams getting multiple players free per season.

You make some good points, so thank you for that! Have guys tried to actually quantify the problem the problem though, like, how many recreates circumvented the draft over the last few seasons, how many FAs did the various teams manage to sign in a given season etc. Because from my very subjective and incomplete perspective it seems like a problem that might exist somewhat, but isn't bad enough to warrant such grave measures. It would be nice to see some numbers to determine whether that intuition is right or not.

We've examined the numbers in HO, and they weren't trending in positive ways. Teams were able to sign disproportionate amounts of FAs comparatively to the rest, and it was only trending in more disproportionate ways as we went by seasons. While we could have a discussion on whether or not the numbers justified such a change again within HO at the end of the day our GMs brought up many good points that justified at least a temporary change in systems. This has been an ongoing conversation for multiple consecutive seasons, and like the main post says, should we feel it is overbearing or causing a negligible amount of gain then we can re-examine this at the end of our trial period