2020 ALL TIME AUCTION - 1ST EVER SIGN UPS, RULES AND DISCUSSION

[ImporterExporter]

Welcome all,

We've all seen the long standing ATD become rather stale, with overall participation waning into the low 20's in recent years. While the draft itself is still the cat's meow and runs smoothly, there are little surprises. Draft tendencies rarely change. Draft placement rarely changes outside active players moving up/down. Post draft participation might as well be scrapped all together with many GM's not even debating.

Here is the alternative many have spoken of over the years. This will drastically alter how teams are built because of my specific rule of having daily randomly selected pools of players drafted in previous ATD's. No GM will have any idea who will be available to bid on day 1, or day 25. One pool of players may have bench fodder and low end starters. Others could contain multiple HOF'ers.

Please, I am very open to feedback and criticism of what you see below. My goal is to make this experience as user friendly as possible. If morale is high then the entire operation goes better.

The first (hope of many) ATA!

Rules:

1. Salary Cap will be set at 82 million.

-This was done because this closely resembles real life so the top players in real life today will sort of be a benchmark for the top players all time. Gretzky, Howe, Orr should likely all be the highest paid players here, so you'd expect to see at least 13 million per, possibly more depending on how top heavy a GM wants his/her team to be. Would somebody be willing to go nuts to ensure one of the big 4? Will a GM try to get Gretzky AND Orr or will depth reign supreme?

2. Roster will consist of 23 players.

12 starting F
6 starting D.
1 starting G.
1 backup G.
3 reserves (F or D)


3. Any player in hockey history will be available to sign in the daily auction pools. This includes pre NHL stars and non NHL Euro's.


4. Pools will consist of 15 players each.


5. Daily bidding on each pool will occur over 40 days, Monday-Friday, totaling 600 players offered (15 players per pool x 40 days of bidding).

-Basically if they've been drafted in the ATD, they'll show up here for bidding. Also, Monday-Friday allows us to catch a breather each week.


6. The daily pools will be randomly generated. There will be no set order. You could have 8 goalies in one pool and 12 C's in the next.


7. I will be generating the daily random pools.

-If you have a problem with that, then consider. One, getting somebody else, not involved to pledge the better part of 2 months to be here daily for that is not something I"m willing to ask someone to do for a trial run. Two, even if I were to set up the pools manually (scheming for my benefit), I'm still not guaranteed to get the player anyway (someone can outbid me). I hope people realize that this is for fun first and foremost. Plain and simple. I'm willing to be vested for the betterment of all. I've already typed up 600 names for the random generator. RANDOM.ORG - List Randomizer . This course of action ensures there are no delays because of attendance. We get the pools up on time, every time.


8. You may bid on up to THREE players from each pool. You don't have to bid on any though.


9. EACH GM WILL SUBMIT ONE BID PER PLAYER (UP TO 3 PLAYERS TOTAL) DAILY BETWEEN 0700 and 2100 (9) PM EST. See #10 for unique bid instructions.


10. MINIMUM BID FOR THIS YEAR WILL BE 750K. ALL BIDS MUST BE AT LEAST THAT HIGH AND BIDDING INCREMENTS WILL BE 10K UP TO 1 MILLION. ONCE YOU REACH 1 MILLION INCREMENTAL BIDDING WILL BE 100K.

So, examples of acceptable bids

750K or 760k so on and so forth up to 1 million.

Then it goes 1.1M, 1.2M, 1.3M, etc.

10.1M or 10.2M

Any bids that do not adhere to the above rule/examples will be thrown out. Do not moan after the fact. You have all day to plan your bids out and get them in properly.


11. Any tied bids will go to a do or die bid off, where the GMs tied must submit a final offer. We will discuss the time frame of a bid off once we get closer to the start date. Obviously I'd like to have a new pool of players up daily but with bids happening from 7 am to 9 pm EST, we would probably need part of the next day to allow for any tied bids to be resolved.


13. After we've completed 40 days of bidding, all players who did not receive a bid throughout will go into a FA pool. This pool will be used to fill out any open position on rosters. Some teams may have all 23 guys signed and others may need 2-3 roster spots filled.


14. We will hold a one round draft for coaches after the bidding finishes on players.

-I like MM's idea of having the draft order set by remaining cap space. Whoever has the most cap space available at the end of the auction would get the first pick. Whoever has the least amount of cap space would get the last selection.


15. NO VOTES WILL BE SENT TO ME.

-To absolutely ensure validity, I will have an outside party collect the daily bids and submit winners each night/or morning. This way I have no access to when/how much a GM bids on any player. I'm working on securing that person now.

16. No trades of any kind after the draft. Who you sign is who you keep.


17. Depending on # of teams, we'll figure out conferences/divisions.


17. Playoffs and voting procedures will be discussed by the inaugural members but I will be recommending that a panel from the HoH forum be judges on the round to round match ups. Obviously that will be volunteer based and the members would have to be agreed upon by the GM's here as well.


INTERESTED MEMBERS:

@ImporterExporter
@VanIslander
@Namba 17
@DannyGallivan
@The Macho Man
@Habsfan18
@tinyzombies

Click to read more...

 

[VanIslander]

No way this should run at the same time as the ATD.

I would be first to sign up for it in the spring (the ATD ends in March).

 

[Namba 17]

This is great idea and tempting rules. But I've already singed in "traditional" ATD and won't have time to participate in both events. If you released your suggestion earlier I'd definitely took part in it. The same if for any reason they decide that ATD should be canceled or whatever.
What if we take this draft in this fall, say, October as an experiment?

 

[ImporterExporter]

This is just sign ups and discussion. I wasn't planning starting this until the ATD was at least winding down. I'd like to shoot for April/May start. This will give me time to secure someone to collect bids and also put feelers out for HoH members who would be willing post auction judges.

Anyone is welcome to join. I'm also looking for suggestions or critiques of the rules more than anything.

 

[DannyGallivan]

Since the bidding is Monday to Friday, I would join. I'm on the internet between 8:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Central Standard Time Monday to Friday. I adhere to a strict home rule of no internet in the evenings or at all on the weekends.

 

[The Macho King]

I mean I'd be 100% down schedule permitting. I have a trial in early April but it should only be a week, and after that I'll probably be free.

I can look through the rules as written this weekend and suggest some revisions.

 

[VanIslander]

... I'd like to shoot for April/May start.

Alrighty then!

 

[Habsfan18]

I’m very intrigued. This is a great idea. Really not sure how I’d do with the whole cap management aspect, but I suppose that’s the fun of it and the whole point.

 

[The Macho King]

Rules:

1. Salary Cap will be set at 82 million.

-This was done because this closely resembles real life so the top players in real life today will sort of be a benchmark for the top players all time. Gretzky, Howe, Orr should likely all be the highest paid players here, so you'd expect to see at least 13 million per, possibly more depending on how top heavy a GM wants his/her team to be. Would somebody be willing to go nuts to ensure one of the big 4? Will a GM try to get Gretzky AND Orr or will depth reign supreme? No comments here - this is fine.

2. Roster will consist of 23 players.

12 starting F
6 starting D.
1 starting G.
1 backup G.
3 reserves (F or D)

I might switch this to one or two spares instead? I don't know - spares are generally uninteresting and not used much, although this format might lead to something a bit more interesting.

3. Any player in hockey history will be available to sign in the daily auction pools. This includes pre NHL stars and non NHL Euro's.

I would expect nothing less.

4. Pools will consist of 15 players each.

Fifteen players and only three bids per pool (as discussed later) seems a bit thin. I might suggest increasing the number of potential bids to

5. Daily bidding on each pool will occur over 40 days, Monday-Friday, totaling 600 players offered (15 players per pool x 40 days of bidding).

-Basically if they've been drafted in the ATD, they'll show up here for bidding. Also, Monday-Friday allows us to catch a breather each week.

600 feels like a lot. That would require ~25 GMs during the playoffs/offseason to fill out, which seems... aspirational.

6. The daily pools will be randomly generated. There will be no set order. You could have 8 goalies in one pool and 12 C's in the next.

This is fine - but I would suggest releasing all of the pools first. Allows for more strategy if you know Orr is in pool 35 so if you really want him you need to save 13mil in cap space, and also allow people to check out for a random day or two if they know no one of interest is coming up for them.

7. I will be generating the daily random pools.

-If you have a problem with that, then consider. One, getting somebody else, not involved to pledge the better part of 2 months to be here daily for that is not something I"m willing to ask someone to do for a trial run. Two, even if I were to set up the pools manually (scheming for my benefit), I'm still not guaranteed to get the player anyway (someone can outbid me). I hope people realize that this is for fun first and foremost. Plain and simple. I'm willing to be vested for the betterment of all. I've already typed up 600 names for the random generator. RANDOM.ORG - List Randomizer . This course of action ensures there are no delays because of attendance. We get the pools up on time, every time.

No need to be defensive

8. You may bid on up to THREE players from each pool. You don't have to bid on any.

I'd make it 5.

9. EACH GM WILL SUBMIT ONE (SINGLE) BID DAILY BETWEEN 0700 and 2100 (9) PM EST. See #10 for unique bid instructions.


10. YOU MAY NOT USE "ROUND" NUMBERS WHEN PLACING A BID.

-So you can't bid 750,000, 5,500,000 or 12 000,000 million. You need to make it unique. (NO REPEATING NUMBERS). This will help reduce the number of same bids. Yes, it will require a little bit more tracking by each GM so you don't go over the 82 million dollar cap (an extra few minutes with a calculator) but the trade off is a smoother bidding process, which is paramount. Any bid placed like 7M, 8.5M OR 7.99M will be thrown out.

Again, make sure you bid
10,750,501,
5,940,650,
or 750,510 on each player.

Do not moan after the fact. You have all day to plan your bids out and get them in properly.

Sorry - this is a bad idea. I would go the other way and make bids to the 100k. I see what you're trying to do - you're trying to avoid ties. I would suggest instead making an interesting tie-breaker. This is already a very new procedure, and adding this level of fiddliness is going to cause more headaches than it prevents.

11. There are no maximum or minimum amounts you can bid.

I'd put in a minimum of like 700k or something like that (close to league minimum now).

12. Any tied bids will go to a do or die bid off, where the GMs tied must submit a multi million dollar offer unique down to the last digit. NO REPEATING NUMBERS. Highest bid wins.

Let's put a bit more thought into the tiebreaking procedure, because I think there's a way to make this a lot of fun. Maybe make each tied party escalate their bids by 100k at a time until someone taps out - could lead to some interesting incentives of pumping value.

13. After we've completed 40 days of bidding, all players who did not receive a bid throughout will go into a FA pool. This pool will be used to fill out any open position on rosters. Some teams may have all 23 guys signed and others may need 2-3 roster spots filled.

Yeah.

14. We will hold a one round draft for coaches after the bidding finishes on players.

-This will make the draft unique in that you may build your roster as you see fit but are not guaranteed to get the perfect (or top) coach because the draft order will be random. So if you sign Gretzky but only select say 15th in the coaches draft, you may have to take a coach who isn't the best on the board to provide the right fit.

Hmmm... this part might need more cooking. Maybe order the draft for the coach based on who has the most cap space to the least?

15. NO VOTES WILL BE SENT TO ME.

-To absolutely ensure validity, I will have an outside party collect the daily bids and submit winners each night/or morning. This way I have no access to when/how much a GM bids on any player. I'm working on securing that person now.

16. No trades of any kind after the draft. Who you sign is who you keep.


17. Depending on # of teams, we'll figure out conferences/divisions.


17. Playoffs and voting procedures will be discussed by the inaugural members but I will be recommending that a panel from the HoH forum be judges on the round to round match ups. Obviously that will be volunteer based and the members would have to be agreed upon by the GM's here as well.

 

[tinyzombies]

I'm in.

 

[VanIslander]

Have the post-auction free agents go into another pool (an FA round of auctioneering)... give EVERYONE a chance to bid on a guy who wasn't randomized.

No first come, first served.

Make every pick open to competition.

 

[Hockey Outsider]

I really like this idea. I've talked about it before - the challenge is finding someone to run the draft (that's not going to be me though).

I would most likely be available to keep track of salaries spent by player/roster, if that would be useful.

If there are randomized pools (ie who's up for auction each day), I can prepare those if you want someone who isn't going to be a GM. (This makes sense if the entire pool is listed upfront - if it's a "secret" pool and the players are listed each day, it would have to be the someone else as I can't commit to doing that every morning).

One big question - if the main concern with the current ATD is the lack of participation in the playoffs, I don't know if this draft format really addresses that. But I don't think it's necessarily meant to.

I also don't know if the "unique numbers" rule is the best way to deal with ties. First, I'm not convinced that ties will be that big of a problem - we're dealing with a salary range from $700K to $13M or so - lots of numbers to choose from. Second, I think we'll spend too much time arguing about what makes a valid bid (ie "is $2,500,500 unique enough?"). I don't have a good alternative now, but I'll give it some thought.

 

[VanIslander]

One big question - if the main concern with the current ATD is the lack of participation in the playoffs, I don't know if this draft format really addresses that. But I don't think it's necessarily meant to.

That IS a big question.

Is the purpose of life to go to heaven? Or is it to have lived a great life?

Do we need to try to win the playoffs or just have a good draft?

I don't think we need to burden a draft with the answer. Different strokes, different folks.

 

[ImporterExporter]

Appreciate all the responses and thoughts @The Macho Man @VanIslander @Hockey Outsider

1. Spares could absolutely be eliminated to be honest.

-I think the vast majority of people generally grade teams based on them being healthy over a 7 game series. If folks wanted to just have a roster at a nice round 20 (12 F/6 D/2 G) I'd be totally on board with that. Shortens the auction process and gives us a little extra juice going into the post auction aspects.

2. We could certainly cut the overall pool of players down as well as the daily pool sizes. Great aspect to get votes on from folks who will be interested.

3. I really want the pools to be completely random for the first run.

-I think that is where the biggest strategy will come into play not to mention suspense. Each day not knowing who will be available really makes each GM have to put a little extra effort into the bids. Plus I think it will be interesting to see prices given we'll be using a cap that mirror the real life NHL. Is somebody going to go nuts and drop 15, 20 million on somebody?

4. I think 3 bids is a middle of the curve # but am certainly open to upping that as MM suggested .

-My idea with 3 bids per pool was to make GM's have to stretch their brains a bit more on who to divvy up bids to. There will certainly be pools where you'll want to throw 5+ bids out but only having 3 bids makes the decision all the tougher.

5. The unique bidding will absolutely be something we all need to discuss for sure as MM brought up valid points.

-I want to really avoid having same bids happen as it will bog down the daily movement of the entire auction. Because there will be a set window for bidding each day, same bids will have to essentially push back the next day of bidding while we go to a sudden death tiebreaker.

Assuming everyone is on board with 9 pm EST as the cut off for a daily bid, and the person collecting the bids can be online nightly to post the winners, we'd still need to give the GM's who are tied time to submit their final bids.

Obviously that pushes everything back. Details obviously will be ironed out in the weeks to come.

But I do agree that making people submit non repeating bids each time will obviously lead to stuff getting thrown out because of a typo or possibly a misread by the person tallying up the bids. And thinking about it logically as HO said, there probably won't be THAT many tied bids.

Bids could be made at 10.1M or 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 950,000, etc. Then if you had to go to a tiebreaker we could institute the no repeating #'s portion.

 

[ImporterExporter]

That IS a big question.

Is the purpose of life to go to heaven? Or is it to have lived a great life?

Do we need to try to win the playoffs or just have a good draft?

I don't think we need to burden a draft with the answer. Different strokes, different folks.

Very big question indeed!

What if we simply put the rosters up to vote from HoH members? We could have say 9 willing HoH members rank the rosters from 1 to whatever. Basically no round by round match ups just best to worst post auction? The GMs here would have to agree on who those judges would be and we'd also need them to actually be willing to do it. Maybe even have write ups done by each judge outlining their choices?

The postseason portion is something I didn't want to dive too far into given I wanted input from potential GM's. I'd rather not just use a copy and past format from the ATD because it isn't working anymore to be quite frank.

 

[ChiTownPhilly]

I might switch this to one or two spares instead? I don't know - spares are generally uninteresting and not used much, although this format might lead to something a bit more interesting.

I actually LIKE spares- and I think something was missing from the OPPF draft by excluding them. You had teams that had players who you KNOW would be likely to get injured over the course of a hypothetical Regular Season- but had no way of accounting for their absence, if not in-the-lineup. To have a draft and say "no-one-gets-injured" like they used to do at the old Strat-O-Matic Football Tournaments warps valuations and makes the virtue of real-world durability an irrelevancy. I say YES to spares.

...I would suggest releasing all of the pools first. Allows for more strategy if you know Orr is in pool 35 so if you really want him you need to save 13mil in cap space, and also allow people to check out for a random day or two if they know no one of interest is coming up for them.

I like this a lot. Transparency at the front-end can only help.

10. YOU MAY NOT USE "ROUND" NUMBERS WHEN PLACING A BID.

I give a "thumbs-up" to this, too. It can even be worded simply. No bids ending in "zero." The goal of avoiding ties is a laudable one. It'll speed up proceedings in a process that already seems to unfold all-too-slowly.

I'd put in a minimum of like 700k or something like that (close to league minimum now).

Well- 700001, anyway.

Any tied bids will go to a do or die bid off, where the GMs tied must submit a multi million dollar offer unique down to the last digit. NO REPEATING NUMBERS. Highest bid wins.

Gigantic loophole exists in this rule- one that would allow two colluding GMs the latitude to make a mockery of the entire process, if such a rule were to remain in its current form. Safeguard against the vulnerability by requiring the tie-break bid to be at least as high as the tying bid.

Maybe order the draft for the coach based on who has the most cap space to the least?

Seems the most equitable solution, to me.

 

[ImporterExporter]

So I think we definitely need to simplify the bid amounts.

Glad MM caught the minimum bid amount bit. Obviously we don't want GM's sneaking somebody for 100k so we'll set the minimum bid at 750K. No max/cap though. Simply must stay under the cap ceiling.

So bids would be at least 750K and bid increments must be set/raised by 10k, So you can bid 760k or 1.60M or 11.30M etc.

As for the handful of tied bids we're sure to get over the 2 months, we could have a short time period the next day where the tied GMs would then submit a final do or die bid. In the case where neither GM resubmits a do or die bid then the player in question would NOT sign with either and would then go to the post auction FA pool as a potential roster fill out (possible strategy?).

 

[ImporterExporter]

What do folks think about adding roster spots for spares?

I know they don't garner much respect/impact post draft but this being an auction means we would only have to extend the auction by a 3-4 days. It's up the group. I personally don't think they're worth the time because I don't think many people give them credence but I want folks to share their thoughts.

 

[ImporterExporter]

I updated the OP w/ the new bidding details that I described in post #17.

 

[VanIslander]

Spares are good because an impulsive bid might win you a guy who, in hindsight, you might want to BENCH!

It is like a built-in mulligan. You can re-pick your starter, you just have to bite the bullet salarywise.

 

[ChiTownPhilly]

10. MINIMUM BID FOR THIS YEAR WILL BE 750K. ALL BIDS MUST BE AT LEAST THAT HIGH AND
BIDDING INCREMENTS WILL BE 10K.
So, examples of acceptable bids
750K or 760k so on and so forth
1.50M or 1.60M
10.1M or 10.2M
Any bids that do not adhere to the above rule/examples will be thrown out. Do not moan after the fact. You have all day to plan your bids out and get them in properly.

O.K.: just to clarify...

$1720000. [One million, seven-hundred twenty thousand]. Acceptable bid, or no? Because based on the enlarged font TEXT, it IS an acceptable bid. But based on the enlarged font example-illustration, it is not.

The examples given here suggest that it's intervals of 10000 until 1 million is reached- and after a million is reached, the intervals increase to 100000.

 

[ImporterExporter]

O.K.: just to clarify...

$1720000. [One million, seven-hundred twenty thousand]. Acceptable bid, or no? Because based on the enlarged font TEXT, it IS an acceptable bid. But based on the enlarged font example-illustration, it is not.

The examples given here suggest that it's intervals of 10000 until 1 million is reached- and after a million is reached, the intervals increase to 100000.

Thanks for helping clarify CTP!

Intervals of 10k until 1 million, yes. So 750k, 760k, 770k, so on and so forth.

Then it goes by 100k onece you hit 1 mil.

1.1M, 1.2M, 1.3M, etc, etc.

 

[ImporterExporter]

Wanted to bump this up for discussion purposes. Won't start until after the MLD.

We already touched on some of the rules, specifically the bidding process.

Does anything see anything else that should be discussed/added?