Trade Deadline(s)

MatthewFlames

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Jul 21, 2003
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Perhaps a better way of looking at this is payroll and talent level. Maybe some of the teams you indicated above are paying top dollars for mediocre talent and the end result is missing the playoffs and/or blowing the bank. As a player agent, I know teams like Colorado, Vancouver, St Louis are hardest to bargain with and somehow they know how to move expensive players for cheaper players. Maybe we need to learn a thing a two from them.

There is no doubt there is some truth to this. But are you really accusing veteran gms like Rich, Rob, Matt G of mismanagement with contracts for their situations? I don't think so.
 

MatthewFlames

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Jul 21, 2003
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'Murica
Wouldn't be the first time, especially when it comes to numbers. :(

However, it seems to me that of course those teams aren't making a profit over the whole year. Because they didn't have these low payrolls for the whole season. They are making a profit NOW because they have drastically cut their payrolls. Any team with a projected balance above their current balance is making a profit.

Or am I missing something?

You can't look at just expenses versus revenue for the remainder of the season. You have to take the bigger picture of the entire season.
I project to make more money for the remainder of the season only because I have played 6 more games on the road than at home.

The financial calculations I did show the true pictures. I mean, I am spending less than one Wojtek Wolski more than the Ducks. Hardly THAT much more financially imprudent
 

Wildman

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Feb 28, 2002
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Toronto
There is no doubt there is some truth to this. But are you really accusing veteran gms like Rich, Rob, Matt G of mismanagement with contracts for their situations? I don't think so.


I am not accusing anyone but do you think Gomez and Jokinen were worth what they got as a UFA? Rich took a risk of signing Jokinen and I took the gamble on taking Gomex contract before he went into a slump and we both lost on the signing (well at least me cause Rich flipped Jokinen for 2nd rd pick). Perhaps the GM needs to start their budget with $40M as a breakeven number and do some scenerio analysis as how much risk thay can take and gamble when they are ready to take the loss.

Lets look at Ottawa here, the guy had close to $60M payroll and less than $10M in a bank. What if his team did not perform as he expected, can you blame anyone else for his mismanagement? Do you think Tampa made a wise choice of giving Selanne $8M for 4 years? especially when his roster was mediocre and needed depth players rather than one star player. These are the things that GM need to think before signing players.
 
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Canuck09

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Jul 4, 2004
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Vancouver
I am not accusing anyone but do you think Gomez and Jokinen were worth what they got as a UFA? Perhaps the GM needs to start their budget with $40M as a breakeven number and look at how much they can make/lose by making into the playoffs and factor in Endorsements.

How can we continue to use $40M as a starting point when the cap is north of $60M...with salaries that are tied NHL numbers and that $60M cap??? That doesn't compute to me.
 

The old geezer

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Feb 10, 2007
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We've already been busy filling up our cap space. With the addition of Selanne and Sturm we've added about 10.8mil. We still have quite a bit of space but at this time were really just looking for a rental dman.
Still its hard to find a good deal as a buyer, everyone keeps asking for top ten prospects for their 70 rated players with bad contracts :)

I can't agree with you more on this one. I have cap space and have been willing to eat a big expiring contract or two as a rental but I've been asked for top prospects in return. Seriously delusional requests frankly. The going rate for those sort of guys are mid rounders at best.
 

Wildman

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Feb 28, 2002
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Toronto
How can we continue to use $40M as a starting point when the cap is north of $60M...with salaries that are tied NHL numbers and that $60M cap??? That doesn't compute to me.

I think the first thing you need to do is make a realistic assumption on how good your team is compared to your division. If your team is playoffs bound than perhaps add some salary to be competitive otherwise stay around $40M - $45M and you should be fine. The same cap applies in NHL as well and many teams stay way below the cap and are just as competitive. One more thing, do you realize how much Penalty some of the teams have paid for trading their UFAs? Maybe team needs to pay more attention to this.
 

The old geezer

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Feb 10, 2007
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Oh my. I can't believe this discussion is back ... I'm generally staying out but welcome intelligent discussions on possible solutions.

The thing that is missing in some of these discussions in mind is laying out what the end state needs to be and what 'behaviours' that want to be enforced or discouraged. Once your clear on, and more importantly in agreement with, that then finding a solution is clearer.

First the revenue and endorsements are geared towards winning. This was done to counter all the prospectors and associated icing of farm teams instead of competitors. The minimum OV rule was also a piece of that puzzle but even I, as one of the original advocates for that rule, tend to agree it has lost it's effectiveness with time and changes.

Second you need to decide whether you are setting revenue to expense targets on single season numbers or looking at a model that is balanced over time. In other words I hope it is agreed that setting something up that ensures 90% of teams make money every year is not any better than 90% losing money.

Anyway that's just my two cents on how you may want to break down the problem and gives you a scorecard against which to evaluate many of the proposals being made.
 

Brent Burns Beard

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Feb 27, 2002
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I am not accusing anyone but do you think Gomez and Jokinen were worth what they got as a UFA? Rich took a risk of signing Jokinen and I took the gamble on taking Gomex contract before he went into a slump and we both lost on the signing (well at least me cause Rich flipped Jokinen for 2nd rd pick). Perhaps the GM needs to start their budget with $40M as a breakeven number and do some scenerio analysis as how much risk thay can take and gamble when they are ready to take the loss.

Lets look at Ottawa here, the guy had close to $60M payroll and less than $10M in a bank. What if his team did not perform as he expected, can you blame anyone else for his mismanagement? Do you think Tampa made a wise choice of giving Selanne $8M for 4 years? especially when his roster was mediocre and needed depth players rather than one star player. These are the things that GM need to think before signing players.

i think i am a fiscally responsible GM for the most part. i have made a couple mistakes (the Gionta trade and not auto signing Schneider last season) but other than that:


i have rarely (once i think) signed a UFA
i make financial trades often (dumping salary, picking up cash)
i made the 2nd round of the playoffs last season (iirc)
my highest paid player makes 4.5m
i admit to having an overpaid back up, which was 100% my fault


my only mistake was not signing up for endorsements, but thats my general life philosophy on gambling. id rather be guaranteed even than chance being down.


just didnt expect to be bleeding so badly to be honest, but i will continue to make moves to get my payroll under control and hopefully will have some money to try and buy endorsements next season.
 

Wildman

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Feb 28, 2002
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i think i am a fiscally responsible GM for the most part. i have made a couple mistakes (the Gionta trade and not auto signing Schneider last season) but other than that:


i have rarely (once i think) signed a UFA
i make financial trades often (dumping salary, picking up cash)
i made the 2nd round of the playoffs last season (iirc)
my highest paid player makes 4.5m
i admit to having an overpaid back up, which was 100% my fault


my only mistake was not signing up for endorsements, but thats my general life philosophy on gambling. id rather be guaranteed even than chance being down.


just didnt expect to be bleeding so badly to be honest, but i will continue to make moves to get my payroll under control and hopefully will have some money to try and buy endorsements next season.


Lets look at your team....you had a payroll of $45M at the end of last season and $3M in the Bank account. Lets say you made $1M per game in the playoffs and went to 2nd round last season which adds to $7M so the total is $10M to start the season. I don't know what the TV revenue were but lets say it was $2M so that bring you to $12M.

Your current payrol is $51M after trading some of your core players and the average revenue that sim provide is about $1M per game so you are down $11M for the season.

Robb, you may not have $8M dollar guy in your roster but you have quite a number of players that make around $3M-$4M and very few at rookie salary. However, I think you could have easily covered some of the losses by signing endorsements and maybe get a round of playoffs.
 

Canuck09

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Jul 4, 2004
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Vancouver
Lets look at your team....you had a payroll of $45M at the end of last season and $3M in the Bank account. Lets say you made $1M per game in the playoffs and went to 2nd round last season which adds to $7M so the total is $10M to start the season. I don't know what the TV revenue were but lets say it was $2M so that bring you to $12M.

Your current payrol is $51M after trading some of your core players and the average revenue that sim provide is about $1M per game so you are down $11M for the season.

Robb, you may not have $8M dollar guy in your roster but you have quite a number of players that make around $3M-$4M and very few at rookie salary. However, I think you could have easily covered some of the losses by signing endorsements and maybe get a round of playoffs.

Matt pointed out earlier in the thread TV revenue was $0 last season. I don't think we can count on that as a source of revenue if there's potential for $0 payouts.
 

Brent Burns Beard

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Feb 27, 2002
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Lets look at your team....you had a payroll of $45M at the end of last season and $3M in the Bank account. Lets say you made $1M per game in the playoffs and went to 2nd round last season which adds to $7M so the total is $10M to start the season. I don't know what the TV revenue were but lets say it was $2M so that bring you to $12M.

Your current payrol is $51M after trading some of your core players and the average revenue that sim provide is about $1M per game so you are down $11M for the season.

Robb, you may not have $8M dollar guy in your roster but you have quite a number of players that make around $3M-$4M and very few at rookie salary. However, I think you could have easily covered some of the losses by signing endorsements and maybe get a round of playoffs.


ok, but surely i am allowed to have some NHL level players, no? they cost money, based on the system we use of resigning to NHL cap hits.


so i think the conclusion is:


- keep payroll under 40m
- gamble on endorsements


or fight for your financial life?
 

Wildman

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Feb 28, 2002
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Toronto
ok, but surely i am allowed to have some NHL level players, no? they cost money, based on the system we use of resigning to NHL cap hits.


so i think the conclusion is:


- keep payroll under 40m
- gamble on endorsements


or fight for your financial life?

Robb, I am not saying to keep payroll below $40M but each GM needs to have reality check to see where their team is compared to others in the division. If you think your team is playoff bound than perhaps you can increase your salary and take a chance. However, you also need to have money in the bank to take chances.

As for the endorsement, there are couple of endorsement that are not a gamble atall. For example, achieve attendance of 80% or above...any team can achieve this if they figure out the ticket price. The Mountain Dew usually is done after half a season so teams have fairly good idea if they will achieve this one or not. In the previous years, I used to take mountain dew cause I had the prospect but htis season opted not to sign on this one because I didn't see myself achieving more than $1M.
 

Ohio Jones

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Feb 28, 2002
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If you think your team is playoff bound than perhaps you can increase your salary and take a chance. However, you also need to have money in the bank to take a chance.

This is the crux. Matthew gambled - not unreasonably - and lost. If he had a bank balance he could absorb the loss. He doesn't, so he has to go "scorched earth".

The question from Matthew am others is: how to accumulate that bank balance in the first place. The wealthy teams got most of their money under previous sims, and have had winning teams that could augment their revenues through significant endorsements and playoff runs. Teams without that luxury are hard pressed to break even, and therein lies the crux.
 

kasper11

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Feb 27, 2002
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New York
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This is the crux. Matthew gambled - not unreasonably - and lost. If he had a bank balance he could absorb the loss. He doesn't, so he has to go "scorched earth".

The question from Matthew am others is: how to accumulate that bank balance in the first place. The wealthy teams got most of their money under previous sims, and have had winning teams that could augment their revenues through significant endorsements and playoff runs. Teams without that luxury are hard pressed to break even, and therein lies the crux.

I think we need to figure out, as a league, how much money it is reasonable to expect a team to spend and break even without missing the playoffs.

Pitt has a payroll of $52M. Without making the playoffs, I have no problem with him losing money. The problem is the amount, about $9M.

That means a team needs to spend only $43M (or less) to break even if they miss the playoffs. The problem is, the NHL has a cap floor higher than that, and our salaries are tied to theirs.

Personally, I think that if we have a cap of $59M, then a team around $49M, $10M less, should break even without making the playoffs. Obviously this will change next year.

If teams $10M under the cap are losing significant money, I think we will very quickly get to a place where 4-5 teams go for it in any given year, and the rest have no choice but to field a team as cheap as possible.
 

Wildman

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Feb 28, 2002
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Toronto
This is the crux. Matthew gambled - not unreasonably - and lost. If he had a bank balance he could absorb the loss. He doesn't, so he has to go "scorched earth".

The question from Matthew am others is: how to accumulate that bank balance in the first place. The wealthy teams got most of their money under previous sims, and have had winning teams that could augment their revenues through significant endorsements and playoff runs. Teams without that luxury are hard pressed to break even, and therein lies the crux.

Doug, I don't know what the answer is to solve this but perhaps we need to remove the UFA penalty so teams can immediately start thinking of the future when they notice that they are slumping. I know Matt and yourself have paid a lot over the last few years and has drained your bank balance.
 

Ohio Jones

Game on...
Feb 28, 2002
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Doug, I don't know what the answer is to solve this but perhaps we need to remove the UFA penalty so teams can immediately start thinking of the future when they notice that they are slumping. I know Matt and yourself have paid a lot over the last few years and has drained your bank balance.

Actually, I'd be opposed to removing the penalty. It exists to ensure that teams don't take the easy auto re-sign of their pending UFAs on a whim, and that's a worthwhile objective in my mind. I am the first to acknowledge that I am the one who has signed a guy only to flip him in a hockey deal the following season, and I have and should pay the price for those decisions. If it places me in precarious straits financially, I have nobody to blame but myself.

Without this rule in place, our FA season will be even more pathetic than it already is -- if that's even possible! -- and those teams that have come through rebuilding and are looking to add established players (like Phoenix did last summer) will only be able to do so through trade, thus costing them some of their rebuild assets. That is a further disincentive to rebuilding, in my mind, and should be avoided at all costs.

If teams are slumping and have to move salary, they'll simply have to move some of their other high-salary assets and wait until the ASG to move re-signed players. Or pay the penalty, if they can afford to.
 

Toronto_AGM_Adil

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Apr 9, 2006
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To put it into perspective. If we finish with 910 million in the league bank accounts (our number from two years ago) - we would add 60 million, or 2 million per team into TV revenue. Your proposal, balancing to 60 million, not 32.3 (which we presently do, per team, since we started with 35 million per team but with only 28 teams (pre expansion)) - then we would balance to 1.8 billion. That's roughly 900 million additional TV revenue in the league. That means TV revenue would be SIXTY (60) MILLION PER TEAM.

I would propose a MUCH smaller number like 45 million per team (instead of 32.33) - which would give teams around 10-12 million of TV revenue (and that would fluctuate per season as it does now...)

You misinterpret me... I think we should look at this as revenue/spend equation not bank balance. If we say the cap is 60M, we can assume an average salary of maybe 50M. revenue wihtout endorsements/playoffs is around 40M, which would lead to a 10M loss. So, we take all the league expense (all player salaries) minus league revenue and we get a number which reflects the amount of cash that is lost from the league due to revenue/salary imbalance. We don't want to correct all of that number since some of that loss will be countered by endorsements/playoffs, but let's say we correct for half of it. We take that sum (say average 5M per team) and distribute it based on team performance. If a team has 60points they get say 2.5M, if they have 120points they get 7.5M if they're even they get 5M... poor teams still make money, good teams are rewarded. Key thing though is that revenue spread is increased from 5M to 10M.
 

Toronto_AGM_Adil

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Apr 9, 2006
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Matt pointed out earlier in the thread TV revenue was $0 last season. I don't think we can count on that as a source of revenue if there's potential for $0 payouts.

This is broken... $0 payout on TV revenue means the average team should be fielding a 40M payroll which is impossible with the NHL salary floor... it's not reasonable to expect this from GM's... this will just lead to cheap signings in Free Agency.

The 40M number is like two season's old and it's based on the old sim with a wider revenue spread and a lower cap.
 

MatthewFlames

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Jul 21, 2003
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'Murica
Actually, I'd be opposed to removing the penalty.

Yes. I think the penalty is important. It goes back to what Drew has stated about getting the right results out of GM behavior. This already barely keeps control of us. It probably could do with tightening. Maybe we say double penalty or you have to keep the player till the next off-season instead of all star break.
 

MatthewFlames

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Jul 21, 2003
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'Murica
You misinterpret me... I think we should look at this as revenue/spend equation not bank balance. If we say the cap is 60M, we can assume an average salary of maybe 50M. revenue wihtout endorsements/playoffs is around 40M, which would lead to a 10M loss. So, we take all the league expense (all player salaries) minus league revenue and we get a number which reflects the amount of cash that is lost from the league due to revenue/salary imbalance. We don't want to correct all of that number since some of that loss will be countered by endorsements/playoffs, but let's say we correct for half of it. We take that sum (say average 5M per team) and distribute it based on team performance. If a team has 60points they get say 2.5M, if they have 120points they get 7.5M if they're even they get 5M... poor teams still make money, good teams are rewarded. Key thing though is that revenue spread is increased from 5M to 10M.

Ah. Gotcha. Sorry about that.

Average salary is actually higher than 50 million. Much closer to 53 or 54 million. Bumping up the base for minimum league $$ per team from 32.3 to the 40 that you suggest would make a difference. It wouldn't be so much money to imbalance nor enough money to go hog wild. But enough that teams can realistically try to get into the playoff races until that all star breaks and enough to apply for endorsements.

On the endorsement front I say we remove the gambling/payment element. That may mean lowering the endorsements. For example instead of a 5 million payout for 90% attendance and a 2 million fee to play, you just make it a 3 million payout. Still use the same or better challenges to be met, so that winners fair better than teams that are losers. But essentially poor teams can spot pick and make enough revenue to stay afloat or even out things a bit.

Alvaro has suggested that one reason in-sim revenue is so low is that we've never given SP (star Power) ratings to our players. His research indicates that SP is a revenue driver and with all our teams have almost all players 0 ratings (a few minor players have 1's for some reason) the fans are not motivated to come out. Its a good point and we should look into it further. And even I suggest rate this next season.
 

Dryden

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Feb 27, 2002
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Toronto
Is their a team performance factor that puts butts in seats? Because I don't think there is one. As long as my ticket prices stay the same i get the same attendance level also no matter how my team performs. In fact my attendance was 87% last year and this year is 84% with same prices but a better team.
 

Ohio Jones

Game on...
Feb 28, 2002
8,257
201
Great White North
Is their a team performance factor that puts butts in seats? Because I don't think there is one. As long as my ticket prices stay the same i get the same attendance level also no matter how my team performs. In fact my attendance was 87% last year and this year is 84% with same prices but a better team.

Nope. Revenue is pretty much fixed. I have over 96% attendance but am earning slightly less than you in revenue per game.

The difference for me is I recognize I can control attendance through ticket prices without significantly impacting revenue, so I optimize attendance for maximum endorsement gain.
 

MatthewFlames

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Jul 21, 2003
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'Murica
Nope. Revenue is pretty much fixed. I have over 96% attendance but am earning slightly less than you in revenue per game.

The difference for me is I recognize I can control attendance through ticket prices without significantly impacting revenue, so I optimize attendance for maximum endorsement gain.

But I think it does if you're losing. Teams that are losing make significantly less revenue and as my MO has dropped my attendance has dropped. I've slowly been lowering my ticket prices all season to keep my attendance above 90%
 

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