to veto or not to veto

[87Flyer]

Since I joined this site i\'ve seen a bunch of posts talking about league presidents who feel they have the right to veto a trade at their whim. I find this very disconcerting to think that someone would think that they have the right to veto a trade because they don\'t agree with it or like it. Now before you all start sending crazy replies let me say that by no means do i think a trade that is made to help one team beat another or 2 friends fixing each other up is right or fair I just can\'t believe that ANY guy running a pool can do what he wants cause he don\'t like a trade. If I had someone veto my trade because he didn\'t like the fact that I traded someone he feels is undervalued I wouldn\'t be in that league for very long(i\'d prolly have some choice words for him as well).

My problem with this veto talk is simple, it\'s MY team and if I feel that a certain trade is right for me then I expect to be able to make it. Now i\'m not saying that trading a superstar for a bum shouldn\'t be vetoed as this would obviously be a collusion situation but come on now, what gives ANY league president the right to stop a trade that might make sense to the parties involved but not to them. Sometimes those bad trades are what teaches a fledgling GM the needed experience to think a little more or wait a little longer to make a trade or research the players they are thinking of trading. In the end it\'s all about experience, sometimes the best way to get that is to get burned via a bad trade.

Case in point, last year I joined my 1st long term keeper league with some friends I grew up with. I started the year with T.Kaberle. The first month or so went by and he was absolutely garbage, I got frustrated with the lack of production and dealt him for what I thought was the replacement for N.Lidstrom, thats right crappy Kronwall lol. Wouldn\'t you know it not 2 days after I traded Kaberle he started to rip it up. I regretted that trade all year and still do but you know what, I learned a valuable lesson from that trade and I didn\'t make another bad one all year long. I learned the value of looking into other players that I thought would be worth it, I found a wicked site to glean my info from while searching through hockey sites(yup you guessed it this one). Since that bad trade i\'ve manged to put together my list of 10 protectors for next year who are ALL in the top 50 of Dobbers list. Sure some of them will need to be upgraded next year( a couple are band aid boys that I need to unload) but know instead of being the GM that everyone thought they could rape i\'m now the one that they\'re all wary of making deals with. I learned, unfortunately the hard way but it worked. If the league president had\'ve vetoed that deal what would I have really learned, it\'s ok to be a bonehead, the commish will wipe my ass for me and make sure i\'m tucked in at night with a bedtime story, not a very good lesson from where i\'m sitting.

Sorry to rant on about this I just don\'t think it\'s cool for someone to think they can make decisions for other poolies because they don\'t like what decisions someone else makes. If you want to be in control that much why not just draft 10 teams for yourself and then you can make sure that no one makes any bad deals. I\'d like to know just how many league presidents actually veto deals in their pools and if it happens a lot.

[superluke]

In our keeper league, anyone can veto a trade....but he need someone else to second the vetoe, then at that point, their is a vote and we need to have 60% managers to agree to void the trade.

So it\'s not the story of one man and it\'s just more democratic...

[doulos]

We\'ve always had a democratic system in place for voting as well.

[Dobber]

87Flyer - I wholeheartedly agree. I had my own rant about this...very similar to yours...in this forum about two months ago. Wish I could dig it up for ya. A veto rule should be in place just as a warning, but it should be difficult to implement and over the course of 10 years it should be used zero times.

Both my keeper leagues (18 years and five years) have vetos. No trades have been vetoed yet. Sure, there have been some rape jobs, but a veto should only be there when it is an out and out buddy deal (i.e. one owner helps another owner to win and then quits the pool).

[87Flyer]

Now that definitely makes much more sense. I could understand it happening as a vote if all the GM\'s thought something was fishy. I\'ve also had a friend of mine mention your scenario as well Dobber, think he said something about the trade being undone or something when one player all of a sudden quits so that the guy who benefitted actually wouldn\'t. Thanks for the replies, good to know that there are rules in place for most other pools and it\'s few and far between where 1 guy is the decision maker for everyone. Thanks again guys.

[Egon]

I had a trade of mine vetoed this year and I was pretty pissed about it.

Doesnt feel good especially when if you really looked at the trade I got the worst end of it. (trade was built so I would solidify the win this year but lose 2 solid keepers to build the other guy for the future)

[Dobber]

Egon wrote:

I had a trade of mine vetoed this year and I was pretty pissed about it.

Doesnt feel good especially when if you really looked at the trade I got the worst end of it. (trade was built so I would solidify the win this year but lose 2 solid keepers to build the other guy for the future)

That\'s how trades should go - ruin the team of the guy who is winning it, in exchange for helping the guy who is giving up! You should demand change Egon. Tell the admin guys to look at the trade like this:

You gave him: player A and player B

He gave you: player C, player D, $300 in prize money (or whatever it is) and a permanent engraving of your team name on the trophy.

If they veto it strictly looking at the players, they are wrong. They need to look at the full picture. The money and the trophy are what it\'s all about. If I won that, I\'d happily be last for five years! (actually, I kinda did do that in one league - won it before the lockout, sacrificed everything, and have been second-last for two straight years). Big picture, my friend. Big picture.

[The Comish]

I run two keeper pools and one of the problems is that some poolies need glasses and are sometimes very short-sighted. When you throw it out there for a vote, sometimes the mob rules (and the mob\'s record sucks for hockey knowledge). What if some guys lobby their friends to veto a trade? The potential for havoc is there when you put it out to everyone. I put in my rules that I will approve a bad trade, but need to understand why the trade is made.

[blindedbyfear]

I have serious issues with this as well, especially as a commish.

My primary league had 10 teams this season. I had a rule in place that I needed 4 objections to look at a trade (4/7 being over 50%). That\'s assuming that the 2 teams that are participating in the trade obviously won\'t veto it and I generally won\'t vote since I\'m the commish, unless it\'s absolutely ridiculous (I vetoed nothing for the record).

There were a few trades this season and only a couple came to me to look at. I only vetoed one and that was at the trade deadline and was an obvious \"buddy\" move between someone who I was pretty sure was leaving the league (and he actually left prematurely once the trade was vetoed) and someone who, at the time, had the second best overall record in the league. The trade was Zetterburg for Tim Connolly. Sorry, I felt it was lopsided enough to uphold a veto.

For next season my league is expanding to 12. I am going to have some sort of veto mechanism, and I\'m torn between a couple of different ideas:

1)All are allowed but must go through me and I can veto anything really, really bad. I really don\'t want to be the sole arbiter, because people seriously tend to whine when any trade they\'re involved in is vetoed. Although maybe it\'s necessary for there to be a sole arbiter.

2)Same as it is now, except 5 must object to go to a decision. And the decision, instead of being made solely by me, is made by a 3 member executive committee. Obviously we\'d have alternates so that people wouldn\'t be approving/disapproving trades they\'re involved in.

But I tend to agree with the OP. If someone wants to screw themselves, let them do it. I let a Malkin trade go through that I was adamantly opposed to. It didn\'t even get enough objections to go to veto. The trade was Malkin for Iginla, Comrie, and Mark Bell. My objection, aside from the fact that I was horrified someone was trading Malkin, was actually based on the \"big picture\" because the team trading Malkin sucked and needed at least a year or two of rebuilding to really contend. His only other forwards of any value were/are Eric Staal, Zach Parise, and Alexander Frolov. The explanation given to me by the team trading Malkin was that he was getting back a superstar to replace Malkin who would help him now and he was getting depth for the future to rebuild. An oxymoron if I ever heard one, especially when the team getting Malkin has players such as Stastny, Nash, Lehtonen who could have been asked for. I just don\'t see why he made the trade and didn\'t ask for something like Iginla/Stastny/Nash. The owner who traded Malkin has finished in last for the second consecutive year and his best forwards are Iginla/Staal/Parise/Frolov. But, you know, it\'s nice having his cash in the prize pool.

So why didn\'t I veto it? Because it wasn\'t malicious, and he still was getting 1 decent player out of it. He will, I would guess, regret the move for a long time to come, but I don\'t think the deal damaged the integrity of the league. Which is why I didn\'t veto it. It\'s not my job, as commish, to protect you from being an idiot with your team. It is my job to prevent collusion.

Post edited by: blindedbyfear, at: 2007/06/04 16:26