Keeper League Trading Rules

[SirIrish]

Dobber, excuse the redundancy of this post as you had a similar discussion going on your old website. I am finalizing the details for my leagues transition into a Keeper League and need some help from your knowledgeable members.

The problem that is creating the most concern from other team managers is the leagues ability to prevent the unloading of players once they realize they are no longer in contention.

To use Dobber’s example:

“Let me use an example. Say you’re allowed to keep up to five players each year. Close to the end of the season, a few teams at the top will have a chance to win the League
and a number of teams at the bottom are looking to improve their chances next season. Now, assume that one of those teams, cognizant of its chances to win the League, wants a stud keeper (say, Dany Heatley) from one of the top teams. This bottom-feeder decides that he has five attractive players that are good, but not \"keeper quality\" - Nick Lidstrom, Peter Forsberg, Keith Tkachuk, Alex Tanguay and Martin Straka - so he offers these five for Heatley. If the trade is accepted, he wins because he gets his stud keeper for next year, this year be damned. The Heatley owner also likely wins because though he\'s lost a great keeper, he\'s added enough talent in the short-term to win the League. Both owners win, the League loses”

Some solutions to this problem were as follows:

1) Remove the subjectivity is to require that trades have a relatively equal amount (a certain percentage or dollar value) of NHL salaries going each way
2) Give out prize money for the team that rises the most in the standings after January 1
3) A post-season with prize money for the winner, but only the top eight teams in the standings make the post-season
4) Can’t trade more than one of your top 5-point players or top 5 salary players to the same team and maximum of 3 trades with one team

Does anyone use a different system that they would like to share? Thanks guys.

[smoothfun]

in our league we have a trade deadline similar to the nhl deadline,it helps.

[hoopej2]

We have a deadline too but we also have a minimum roster size. We have 24 guys on our teams and we must at all times have 2 G, 12 FWD and 6 D. That only leaves 4 reserve spots so it\'s harder to pull off a deal like the one you suggested. It\'s not impossible but not very likely.

We also have a last place penalty that is 50% of the entrance fee. This is to stop teams from tanking the season as you mentioned.

Post edited by: hoopej2, at: 2007/03/26 15:53

[dynamo45]

In one of my pools...we buy our players with 50.00 of fantasy money, so for instance Heatley is $5.40...Lidstrom is $5.20 and so on....
at no time during the year can your salary exceed 65.00 and at no time go below 40.00..... so in our league that trade you proposed would not even be finacially possible as the players involved all hover around the 4.50 to 6 dollar range....so if the team that had Heatley is in the running, he obviously has a good team already hovering around his original 50.00 mark, and he gets rid of Heater at 5.00 which puts him to say 45.00..then he takes all the guys mentioned which would be around 25.00-30.00 puts him at 70.00-75.00 which is not allowed....hope this helped a little

[reeveta]

I think this point was made already but here it goes again:
The best way around this is not to have such a small number of keeper players.
I don\'t really understand why \'keeper teams\' keep less then 20% of their players. It lends its self very easily to this sort of trading. For team out of the money, the rules pretty much tell you \'anyone who is not your top five player can be traded for a bag of pucks since you will lose him anyways\'. Then the leaders can buy a winner by being in the right place at the right time.
If it is a keeper league you should be able to keep most/all of your players!

[lanky522]

I don\'t know if I like the idea of a last place penalty. It is a keeper league strategy (and an NHL strategy) to try and trade/acquire good youth players when your keeper team/NHL franchise is clearly out of the running.

I think that this rebuilding can be a very necessary tactic, and I don\'t know that you should penalize a player who decides to trade a bunch of his point producers for younger talent (thus causing him to drop to last place). In my mind, that\'s the same as penalizing a player that trades for talent to propel him into first... it\'s all just strategy.

[Lehtonen32]

Fair enough lanky, but one of the most unrealistic things about fantasy hockey is that there is an inordinate amount of \'rebuilding\' teams. In the NHL, rebuilding is not an acceptable practice in many cities. And even in those cities that do accept a rebuild, there are significant disadvantages; you don\'t win, attendance down, fans get pissed off, you lose money, players grow up in a losing environment, players get into bad habits (see: Nash, Rick), players get pissed off with losing all the time and want out, goalies get destroyed etc. etc.

In fantasy hockey, there are no repercussions. Not going to come first? Why not blow up your team and start again! I\'ve given thought to a come-last-twice-and-you\'re-out system in my league, but haven\'t ever implemented it. A monetary penalty seems harsh, but it gets the job done.

I don\'t know why, but I\'m just really against massive I-have-zero-NHLers-on-my-roster style rebuilding. Especially immediately after (or during) the inaugural draft. That\'s like choosing to suck; what kind of people do that?

[smoothfun]

good point,i\'ve expressed the same in my pool , you go through the trouble of researching young players and wheeling and dealing to get stud players all to have it tanked at the end of the year when you\'re required to throw out the vast majority of your team.

[Zorro]

For those people who want to rebuild let them rebuild. For those people who want to win let them want to win. A trade is a trade, it takes two people to trade. To be in a good league you have to play against good owners, you just hope your owners/GM\'s know their hockey enough not to trade like an idiot. I know its nice to blindside somebody in a deal and get more for what you paid. But why would you be in a league with a bunch of dummies anyway??? It wouldn\'t be challenging if you could rip off everyone in your league. But in Fantasy hockey you have to take risks.

So the guy rebuilding in this deal gets heatley but that won\'t push his team over the top for next season. The guy in first loses Heatley and hurts his chances or next season. I like the deal.

[lanky522]

Optimistic people like to hope that in a couple of years, they\'ll have a dynasty team that will win many years in a row...

I do think that coming in last place can be a strategic move, but at the same time, I see your point of view... It can be very frustrating when you\'re challenging for first and the team ahead of you plays a team in the last week of the season that you KNOW will lose (because they suck so hard from rebuilding). I think there has to be some sort of system (other than the one where last place gets a fine), to deter teams from completely blowing up their teams (but without taking the strategy away from doing it).

It just seems unfair to me to penalize a guy who\'s really into it, that just picked bad players one year, and wants to load up on young guys for the future runs... He\'s not any less serious about it, he just got a bad lot.

Also, the NHL has the Free Agency system in place where teams who are rebuilding can add a couple of marquis players during the offseason... I take it that your fantasy league doesn\'t have any Marquis players available during the offseason, and this is the reason that teams in your league that may try to \"rebuild\" never get anywhere...

***** Maybe charge the guy a fee for every non-NHL\'er he has on his team. That way, if he at least trys to go out there and get some players that will help him the following season, he won\'t be penalized as much as if his entire team is minor leaguers. *****

[hoopej2]

The fee works great for us and it isn\'t so steep, only $50, that it will break the bank. We can only keep 8 players from year to year and you can\'t keep a player that wasn\'t drafted in the first annual draft. SO for example, if someone picked up Jack Johnson on the waiver wire today, he couldn\'t keep him anyway. By the way, we also charge $25 for waiver wire pickups to emphasize the value of a good draft. The reason this works for us is that we only keep 8 of 24 players (19 have to be in your lineup each night), so no one is going to have any more than one true prospect on their team because of how much that would hurt their team. Also it\'ll be three or four years before some of these guys actually produce.

I had Speeza on my team when we started our league kept him for two years but then dropped him and it took him four years to do anything special. Because it took him so long to become a success and b/c he\'s a bandaid boy, I\'m not too upset about not keeping him.

Ours is not a head 2 head league and Lanky, you mentioned the reason why I hate those leagues. There is nothing worse than:

It can be very frustrating when you\'re challenging for first and the team ahead of you plays a team in the last week of the season that you KNOW will lose (because they suck so hard from rebuilding).

Dropping all of your mediocre non keeper players should not be allowed in these leagues as it gives an unfair advantage to teams playing the \"rebuilding\" teams. It won\'t surprise you to know that our NFL H2H league has a fine for fielding a team that isn\'t full of people who are actually playing that week.

[Lehtonen32]

lanky522 wrote:

Optimistic people like to hope that in a couple of years, they\'ll have a dynasty team that will win many years in a row...

I do think that coming in last place can be a strategic move, but at the same time, I see your point of view... It can be very frustrating when you\'re challenging for first and the team ahead of you plays a team in the last week of the season that you KNOW will lose (because they suck so hard from rebuilding). I think there has to be some sort of system (other than the one where last place gets a fine), to deter teams from completely blowing up their teams (but without taking the strategy away from doing it).

It just seems unfair to me to penalize a guy who\'s really into it, that just picked bad players one year, and wants to load up on young guys for the future runs... He\'s not any less serious about it, he just got a bad lot.

Also, the NHL has the Free Agency system in place where teams who are rebuilding can add a couple of marquis players during the offseason... I take it that your fantasy league doesn\'t have any Marquis players available during the offseason, and this is the reason that teams in your league that may try to \"rebuild\" never get anywhere...

***** Maybe charge the guy a fee for every non-NHL\'er he has on his team. That way, if he at least trys to go out there and get some players that will help him the following season, he won\'t be penalized as much as if his entire team is minor leaguers. *****

Regarding the free agency stuff, by the same token these teams aren\'t losing marquis free agents to free agency, nor do they have to dish off the high paid stars because they can no longer afford their salaries (because they don\'t have to worry about fan dissatisfaction and ticket sales). I dunno - I just don\'t see why some teams need to blow up everything. Retooling with no real intention of winning it all could be acceptable, but I don\'t think I\'ve ever seen a team successfully pull off a complete blow-up-your-entire-team rebuild.

The values of prospects are always inflated; most managers expect you to pay as if these guys had already hit their ultimate upside. To turn a relatively mediocre team into a team full of elite prospects is not an easy thing to do; you will likely end up overpaying (aside from maybe a couple of desperate deadline deals), and you\'ll likely end up with a bunch of mediocre prospects as the assets you\'re dealing aren\'t likely to be too attractive (if they were, I\'d suggest there is no need for a rebuild).

I think the rebuilding I\'ve seen has just been so ******ed that it has skewed my opinion on all rebuilders. The league that I\'m thinking of is identical the one getting all the attention in the \'New FHL is forming\' thread. Right off the inaugural draft, about 5 teams decided to go for the full on rebuilding route, and I just don\'t get it. They were all ******ed at it, and most of them have left because they\'ve realised three things:
a) just how boring it is running an NHL team with no NHLers in it,
b) just how long they would have to wait to get enjoyment out of the league, and
c) that even if all his prospects hit their ultimate upsides, his team still wouldn\'t compete because they paid so god damn much just to acquire mediocre prospects.

The one smart manager of the lot realised that all these idiots were massively inflating the values of prospects with their nonsensical drafting and trading, so he turned around and traded a lot of his young guys, doubled his cap number (which is quite an achievement in the space of 2-3 months!) and suddenly was near the league leaders to finish the first regular season.

So yeah, I\'m definitely biased based on the experiences I\'ve seen. And the experiences, admittedly, seemed to be based on managers who aren\'t that good. All the good GM\'s I\'ve ever seen have no need to rebuild though; in fantasy hockey, in the leagues where you keep all your players from year to year, once you\'ve got a good asset base (acquired from smart drafting and smart trading) you can contend every year. There\'s no need for a rebuild.

And even in leagues where you only keep a certain percentage of players, the good GM\'s will have a better group of keepers and then excel in the draft. Again, why rebuild when you can compete every year?

I guess I\'m just stuck in the mindset that rebuilding is a losers strategy, and unless you can politely convince me otherwise, I probably won\'t be converted until I see a case of it actually working.

[reeveta]

Well said Lehtonen32. I agree that rebuilding can be a little dull. I just watched a guy trade away Scott Niedermayer and a draft pick for Kevin Bieksa. How do you replace a guy like Niedermayer? Not that Bieksa can\'t be good but he is a long way from Niedermayer. All in the name of \'rebuilding.\'
The term rebuilding should be replaced with \"Gambling on youth\"