Question about Positional Eligibility

I brought this up last year after the draft when ESPN, in all their wisdom, changed Jakub Silfverberg from a LW eligible player to a RW eligible player before the season began. I had never seen this before. Generally speaking, once the system has been rebooted for the year, all ESPN ever does is ADD positions: ie. Silfverberg would become BOTH LW and RW. I've never seen them take a position away before.

However, they did take it away and it put my team in a huge pickle before the puck was dropped in October. I had to trade Kopitar away to fill my hole at LW, and thankfully Ray was willing to give me a decent return on Kopy.

My suggestion is that if ESPN should TAKE AWAY positional eligibility from any player before the puck drops in October, that the GM this happens to has the option to drop one of their players and add to their team from the waiver wire to fill in that positional eligibility. Obviously, they are only able to pick from players that were not chosen during the draft.

Since we all want to do the draft early in September, rather than wait until closer to the beginning of the regular season, I think this is a small way to protect everyone in the event ESPN does this again.

I wanted to discuss this now before we got any further in our draft.

Thoughts?

I have not seen that before? Obviously we need to trust the system. Perhaps we need to wait until they reset the site in future. Jugger overlooked Erhoff being on pit versus buf partly because system hasn't updated. Just a suggestion but let's wait until ESPN has finalized player updates so we will not be blindsided by them again.

This is one of the problems with doing the draft so early, before training camps start.

In a case like Ehrhoff, at last John has the ability to buy a fantasy hockey mag and it will list Ehrhoff as being on Pittsburgh.

However, nobody knows exactly what ESPN will do as far as positional eligibility goes, so since we all want to do the draft this early in the season, I suggest that in the event ESPN takes away positional eligibility of any players, that the GM who owns them has the right to drop one of their players (not necessarily the player who changed positions) and replace with another player off the waiver wire.

It's not a great solution for the GM, as they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. But at least it's a little bit of insurance.

yah im good with if a position is removed from a player from the draft to October then you have the option of dropping him and picking up a free agent

I would be ok with the drop and add option if your players loses a needed position.

Is there a way for the Commissioner to add a position to a player, or is this only done by ESPN?  That could solve the problem.  But if there is no way other than to wait for the positions to be updated, then we wither wait or have a "Conditional rule" in place for such occurrences.

Since we all love doing hte draft early, I am in favor of adding a rule to the manifest, and the transaction should have taken place before the start of the season.

You get to draft 30 guys to fill 15 forward and Defense spots.

that should be more then enough to figure that out. If not make a trade when the season comes.

Just my opinion, but I've also never had this cause an issue for me yet.

how would this work?

say you did not have enough LW to start season cause of this issue then you get to pick someone else up? cause I think that would make sense

but if you had enough guys to fill that slot then.

Glad you guys agree. It's for the benefit of everyone, not just for my team, even though it was my team in the pickle last year. ESPN usually only adds positions, so hopefully this was an anomaly.

And Ray, Greg and I looked at this last year and it doesn't appear the league commish has the ability to change positional eligibility. So we're stuck with another option.

By the way, just to be clear, the GM should NOT be forced to drop the player whose eligibility was changed. For example, right now ESPN has Mikael Granlund listed as LW eligible. However, it wouldn't surprise me if he ends up playing centre this coming year. Will ESPN simply add "C" as a positional option? Or will they take "LW" away from Granlund and make him a "C" only?

Not surprisingly, since I took Granlund with my first pick, I would not drop him even if his positional eligibility was changed. What I would do is drop my last "C" pick and replace him with a "LW" on the waiver wire.

Just want to make sure to clarify that it does not have to be the player whose eligibility was changed that has to be dropped. It makes more sense to drop one of a person's last picks because they would be more in line with the value of players still left on the waiver wire.

Shoreside Situations schrieb:

how would this work?

say you did not have enough LW to start season cause of this issue then you get to pick someone else up? cause I think that would make sense

but if you had enough guys to fill that slot then.

Basically, the way I see it, if ESPN takes away positional eligibility from a player you draft during this draft, then the GM who this happens to has the option to drop one of their players and replace him with another player who is remaining on the waiver wire.

The key here is that ESPN would have had to delete a positional eligibility of a player who was drafted by said GM.

This could be tough as I don't know that I would even notice some peoples status changing.

Maybe we should just be aware this could happen and make sure you have a couple spares for each position? or Maybe start FAAB right from the start?

I missed this conversation yesterday fellas.  Sorry about that.

To be honest, I am comfortable with any of the suggestions above.  Seems like going forward, we ought to have our draft a couple of weeks later.  Mid September would be ideal I suspect.

Seems like everyone is comfortable with my suggestion. It's a minor tweak, but would allow us to do the draft earlier and would offer some protection in the event ESPN does something peculiar like they did last year.

For next year, we can discuss other options if people are keen.

We've discussed having FAAB earlier in the season, but as some have pointed out, having FAAB from the beginning of the season would mean no mid-season draft. Having the mid-season draft allows some suspense to build as there are always a few good players that are missed in the September draft.

Well, I will go with what the majority want. I would vote to just leave it the same as we have now. And if you have to trade to fill a spot then so be it. This would force people to either trade and/or make people that draft a balanced team a plus. I always try to make sure I have extras just in case of injury. I don't see the ESPN changes as anything really different.

I think i would have to agree with John on this one as well