Hello Everyone,
One of the things that makes this group special is the willingness to listen to each other and consider their ideas respectfully -- if at times only briefly -- before either agreeing with them or shooting them down
There is one GM that has proposed a somewhat radical shift in trade policy, and to be fair I wanted to run it by everybody to see what people think.
The gist of his proposal is this: he wants to trade outright for a keeper slot.
Now if you recall, last year Greg and I did a deal that was a post keeper deal. He traded Lecavalier and Hemsky for my Kovalchuk. Since I had only ten keeper slots, the only way I would have done the deal was after keepers had been selected, meaning that I could keep both players that he was trading me for. In effect this meant that I ended up being able to keep eleven players (instead of ten), but this was balanced off somewhat by several factors:
1) Me losing the concentrated value of Kovalchuk at LW. Had this deal been done mid-season it would have been considered by many to be a reasonable exchange in value. So even though I got to keep an extra player, in exchange I lost a lot of value in one of the league's top wingers. Basically, I spread that value out over two players instead of one.
2) This move also handcuffed me in the sense that I could not engage in trade talks regarding Lecavalier and Hemsky until keepers had actually been selected and the other players dropped. This handcuffed me more than I expected.
3) I was also forced to keep both Hemsky and Lecavalier (or rather, Greg was) before passing them to me post keeper. So I didn't have a choice as to which player I kept with the extra room.
4) Post keeper trades seem to be a fairly common activity in many keeper leagues of which I'm familiar.
I emphasize these points for a post-keeper trade so that I can now contrast them with what would happen if we began trading keeper slots back and forth. As you can probably tell, I am against the direct trading of keeper slots as that seems to fly in the face of what we were trying to accomplish with this league -- that being to balance the power dynamics out long term, and to keep the league very competitive.
If we were to start trading keeper slots straight up, it would mean the really stacked teams could to an extent buy there way out of trouble at a pretty reasonable rate. Of the deal that I am aware, the one GM was planning to trade a prospect to the other GM in exchange for a keeper slot.
The GM with the extra keeper slot could then use that keeper slot on ANY player he wanted, without restrictions, thereby altering the power dynamics.
Therefore, it is my opinion that we should be allowed to negotiate post keeper deals, but should NOT be allowed to trade for keeper slots directly. I'd love to hear feedback from other GMs about this, including the guys who were interested in trading keeper slots.
As always, lets keep the dialogue respectful and constructive.
Cheers,
Matt