The Rookie Draft

[shooter47]

Maybe we don't have to have a real one, as I'm not a fan of making teams acquire players they don't want.  They could just sign any random free agent to a one year deal to get them to the cap floor.  That doesn't add anything to the league.  The NHL has the salary floor set to 16m below the cap.  Maybe we could just use that 16m for equation purposes and make that the largest free cap allowed when figuring it out.  Wonder where that would set our cap for next year???

One thing that I just recently thought of is that our extension values in this league are based off of real life contract values. The Real NHL contract values are set up based on a 30 team league (soon to be 31 teams) each spending up to there cap of 73 million. This would come out to a pool of 2.19 Billion dollars as the maximum that can be spent on players (jumping to 2.263 Billion dollars when Vegas is in the league). Our league currently has 20 teams with a cap space of 79.3m per team. This equates to a 1.586 Billion dollar total salary pool.

I know that it isn't a fair comparison since we have prospect contracts and prospect extensions which keep some salaries down in our league as well as Defenseman contracts being decreased to 66% of actual contract values. I think it is still important to note that these extension values are being set my a league that has a lot larger pool of money to spend. I think that this may have the effect of inflating the extension values of the best players. I think that over time as more teams re-sign there players and don't let them go to FA that more and more cap space will be used up and it will become more and more valuable in our league. I know that the past couple of years teams are having a harder and harder time of resigning all there FA's.

[shooter47]

My suggestion was that only the NHL 1st Rounders not be available for us.

Every team would still have the option of picking up 3 of their parent team's NHL draftees, drafted in round 2 through 7 in the NHL draft.
Some teams might have three 2nd rounders, others might have a 2nd rounder and then a 5th and 6th or something like that.

But to your point, there would still be 3 players added each year "for free" to the minors for each team, plus 3 draft picks if they don't trade them away - 1 of which will be an NHL 1st rounder; 2 of which will be 1st rounders if the team in DNHL finishes 11th or worse (2nd round would be picks 21 and up, so 21-30 are still in the real NHL draft 1st round).

I think this approach would just shift more of the value to the teams that keep their draft picks and takes some value from teams that rely more on the draft keepers to fill up there minors. Honestly with only 12 player minors any player that isn't drafted in the 1st round is hard to keep around until they are much closer to the NHL. With this arrangment we are just going to spend the 1st round and half of the 2nd round of the supplemental draft picking players from the first round of the rookie draft and having less picks to use on those players that have fallen thru the cracks from the past drafts and are closer to the NHL. This will just lead to more quality players ending up in FA where they need to play 40 games before they can be signed. Pushing up the contract values they get signed for.

[Capn Cally]

I think this approach would just shift more of the value to the teams that keep their draft picks and takes some value from teams that rely more on the draft keepers to fill up there minors. Honestly with only 12 player minors any player that isn't drafted in the 1st round is hard to keep around until they are much closer to the NHL. With this arrangment we are just going to spend the 1st round and half of the 2nd round of the supplemental draft picking players from the first round of the rookie draft and having less picks to use on those players that have fallen thru the cracks from the past drafts and are closer to the NHL. This will just lead to more quality players ending up in FA where they need to play 40 games before they can be signed. Pushing up the contract values they get signed for.

I'm not so sure on this point...

I know personally being a team that is in the hunt for a playoff position, this year in the Supp draft I passed on the NHL draft's picks 10+ in the 1st round in favour of players who were decent in the AHL and I was hoping that would make an impact in the NHL this year.... Versus waiting for that 18-year old for 2-3 years to become a fantasy asset.

Older AHL/college/junior players I took a gamble on who definitely have a lower ceiling than the 2016 NHL draftees, but who might contribute a lot sooner than those 2016 NHL draftees. (By "older" I mean 20-23 years old versus 18 years old).

To be honest it is still a strategy I would use for the next couple years while my team is competitive. I don't see a point in my stashing a player who might be in the NHL in 2-4 years putting up 1.5 fanpts per game, when I could have that same player putting up 1.4 fanpts per game this season or next for me kind of thing.

[shooter47]

I'm not so sure on this point...

I know personally being a team that is in the hunt for a playoff position, this year in the Supp draft I passed on the NHL draft's picks 10+ in the 1st round in favour of players who were decent in the AHL and I was hoping that would make an impact in the NHL this year.... Versus waiting for that 18-year old for 2-3 years to become a fantasy asset.

Older AHL/college/junior players I took a gamble on who definitely have a lower ceiling than the 2016 NHL draftees, but who might contribute a lot sooner than those 2016 NHL draftees. (By "older" I mean 20-23 years old versus 18 years old).

To be honest it is still a strategy I would use for the next couple years while my team is competitive. I don't see a point in my stashing a player who might be in the NHL in 2-4 years putting up 1.5 fanpts per game, when I could have that same player putting up 1.4 fanpts per game this season or next for me kind of thing.

Some teams will draft based on where they are at in the standings. Contenders may add more immediate impact talent where rebuilding teams may prefer to add higher upside players that are farther away. Having all the first rounders available in the draft will mean that 20 players who would typically be kept as draft keepers will now be going in the draft which will push 20 other players out. You can't argue that it won't.

This will just increase the available talent in the FA pool of rookies and more players will get signed during the year after they have played 40 games.

[Capn Cally]

Some teams will draft based on where they are at in the standings. Contenders may add more immediate impact talent where rebuilding teams may prefer to add higher upside players that are farther away. Having all the first rounders available in the draft will mean that 20 players who would typically be kept as draft keepers will now be going in the draft which will push 20 other players out. You can't argue that it won't.

This will just increase the available talent in the FA pool of rookies and more players will get signed during the year after they have played 40 games.

I don't have a problem with this, personally, as the FA pool is very thin (look at it today).

That, and people in the 3rd round of our draft are scrounging for the most part, or just taking the next available NHL draftee who is a 3rd or 4th rounder.

This is the 3rd round from this year's draft:

Round 3
1) D Nikita Tryamkin
2) RW Seth Griffith
3) G Tyler Parsons
4) G Garret Sparks
5) RW Anton Rodin
6) G Mantas Armalis
7) G Wouter Peeters
8) MISSED
9) G Jared Coreau
10) C Jonathan Dahlen
11) G Evan Smith
12) D Jack Dougherty
13) G Igor Shesterkin
14) LW Kirill Kaprizov
15) RW Tobias Lindberg
16) C Tyler Graovac
17) D Jacob Larsson
18) C Maxim Letunov
19) D Joe Hicketts
20) LW Dmytro Timashov

How many of those players realistically are going to be on a fantasy roster in 2-3 years still? There's a lot of C-level fantasy talent mixed with a lot of hit or miss players with the percentage being like 5% hit, 95% miss.

Tryamkin was a nice pick, but how fantasy relevant will he be? Your Larsson is a nice prospect, but again, how fantasy relevant will he be.
He would be available to be drafted in the next Supp draft in all likelihood, but would he be? Not sure.
I took complete fliers on Griffith and Rodin. They've worked out splendidly for me so far
Given that we get 3 new prospects a year for free, I see a lot of these players being dropped off full minor league rosters as the new draftees come in.

So, again to get back to you point, these are the 20 players that would get pushed out if we were to change something with the draft. I'm not sure we would be missing a lot...

[Anthony]

Let's expand our minors roster to 15. Gives teams the extra flexibility to let players mature in the minors, but isn't overkill and won't completely dry out our FA prospect pool.

[Rob]

Maybe we don't have to have a real one, as I'm not a fan of making teams acquire players they don't want.  They could just sign any random free agent to a one year deal to get them to the cap floor.  That doesn't add anything to the league.  The NHL has the salary floor set to 16m below the cap.  Maybe we could just use that 16m for equation purposes and make that the largest free cap allowed when figuring it out.  Wonder where that would set our cap for next year???

That is a great idea. I'll do the math tomorrow.

[Rob]

One thing that I just recently thought of is that our extension values in this league are based off of real life contract values. The Real NHL contract values are set up based on a 30 team league (soon to be 31 teams) each spending up to there cap of 73 million. This would come out to a pool of 2.19 Billion dollars as the maximum that can be spent on players (jumping to 2.263 Billion dollars when Vegas is in the league). Our league currently has 20 teams with a cap space of 79.3m per team. This equates to a 1.586 Billion dollar total salary pool.

I know that it isn't a fair comparison since we have prospect contracts and prospect extensions which keep some salaries down in our league as well as Defenseman contracts being decreased to 66% of actual contract values. I think it is still important to note that these extension values are being set my a league that has a lot larger pool of money to spend. I think that this may have the effect of inflating the extension values of the best players. I think that over time as more teams re-sign there players and don't let them go to FA that more and more cap space will be used up and it will become more and more valuable in our league. I know that the past couple of years teams are having a harder and harder time of resigning all there FA's.

I'm just catching up here since it appears I missed a few posts, so I'll respond in order...

When we started the salary cap was set to $70m.  The NHL salary cap at the time was $59.4m.  From there our settings have been updated relative to the league, including cap and extension costs.  Based on your numbers, with 20 teams we should be around $1.46 Billion in total cap space, if we're staying relative.  If we're at $1.586 Billion in total salary pool that means we're over by $126M, which is $6.3M per team.

Our starting point was +$10.6M over the league average and we're now at $6.3M over.  The measures we've taken have so far brought us closer to reality. 

However, we have 30 player rosters.  An NHL team has 23.  So our average should sit slightly above the league average, I think, even with the decreased D cost and affordable prospect structure. 

In the end, we're in the ballpark here.  And I think the cap equation will keep us there, especially if we include Corey's suggestion (which I haven't done the math on yet - I'll have that later).

[Rob]

Also when doing these numbers it's important to compare our current season numbers to the NHL's prior season.  As we're basically always 1 year behind.  So the total payroll numbers are a little off, but still workable.

[Rob]

Honestly with only 12 player minors any player that isn't drafted in the 1st round is hard to keep around until they are much closer to the NHL.

Exactly.  I rarely keep anyone other than 1st rounders.  I feel that I can get better players in the Supplemental than whoever the Bruins draft after the first round (though I could just be a victim of circumstance...). It would be different if we had larger Minors rosters, but I feel the smaller roster size adds more benefit to the league in the end.