In the interest of transparency, I voted for this rule because I have Doncic and I want to lock him up for as long as possible. Perhaps many people who have voted for this might be in the same boat as me.
If i'm trying to think like an objective commissioner, I agree with the well thought out points from WizKid and I think that you'd probably want to star players to have more movement than 2 teams per career as it makes for a more interesting league. This is my first time playing in a salary cap league but in other non-salary cap leagues dynasty I've played in, a lot of the top players change teams multiple times in a season. I think Harden was traded 2-3 times last year in one of my leagues which is a lot of fun.
If we want realism then we should probably vector around star players playing for 3+ franchises per career but there should also be some mechanism to keep players for the duration of their career. So if Doncic is my favourite player ever and I want to keep him on my team for life, I should be able to. IMO RFA is not a strong enough disincentive as I'd think most teams in the top half of the league would be willing to give up their low ranked draft picks and plan their cap to sign Doncic in his absolute prime years.
As an alternative to franchise tagging for years 9-12, could we be allowed to exceed the cap to resign our own players (or just one of them) if we want contracts to be subject to market valuation? Or maybe if a player has been under one team's control for 8 years, you could franchise tag and you are able to exceed the cap just for that player, but that player's salary has a X% premium over the current franchise tag amounts. I dont really have a good solution but just throwing some ideas out to allow for control for one player's career (with negative cap ramifications)
Great to see and appreciate your feedback as new owner.
One thing I want to point out is that in the RFA process whatever the contract won by other team can be matched so, while teams are willing to give up risk the GM has final say to match regardless and we allow a decent chunk of salary to be exceed (up to 15m) to help out matching and can then sort out cap later in off season the if necessary.
If you match an RFA bid for let's say 3 or 4 years, you are then able to franchise this player another once duration of contract is up. Technically from rookie year you have opportunity to keep same player for 12 years in some instances.
Last point is interesting can mull on it a bit and see if a minor change can be added. However, in theory it matches what I said above, if you control a player for 4 years (4 year rookie, and 4 matching RFA bid, you then have option to franchise for year 9-12 if you'd like).
All this said, as it stands I am going to consider this poll closed still at 6-6 (few teams didn't vote and we do have 3 open teams still but that's ok). We will keep rules as is but definitely will take into account everything and proposed an additional potential change down the line if I see it fit. However, with RFA starting on this coming Monday (Nov 2nd), not sure I want to change anything else at this point. Our main priority is to find 3 owners