After much consideration, we are officially contracting two teams for the upcoming year, bringing our league to 18 teams. The overall health of our league was the primary consideration to doing it now and not waiting until next year. In addition to this, we are heavily considering contracting two more teams after the 2021 season if we continue to have inactive owners and no one to fill those spots. Below is the plan of action for this to work successfully
1. Teams will be given a chance to switch to the open franchises (New York and Detroit). Priority will be given in the form of reverse overall regular season standings from last year. I will post a separate thread for this. The thread will stay open for 48 hours, after which the 2 remaining vacant teams will be contracted
2. Players from the contracted teams who have played under 40 NHL games will be available in the NHL entry draft. Unfortunately this comes as a slight disadvantage for teams who’ve traded their picks away (I myself have none), but the effect will be minimal. Picks owned by these teams will be void and removed from the draft
3. Every team will be given a use it or lose it free drop and the chance to undo one extension to prepare for free agency
4. Realigning the divisions into 3 based on geographical location
5. Elimination of the max salary.
6. Adding a minimum contract length (based on our updated extension prices)
7. Updating our extension prices (see below)
Sometime this week I’ll be posting the updated extension price proposal so we can take a look and decide if it works for our league. I’ve been comparing numbers from our current extension prices to real NHL contracts to make something the mirrors the NHL a little better. The issue is finding the right balance with an 18 team league. If we were to be proportional to the NHL salary cap, we’d have a 145m cap which is unrealistic. On the flip side since we are 56% of the size of the NHL and made values 56% to accommodate for that, our top contract would barely be over 6m. I’m open for some thoughts and discussion on the best way to fix this. The point of this league is to mirror the NHL and even if our extensions aren’t broken, it’s getting further and further away from the NHL norms. We will be moving this to the following year to give more time for due research.
The timeline for everything to happen will be in this order
1. Team changes
2. Division realignment
3. Entry draft
4. Remove Max Salary
5. Free drop/extension undo deadline
6. Free agency
If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them.
