LEAGUE SALARY CAP PERCENTAGE VOTE
Once free agency slowed down this off-season, we noticed that our league overall is spending extremely close to the salary cap. Currently if we equally divided up all of the contracts in our fantasy league to each team, every team would have $1,612,903.23 in cap space. (98% of the entire league's cap used) In the real NHL, if all the contracts were equally distributed, every team would have $5,835,313 in cap space.(92.84% of the entire league's cap used). These numbers are including realistic RFA contract projections for both the NHL and our league.
Our league is known for having free flowing movement and during day 1 of CDC Puck, we had an identical cap hit percentage as the real NHL. Unintentionally through UFA over the years we have slowly inflated the contracts in our league which is beginning to restrict player movement. This vote is letting the GMs have their say on what to do with this problem. You can choose between the following:
1.) Allow (1) compliance buyout to each team to get rid of the worst deals in the league, and lower our total league cap hit.
2.) Raise the salary cap to $86m which would balance out our cap hit percentage to the NHL without changing contracts.
3.) Make the change this off-season or next.
4.) No changes.
Raising the salary cap is self explanatory, but here are the rules regarding our compliance buyout:
The Compliance Buyout is a trade-able asset.
Compliance Buyouts do not count against your salary cap. (Think of it like terminating a contract)
You do not have to use your buyout.
Players bought out with a compliance buyout cannot re-sign with their former team (traded buyouts/players as of the start of the proposed buyout window will be monitored and will not be allowed to return to their former team)
There will be a similar penalty to buying out a recently signed player as there is to trading a recently signed player.
After the buyout window, there will be a July 1st (2.0) for all the players bought out.
There are 8 teams projected to be over the salary cap, with large hurdles to jump over to become cap compliant. We don't want the other 24 teams to think we are bailing those teams out, and we have 2 reasons for you to hear that reassure you this is not a bailout for those teams.
The commissioners have done a "mock buyout" for those teams, and if they were to use the buyout on a player of their own, 7/8 would either lose a top 6 FWD/top 4 D, or still be over the salary cap after buying out a bad contract.
We are finalizing a change to the salary cap overage rule to start the season that will be harsher, in order to stop teams from intentionally starting a season over the cap just to wait for a player to go on IR. This will be announced shortly.
I myself have recently traded away assets to move salary cap, as have many of you. Please keep in mind this suggestion is not to help people in the short term, it is to keep the league's cap healthy in the long term.
This vote will be open for 7 days. Click Here.
There is a comment box in the survey if you would like to share any concerns.