That seems like it would be a little onerous when it comes to trading next year’s picks.
The issue is unbalanced trades in general. We haven’t encountered a situation where an owner was without the pick they’d previously promised, so I don’t see that rule solving anything.
So I may misunderstand you because I’ve done that a few times in these threads, but let me see if I can address this.
Before the draft, there are no draft picks set. It depends on how many players are kept for each team how many picks are created. After the draft starts, if you gain a “natural” pick as if you cut one more player, you’re generating picks that weren’t there before, which moves everyone back a slot. I think we have strong objections to that including my own. I’d rather have the person end the draft with 24 players. We’d have to put some no name player in that spot who could be cut just to satisfy yahoo. That’s how we used to do it.
Or we can just give them the pick the other team had to vacate by having one extra keeper to keep. That’s what we do now.
I can’t see the reason why inserting a “natural” pick that the person would’ve made if they made one more cut before the draft appeals to people. It’s inelegant from a record keeping perspective and it’s unfair from a balance perspective - let’s say you have 3 picks and a player you didn’t expect to drop falls to the spot before your “natural” pick would’ve been if you had an extra pick. You could then trade away 2 for 1 to generate that “natural” pick you didn’t have before, snatching up that player with a mid-draft pick that sprung up effectively out of nowhere.
I’m probably missing something. I really need to go back and re-read the arguments to make sure I understand what people’s difficulties were and what they’re proposing. But I never saw why people are upset that we don’t generate new (“natural”) picks during the draft since that seems obviously wrong to me. Unbalanced trades are not intended for a way for you to generate extra draft picks, they’re just a way to give more flexibility to the creation of trades. No one is getting ripped off if they trade away 2 players for 1 player/pick and, well, they end up with 1 less player/pick because of it. That’s what you would naturally expect. I thought throwing in the now-vacated last round pick was an elegant freebie that was granted without really hurting anyone and it made the bookkeeping work out well.
I was talking about between cutdowns and the start of the draft, not during the draft.
But even that I’m no longer all that in favor of. Last year and up until this discussion I had thought that Hamlet had kind of gotten screwed solely because of bookkeeping. But it turns out he did not get screwed at all, so the need for the rule change in the first place has kind of evaporated.
To elaborate: The trade was made after cutdowns, meaning draft picks had already been created. So the longstanding rule we’ve always used makes sense.
The idea was that if he had made the trade before cutdowns, he would have gotten his own natural last pick instead of Mundi’s. But that turns out not to be true. In that scenario, we would apply the same rules as trading future draft picks. And it turns out, the rule about trading future draft picks is that draft picks in that future year must be evened out. So either way, no matter when he made the trade, he was always going to end up with Mundi’s last pick. Therefore it was always a no harm no foul situation. (Which means no rule change is needed.)
I tend to agree that, once the draft starts, then the draft picks and set and uneven trades after the cuts/draft shouldnt generate a new “natural” pick. Once the draft starts, picks are set, and unbalanced trades shouldnt create new picks.
But thats not what happened to me last year. We did the trade 4 days before final cuts and 4 days before the draft started. So when the cuts were finalized and the draft started, I had three picks. But, for reasons still unknown to me, my third pick wasn’t at my 3rd round spot, it was moved to the last pick of the draft.
Because cutdowns hadn’t happened yet, at the time of the trade, the 1.01 pick you were trading for was technically “next year’s first.” So we would go by future draft pick rules, which are that the future years must all be an even swap.
If you had traded away two players for one player, that could be considered different. But because you traded for a draft pick that didn’t exist yet, that’s a “future draft pick” situation.
EDIT: It’s confusing because on the surface it would seem that you would need to send your last pick to Mundi to balance it out, but you sent two players instead of any draft picks. That’s why you got Mundi’s last pick back.
The other solution is to make it so every team has X picks every year, say, four. The draft is then always 48 picks, and after the draft it is your responsibility to cut down enough to add those drafted players to your roster. Essentially, you are drafting the rights to a player, and you can choose to add them to your roster by cutting an existing player. This is pretty much how it works in the real NFL, anyway.
This poses some interesting new choices for an owner involving the waiver wire after the draft. And it makes unbalanced trades a non-issue. Every team will always finish the draft with 25 players because we don’t have a draft at all and your “post-draft roster” is the same as your pre-draft roster, everything happens after the “draft.” I guess if you go into our draft with 24 players, or trade players for picks, we would need to add a backup kicker to the roster, but that doesn’t require any input from managers or special rules. The commish does it at the end, and there can’t be any hard feelings or misunderstanding about the rules.
The downside to this is that the draft takes longer, and we would have to start sooner. I think we should start the draft sooner anyway, because every year we run the risk of not having enough time to finish the draft, set up the rosters, finalize the schedules, etc.
Additionally, right now, rebuilding is a little more difficult because of the balancing picks rule. It’s hard to build a cache of picks because you are always essentially trading 1:1. You need to include players for picks to gain a surplus of picks, but if you’re rebuilding, what players do you have? Separating the draft from the yahoo roster would make it easier to move a 1 for a 1 and a 3 next year, for example.
Clarify something for me, because at this point I’m not entirely sure how it works:
Say I trade two guys to Beef right now for one of his guys. What happens this weekend during cutdowns? (No draft picks were traded, and draft picks have not been created yet.)
IIRC, the trade was made 4 days before the final cut and the draft started.
That was not my understanding of the rule, and , once again, I still dont understand the reason for it. It kinda makes sense if, once the draft starts, trades are made that create new draft picks which is a no-no. But for trades before the draft is set, it makes no sense.
Which is why I asked if Mundi should include a player for me to cut in the trade, and was told it wasnt necessary.
But, once again, its not worth getting upset over.
I’m honestly not sure. I’m hoping to get clarification on my two for one hypothetical, and then once that clarification comes my follow-up will be to change it from “one of Beef’s guys” to “Beef’s first rounder” and see if it a) would work differently, and b) should work differently.
Yikes. That’s definitely not great in terms of fairness for you. My tenuous understanding is that that workaround would have given you your own natural last pick by the existing (longstanding) rules.
A lot of the mechanisms were explained last year. Trades involving a future pick process once that pick exists. Cuts are made before then. Trades involving picks have to be balanced. Been that way for a while. I personally think the suggestions made in this thread on what to change, aside from my suggestion, have either been too nebulous to be implemented as a concrete rule, or don’t actually solve the issue. Nor do I think they are simple enough to be worth replacing a relatively simple, albeit frustrating, rule. My suggestion solves the issues as far as I can see, but creates a larger draft. Otherwise, I’m wiping my hands of the endless rehashing.
We are a week from the start of the draft, and not everyone has checked in to the thread yet.
HungryHungryHaruspex:
QB: Deshaun Watson, Russell Wilson, Derek Carr
WR: Tyreek Hill, Stefon Diggs, Davante Adams, A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, Jaylen Waddle, Elijah Moore, Terrace Marshall, Tyquan Thornton
RB: Christian McCaffrey, Derrick Henry, Alvin Kamara, Kareem Hunt, D’Onta Foreman, Cordarrelle Patterson
TE: Mark Andrews, Tyler Higbee
K: Daniel Carlson
DEF: PHI, WAS, CIN, GB
Cutting 3, that gives me 3 picks. I don’t see this changing, but Foreman is on the bubble.
Does this mean that Hamlet and Mundi would not have been allowed to trade two of Hamlet’s guys for one of Mundi’s guys plus Mundi’s first pick? (Before cutdowns.)
No Use For A Name:
QB: Tua Tagovailoa, Tom Brady, Kirk Cousins
WR: CeeDee Lamb, Ja’Marr Chase, Treylon Burks, Courtland Sutton, Russell Gage, Curtis Samuel, Allen Lazard
RB: Dalvin Cook, Ezekiel Elliott, Jeff Wilson Jr. Michael Carter, Tyler Allgeier, Chuba Howard, Melvin Gordon III, D’Ernest Johnson
TE: Robert Tonyan, Isaiah Likely, Albert Okwuegbunam
K: Michael Bagley
DEF: San Francisco, Atlanta
I seem to keep counting only 24 players on my roster, which is weird.
Preliminary Cuts:
Tom Brady (Goodnight, sweet prince), Russell Gage, Albert Okwuegbunam, Michael Badgley
Unless I’m crazy that gives me 5 picks (due to only 24 on roster).
ETA: It is AJ Green he was removed from the roster for some reason.
QB Joe Cooler, Jared Goff, Jordan Love
RB Cam Akers, Brian Robinson, Gus Edwards, Darrell Henderson, Alexander Mattison, Tyrion Davis-Price, Damien Williams
WR Tee Higgins, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Christian Watson, Christian Kirk, Zay Jones, Van Jefferson, DaVante Parker, Calvin Ridley
TE Pat Freiermuth, Cade Otton, Hayden Hurst
K Will Lutz, Greg Joseph
DEF Baltimore, Las Vegas, Seattle
Cuts: Henderson, Davis-Price, Williams, Parker, Hurst
That should give me 4 picks, since I had one IR slot on my year end roster
Don’t think I’ve checked in, but I’m in for this year and will be working on cuts this week
Jules has been (kindly) handling pretty much all of the mechanical stuff in the league for the last few years and I’m rusty on how we handle that. We’ve rehashed this issue so much that my brain kind of glazes over about it.
What would happen, I think, is that the players would be traded and one pick would still be owed at draft time. Therefore when the draft was created, we’d suddenly end up with an imbalance. The owner receiving the #1 pick would have 26 picks/kept players in the draft and the other would have 24. One player would have a pick they couldn’t use at the end of their draft, the other couldn’t finish the draft (without adding some placeholder). That’s why we require future draft picks to come with the last (vacated) pick being swapped to the person receiving fewer player/picks. It’s essentially the same thing that happens with picks during the draft. Future draft trades are basically agreements to execute in-draft swaps when the draft is created, and those need to be balanced.
In this case, it’s not that they wouldn’t be “allowed” to make that trade, it would be allowed, it would just automatically come with a “… and Hamlet’s last round pick” clause when he received Mundi’s first overall pick. That clause doesn’t “cost” the original owner anything, it’s not a sacrifice they’re giving up. If we didn’t swap that pick to the new team, they’d end up with 26 kept players/picks in the draft and it would simply disappear. Sometimes I think people get the impression they’re giving something away when we make those swaps and they’re really not.
I welcome correction if I’ve misremembered or misunderstood anything.
They would both have over 25 players, because the question was about doing the trade before cutdowns. They would then cut down to <25 players normally like everyone else. Or so I would assume, but have never known. (Never occurred to me before.) Jules seems to be saying that that would not be allowed, which could be true for all I know.
It wasn’t Hamlet’s last round pick going to Mundi, it was the other way around. Hamlet traded away two guys, no picks, so his roster ended up smaller, not larger. But it was (intended to be done) before cutdowns.
@Hamlet, my best guess of how it was supposed to work if you took some scrub that Mundi was going to cut anyway instead of his last pick: This would have been after cuts (after the first pick had been created), which means you would not have been able to cut that scrub. Cutdowns had already happened. So you would have had to hold the scrub until after the draft before you could cut him. That means getting Mundi’s last pick was actually an improvement for you, from “undrafted free agent after the draft” to a 7th round pick.
I still don’t understand how it would work if right now before cuts I traded two guys for one of your guys, no draft picks involved. I’m pretty sure we would both then just cut down normally, getting all our own natural picks to get back to 25 after cuts. I just can’t get confirmation on that.
It was Qadree Ollison, IIRC, that Mundi was going to give me. I would then cut him when cuts were finalized, and I would get my three picks when the draft started. But since there were cuts made after the trade was announced, I figured those three picks would be in the first 3 rounds. They weren’t.
Seems like that’s how things should work. If the trade is made before the final cuts and the draft hasn’t started.
But, again, no big deal. We now know better to make sure TPTB OKs everything the trade was supposed to be beforehand.
This would have been after cuts (after the first pick had been created), which means you would not have been able to cut that scrub. Cutdowns had already happened.
So you would have had to hold the scrub until after the draft before you could cut him. That means getting Mundi’s last pick was actually an improvement for you, from “undrafted free agent after the draft” to a 7th round pick.
I still don’t understand how it would work if right now before cuts I traded two guys for one of your guys, no draft picks involved. I’m pretty sure we would both then just cut down normally, getting all our own natural picks to get back to 25 after cuts. I just can’t get confirmation on that.
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But you couldn’t get Qadree Ollison plus Mundi’s first until after cuts were finalized, because Mundi’s first wasn’t created until cutdowns.
The part of this that is inherently confusing is that it straddles both sides. In order to work out for you to get a natural last pick, it would have had to go like this: Mundi makes his cuts, then trades his first plus Qadree Ollison to you for two of your guys. Then you make your cuts after the trade is done.
I think the rule ended up being applied fairly and correctly, it was just an inherently confusing edge case. The end result being that a trade must either be done before both parties make their cuts or after both make their cuts. It can’t be done in between.
And agreed that the main takeaway is this: