I was hoping one of the advocates of changing the rules not to require getting picks back with future pick trades would figure it out, because to be honest I never really understood what the objection was to the previous system or how it’s supposed to work. I went back and skimmed through last year’s thread to re-read the argument and I’m still not getting it.
Some of the trades made last year had no (explicit) “and their last pick” clause, so even though I’m not sure we declared it official, I think people were treating it as if the balancing rule were gone. And so we made trades that weren’t balanced and I’m not sure what to do with it.
Quite simply - let’s say someone in the middle of a season trades their second round pick for a player. Now the trade for that year is that player A gets Player B’s 2nd round pick. Let’s say each team kept 22 players, so they each have 3 slots. The trade is executed, and now A has his first, second, third, and B’s second. He has 22 players + 4 picks = 26. Whereas player B kept his 1st and 3rd round pick. 22 players + 2 picks = 24. What do we do?
Player A can’t draft his third round pick. His roster gets full after he picks at player B’s 2nd round pick spot. So he has a pick he can’t use, there’s no room on his roster. And in fact, yahoo wouldn’t allow the draft to be finished because a player cannot have any number of slots but 25. Meanwhile, player B cannot finish the draft because they only have 24 slots and yahoo requires that he has 25. We need to give him an extra slot from somewhere, but the only “unused” draft slot is player A’s third round pick he can’t use. In the past… we just give this unusable last pick from player A back to player B. Solved. Everything works out great. But several people were passionately against this for reasons I cannot understand at all and I just sort of had the attitude of “fine, fuck it, they sound like they have a plan and we’ll just figure it out when we get to it” and to be honest I don’t have it figured out.
I think our options at this point are to either just use the old rule and add an implicit “and his last round pick” to last year’s trades so they’re done the way they used to be, or someone who wants to get rid of that system explain what we do now.
I think Ellis Dee came around in this post to why the system worked as it did after we hashed it out.
Edit: I realize I’ve been pretty hands off and passive about commishing on this issue. That’s my bad. To be honest it kinda gave me a headache to think about.