Mitch_Gill wrote:I didn’t see this post, I would have voted for rule 3 idk if that would have mattered or not. I’ll bring it up next year. I really think that rule is dumb and restricts bad teams from becoming good, and helps the good teams stay on top. Hard to compete with usage and get good players when I’m missing close to 20% of my cap in penalties every year and the good team get an extra 10-% on top of that.
It adds a challenge for sure, especially if you focus on the rule itself, in a vacuum. But you also have other tools in your toolbox to get better. I've been on both sides of the coin, been a bad team and having less money, but it's fairly easy to cope with in most cases. Trading in the offseason or during the season can remove contracts and get you younger controllable talent that can more than make up for the hit. It's how this team got built - Judge, Springer, Shaw traded for cheaply in previous year's trades followed up by taking advantage of good farm drafts and trading for key pieces like Sale this year. It's not the only blueprint and it doesn't happen overnight and there is no guarantee if we didn't have this in place that you'd still be able to rebuild any easier or quicker.
This year, I'll have an extra 5M than I had last year. That's a great advantage. But I also have a lot of free agents leaving, some at really good value (Sale at 8.5M for example) that I won't be able to replicate or replace this offseason. I'll still have to work and likely spend all that money and still have a lesser team, maybe not even a playoff team without a lot of wheeling and dealing. And if I spend that extra 5M unwisely, it could end up shooting myself in the foot.
And some of it just being in the right place and the right time.
The penalties/rewards are a factor, but to act as if that is the only reason Team X can't get better or Team Y doesn't get bad in not correct in my mind. You took over a franchise that was habitually tinkered with no success and that's a hard hurdle to overcome, no matter what the rules are.