Salary Cap Leagues-Yay or Nay?

[Tsunami]

I love it but I'm the kind of person who makes a spreadsheet for all my leagues. If you are the type of player who just wings it or picks players by feel then it might not be for you. In a salary cap league it might make sense to cut your best player if their contract is too high. It might even make sense to give away a draft pick and your best player and get nothing in return.

[Goirish374]

I found that salaries and cap limits severely hamper trading

I think this is an important point that we should talk about.

Skip isn't wrong; it does impact trading. It can severely hamper trading if you approach trading the way you do in pure dynasty league.

In most (not all) formats, your unspent salary cap budget when the season starts, whatever you haven't spent on player contracts, is what you have left to pursue in season acquisitions (free agents, waiver claims, trades, etc.). This means that, usually, your cap space is shrinking as the season goes on. Which means your flexibility shrinks as the season goes on. This has a few important effects:

-trading becomes far more strategic and far less tactical
-you aren't going to see the volume "grab this backup RB for a playoff push" type volume trades you see in plain dynasty, which means you aren't going to see the 2/3 way through the season slow jockeying for advantage via volume trading that you see in pure dynasty.
-bigger trades still happen frequently, but they happen early. Because (in most formats) the contracts move with the players, most teams are less and less able to accommodate big players on big contracts as the season goes on.
-teams have to be far more proactive about team assessment in the offseason. Being stuck in no man's land 6th out of 12 is bad enough in regular dynasty--but you can probably still salvage that in either the rebuilding or playoff bubble directions near week 8 in dynasty. In a salary cap and contract league, that maybe too late to move aggressively.

None of that is all that intuitive. It takes some time to pick up. If there are a bunch of people new to the format that don't recognize the significance of their team's first full pre-season/off-season (after season 1, before season 2) then the whole league can feel cramped for space to move things around until next season, when hopefully people are catching on.

So (subjectively, without data to back it up) i feel there is still plenty of trading once people catch on to the effects of the format. However, it can be very different from trading in pure dynasty.

As mentioned above, sometimes the most valuable part of a trade is getting nothing back in return.

Sometimes acquiring the 1.01 is something you literally cannot afford to do!

[Shcritters]

Never played in a contract/SC league, but my concern would be rookie contract length. I worry about stud RBs on long rookie deals. On the other hand, if the rookie contract have a max of 3 years, I would completely devalue TEs in a draft, push down QBs a lot, and WRs would even take a hit. Maybe my fears are unfounded, but this is just something I have oft wondered about.

How do your leagues handle rookie contracts?

Good questions. For us rookie salaries are defined by what NFL round they are drafted in. The drafting owner has the right to sign to whatever length contract they want, but the contracts increase 20% YoY. Additionally, there is a cap penalty of 20% of a players salary for as long as you had originally signed them. To avoid young players from being too overpowered we have a holdout clause that if a player makes less than 1/3 of the average of the top 10 salaries then they hold out (and rookie salaries are never high enough where they wont hold out). At that point you have the option to sign them to a contract as long as you want, but starting at the average of the top 10 salaries. It makes rookies really valuable for a couple years, but then you really have to give them up. For example, in our league Zeke is gold this and next year because he will be 1/5 of what he will cost once he holds out. But once he does he will not be a 'value' anymore. He'll still be valuable because he is a top player, but you have to pay much closer to market value for him.

Hope that helps. Not perfect, but keeps teams from getting too OP.

[Cult of Dionysus]

BTW, in my salary cap league, we cap contracts at 4 years and allow each franchise to tag a certain number of players for up to 2 years with a certain salary adjustment. I won't go into the specifics, because its complicated, but it means that someone can hold onto a player for up to 6 years.

That is too long.

As someone else mentioned, 3 year contracts seem to hit the sweet spot. I would also caution against allowing too many tags and other mechanisms to keep players longer.

[Defender]

Never played in a contract/SC league, but my concern would be rookie contract length. I worry about stud RBs on long rookie deals. On the other hand, if the rookie contract have a max of 3 years, I would completely devalue TEs in a draft, push down QBs a lot, and WRs would even take a hit. Maybe my fears are unfounded, but this is just something I have oft wondered about.

How do your leagues handle rookie contracts?

Good questions. For us rookie salaries are defined by what NFL round they are drafted in. The drafting owner has the right to sign to whatever length contract they want, but the contracts increase 20% YoY. Additionally, there is a cap penalty of 20% of a players salary for as long as you had originally signed them. To avoid young players from being too overpowered we have a holdout clause that if a player makes less than 1/3 of the average of the top 10 salaries then they hold out (and rookie salaries are never high enough where they wont hold out). At that point you have the option to sign them to a contract as long as you want, but starting at the average of the top 10 salaries. It makes rookies really valuable for a couple years, but then you really have to give them up. For example, in our league Zeke is gold this and next year because he will be 1/5 of what he will cost once he holds out. But once he does he will not be a 'value' anymore. He'll still be valuable because he is a top player, but you have to pay much closer to market value for him.

Hope that helps. Not perfect, but keeps teams from getting too OP.

Is that additional 20% the cap hit for cutting him, or is it some sort of signing bonus?

[Reljac]

The selection I wanted to make was not available. I have never participated in a salary league with contracts, but after 11 years in a league with no contracts & no salary cap, I think you pretty much need to have contracts and salary caps to get the most competitive league. Or at least one with a bit more turnover in the rankings.

[mratlanta]

I'm in my 2nd year in a contract league (no salary caps) and I'm enjoying it. I don't know if I would like messing with salaries but I do like the additional strategy layer that contracts bring.

[Sterling Archer]

I'm fine with an increase in complexity, but it mainly seems like a parity mechanism, which doesn't interest me.

[maxhyde]

I liked mine fine but it is MUCH more difficult to make trades.
I found most deals were cap savings deals where teams with extra cap money could get picks and players for taking on bad contracts (a la Brock Osweiler CLE-HOU swap this offseason). It isn't that it isn't fun but a completely different game from a management perspective.
It is more complicated but fun...the rulebooks are long out of necessity and makes it much more fun in a few ways and much less fun in others

[mnbend]

What website are you using for salary cap leagues?

[Goirish374]

What website are you using for salary cap leagues?

Do you mean which websites are using to host salary cap leagues or which websites are you using for information/strategy/articles related to salary cap leagues?

[Shcritters]

[/quote]

Is that additional 20% the cap hit for cutting him, or is it some sort of signing bonus?
[/quote]

For cutting a player. It is mainly designed prevent people from locking up high scoring players to very long contracts and then dropping them when they fall off . Let's say you signed someone at $50 for 3 years and then decided you wanted to drop him in year 3 because he fell off. By that point the contract would be $72, so you would suffer a $14.4 cap hit (roughly 6% of your cap).

[James McGhee]

Is that additional 20% the cap hit for cutting him, or is it some sort of signing bonus?
[/quote]

For cutting a player. It is mainly designed prevent people from locking up high scoring players to very long contracts and then dropping them when they fall off . Let's say you signed someone at $50 for 3 years and then decided you wanted to drop him in year 3 because he fell off. By that point the contract would be $72, so you would suffer a $14.4 cap hit (roughly 6% of your cap).
[/quote]

So you have an annual salary increase of 20%?
So would his cap number over three years look like: 3/$50, 2/$60, 1/$72?

Is this usual for salary cap/contract leagues?

I'm interested in starting my own and love hearing how people have theirs set up.

I also lover the idea of "hold-outs"...which if I understand it correctly means that if a player performs as a RB1 but makes less than 1/2 (?) of the average RB1 salary, he holds out and must be dropped or his contract renegotiated to the average RB1 salary? Do you then get to "extend" the length of his contract to a full 4 or 5 years?

[maxhyde]

Our cap league you ate 1/2 the contract but max 3 years and a total cap of $1000. So $90 over 3 years you got hit with a 45 for each of the remaining years.
We had extensions at 175% of the salary for one year. Rookies were allowed to be extended 2 years each at 175% and FA's only 1 year.
The rookie salary scale favored owning rookies and the IDP wasn't very well balanced

I really got into trying to make deals with the cap and found the extra complexity almost an addiction

[jpusmc0311]

I've never participated in one, but I'm very interested in doing it.. Just seems much more interesting and challenging.