mr. bruin wroteCOLONoh dear. I am going to bow out of this discussion until the off season. I am still in the playoffs and hope to move on. The thought of me giving up a Kesler/Iginla/Zetterberg/Krejci/Seabrook/Getzlaf as a penalty because i made good trades and did well in the playoffs makes me want to throw up. So I will enter this discussion later...
when i was advocating for some form of free agency because the very worst teams would have had no chance to compete any time soon otherwise, and because the talent collected on the top teams is not managed by morons like when they got it, i was insulted by some, called a whiner and hopeless loser by others and such.. smartly trading a lot was all it would take to make any team a contender very soon ..and i was only making excuses for myself.. (when actually i was never referring to my team in the first place).. if i remember correctly the only GMs that were not against me were the one who ignored the whole thing lol; even Scott who started that argument apparently ended up changing his mind.
And yes, competing the whole regular seasons against some terrible teams takes away part of the fun, especially for the top teams; guess what, one year ago that was already the case.
Now to provide the worst teams a chance to improve faster you're suggesting to nullify everything and restart the whole thing?
when back then no one could even contemplate making one or two of their players available for FA?
Obviously i'm AGAINST any form of restart.
Would be very unfair to the ones who have been working a lot to build the future of their team.
And not only i did work like crazy for that, the challenge of building for the long term moving up from a bad team like the one i inherited was the main reason i wanted to join this league..
as for giving a better chance to move up for terrible teams, the only somehow fair (and realistic) way to do that would still be agreeing on some form of free agency; something that last year thread suggests would be very complicated to achieve.
btw, talking free agency never meant managing open biddings on the forum.. as we use real salaries and would be too complicated anyway. The concept was that players with expiring contracts that wouldn't fit into the team's cap as per playoff rosters would be lost to the market.
A 'market' that actually in our system would probably mean some form of draft.
