The Lazy Steward's Magic Manual
Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2024 12:42 am
The Lazy Steward's Magic Manual
A Garbageman Production
Dear @NY_Magic_Garrett,
It's me, Garbageman, former co-steward of the Orlando Magic for about a day. In that day, I helped turn the Magic from 4 lonely teammates to a full team full of the stickiest of the icky left on the Free Agents list once actual UFA had concluded. For that day of work...about 6 posts of 2 to 6 words each earned me a cool 3 points. But I couldn't just take those fat stacks and run laughing to the bank without leaving you with a set of instructions as to how things work in Disney World Arena or wherever it is that the Magic play.
What's worse is that your mentor is the second newest GM in the league, and your mentor's mentor...while an active participant and a quick learner...is also relatively new to the league. Luckily, most of the people here are more than happy to talk strategy and some of those people even have some idea what they're doing, so get as many opinions as you can handle.
So here's what you need to know about your team and all the things you should--and more importantly SHOULDN'T--do if you want to put out the dumpster fire that you were left with. Actually, dumpster fire is a bit harsh. You're left with basically a blank slate, which can be dangerous for a new GM, but it's better than a team full of long bad contracts.
Anyway, you got your work cut out for you, but with a little patience, here's what you can do to hit the ground running and set yourself up for success in the next simulated calendar year.
STARTING NOW
You're 2-20 with no long term contracts, no worthwhile vet mins, the 50 introductory points all new GMs start out with, and not enough of anything to turn that into something quickly. So what do you do? You've got to build up enough assets to either organically cultivate your team or to trade for win now players when the time is right. Either way you do it, I don't care, but the start is the same.
Right now, you've got a ton of cap space, and other teams might want to get rid of bad contracts. My rule of thumb is that a max salary vet min is making just over 7 million dollars, so for every 7 million dollars in contract a team wants you to take on, charge 1 point. A 70 million dollar contract would be 10 points. If someone wants you to take on a longer contract, it should cost more than points. After all, you're going to want cap space next offseason. For now, talk to the Heat about Wemby. Talk to the Mavs about Funkhouser and his broken leg (but wait a sim....trust me). See if the Nets come back down to earth and then see about Supreme Cook. Let the league know that if there's a three way deal that needs a cap space team that you're the guy to talk to.
In short, lease that space and rack up those points, and whatever you do, don't trade any of your picks. I'll repeat that because it's important. Don't trade any of your picks. Don't trade any of your picks. Don't buy win now players for points from teams that are trying to cut salary, even if the players are green/green or blue/blue. And don't trade any of your picks.
If that doesn't sound fun, it's because it isn't. But if you try to have some fun by making premature trades before you're ready to assemble a winning team, there's not going to be a lot of fun in the long run. With what little you have now to offer the trade market, your team will still miss the playoffs, and you'll have to start over eventually.
HOW TO MAKE THIS SEASON FUN
If you think learning is fun, make sure you've read the Guides and Info for Newbies posts. If you want to take a deeper dive after you get what's going on there, head to the In/Off-Season Media board and comb through for articles with interesting titles.
But as for something that's truly fun, get involved with everything you can. Get into the Facebook group chat if you're on there. Do all the stuff on the Sim Vegas board: Answer the Town Hall questions, even if you have no idea what you're talking about. You get one point whether your answer is clever or stupid as long as it's a bare minimum of five sufficiently thought out sentences. Make sure you do the Pick 'Ems. You could win a point, and you could learn a lot about which teams are good at what.
Wait...you're already doing both of those things? Well, shit. Looks like you're further along the right track than I thought. Seriously, though, participation goes a long way.
You're probably already doing this, too, but mess around with your depth charts and game plans to see if you can learn anything. Honestly, you probably won't learn too much. You won't unlock many secrets about winning by switching your defensive schemes or picking some different green/green guy to be your key player. Even if you do that and see results, there are way too many variables for those results to mean anything. The sample size is small, and the schedule doesn't afford you a lot of apples to apples opportunities as opponent strength, home court advantage, and loads of other tiny factors make each game a unique experience.
Instead, you'll want to focus your energy on what other teams are doing. What do the good teams look like and what are their GMs doing? What do the bad teams look like and what aren't their GMs doing? What good teams look like they should be bad and what bad teams look like they should be good? You can really put a maddening amount of time poring over research and diving into the numbers to try and figure this stuff out, or you could just be satisfied knowing that you know the difference between several colors.
ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?
Let's fast forward to next offseason, because that's going to be where the fun truly begins. Your books are wide open, and you're not stuck with anything the previous administration left you with. Once you get going as a GM, you'll realize how rare it is to have this much freedom in the offseason. In fact, it probably would take a lot of planning and purpose to be in this spot again. Hopefully, if you find yourself with a blank slate, you'll be seasoned enough where it will be less dangerous and less terrifying.
Even as a veteran GM, it's much easier to go into the offseason with limitations. If you're stuck with resigns and mins or MLE, it becomes straightforward. When you have multiple max money to play with, it's a lot more of a balancing act to get everything right, and getting things wrong can have consequences for seasons, While sometimes weaseling your way out of tricky contract situations can be one of the more fun parts of the game, there are some contracts that you're going to be stuck with if you make a bad move. But we'll get there in exactly 25 list items.
THE DRAFT
This is easy. Just don't screw it up by trading your pick.
1. Remember, don't trade your pick
2. Your team needs everything. If the lotto keeps you in the top two, just draft for the best looking player overall. If you get knocked back to four, that's still good advice, but usually around the middle of the lotto, blue potential players begin to look more evenly matched in terms of overall best-looking-ness, so here's where you might want to take a guy who plays C (if there's one who is dominant at 4 out of 5 of these things: INS, ORB, DRB, PSD, BLK) or a blue potential guy who plays PG (there won't be one left).
3. Don't worry about their current rating.
4. Don't trade your pick.
RFA
Anyone who's been behind the curtain knows that RFA is an exaggeratedly exhaustive manual process that isn't built into the game, but it gives the game kind of a rubberband mode so that perennially good teams can't really screw over bad teams in this very distinctive single way, leaving good teams to screw over bad teams in a multiple of other ways, inlucding, but not limited to trying to get you to trade your pick. Anyway, here's a few quick points about RFA.
5. Nothing exciting usually happens. Most teams match pretty much anything, and if they decline a contract, you can rest assured that you don't want that contract. Don't give out any contracts you can't live with keeping.
6. Feel free to throw maxes at max-worthy guys to keep incumbent teams honest. If you don't know whether a player is max-worthy or not, they aren't. But feel free to refer to the Desired Contracts thread on the Free Agency board. That's a pretty helpful guide that becomes even more helpful once you are able to tell who wants more money than they're worth.
7. Feel equally free to do nothing. One late-phase strategy that I've employed in RFA is only going after players I want if I think I have a mutually beneficial sign and trade deal to offer.
UFA
This is it...the jewel of the offseason. Putting in bids and landing free agents is my favorite part, and it's a deep part of the game that could be strategized in too many different ways, so I'll spare you the philosophy of everything and instead focus on a handful of quick guidelines I'd suggest going into your first UFA.
8. Don't waste your time bidding on green potential guys in round 1. These guys are a dime a dozen, and you're not in a position to need role players.
9. Don't give long contracts to anyone over 29. Not this year. After 30, players start to decline every year, so until you're comfortable predicting a players' year-over-year declines, don't try to lock these guys up for 4 years. That being said, once you're more comfortable, some of these players do have years of juice left, enough that it is worth the squeeze.
10. Buying to sell is always an option. What I mean by this is picking off mid value guys on one year contracts with the intent of trading them midseason to teams that need them. Usually, just over the MLE value is a safe spot where many teams can't make the same offer, but there will be other teams that are putting in similar bids.
11. On that note, be aware of how much cap space other teams have...just in general. Maybe not as a main focus this year, but remember that this is something to do down the road.
12. Learn how the financial aspect works. If you have 100 million left in cap space, and you offer two 60mm contracts in a vacuum, once the first guy signs, you can no longer afford the 2nd guy, and the bid goes away. This can be a helpful safeguard to make sure you don't get too many of the same kind of target.
13. Read the UFA rules when the UFA thread gets posted and understand them. Read them every season for 10 seasons. Understanding things like bird rights and contract structuring will be important when you're putting together massive builds.
14. A yellow/blue player is pretty much useless in UFA unless you're sure you're going to max them in 4 years.
15. If a player doesn't get the money he wants on a long term contract, they are more likely to sign a one year contract than a four year contract at a noticeably lower value than they were asking
16. For the love of God, don't trade your pick.
17. Offer some one year contracts. That is a good idea, and I stand by.
18. All else equal, players prefer to sign with teams that have had recent winning records. I'm not positive, but it's likely they only look at the previous year's records. So you might have a hard time landing free agents on mins or maxes for a while if there's a lot of competition. This is where developing players and the trade market help vault you into contention faster than free agency will. And that in turn will make your future free agency periods more fruitful.
TRAINING CAMP
19. Just go recommended
20. It's worth it to pay for extra insurance if you have more than three blue or purple potential players under 27. Definitely use your 3 free ones regardless.
PLAYER TRAINING
21. Don't go hog wild here. A lot of teams will run their point banks down to 0 to train their players. Having some savings will serve you much better than making a young player slightly better.
22. Don't train anyone old. There are very few reasons to do this, and they're mostly for vanity's sake.
23. Don't train anyone that you don't have team control of for a while. If you get a stud rookie and want to give him a small amount of love, go for it--you've got him for 8 seasons if you want. Anyone who's hitting free agency in the next few seasons, though, don't waste your points.
OVERALL
24. Have fun...fun is the true point bank of this game.
25. Don't trade your 2063 pick either.
A Garbageman Production
Dear @NY_Magic_Garrett,
It's me, Garbageman, former co-steward of the Orlando Magic for about a day. In that day, I helped turn the Magic from 4 lonely teammates to a full team full of the stickiest of the icky left on the Free Agents list once actual UFA had concluded. For that day of work...about 6 posts of 2 to 6 words each earned me a cool 3 points. But I couldn't just take those fat stacks and run laughing to the bank without leaving you with a set of instructions as to how things work in Disney World Arena or wherever it is that the Magic play.
What's worse is that your mentor is the second newest GM in the league, and your mentor's mentor...while an active participant and a quick learner...is also relatively new to the league. Luckily, most of the people here are more than happy to talk strategy and some of those people even have some idea what they're doing, so get as many opinions as you can handle.
So here's what you need to know about your team and all the things you should--and more importantly SHOULDN'T--do if you want to put out the dumpster fire that you were left with. Actually, dumpster fire is a bit harsh. You're left with basically a blank slate, which can be dangerous for a new GM, but it's better than a team full of long bad contracts.
Anyway, you got your work cut out for you, but with a little patience, here's what you can do to hit the ground running and set yourself up for success in the next simulated calendar year.
STARTING NOW
You're 2-20 with no long term contracts, no worthwhile vet mins, the 50 introductory points all new GMs start out with, and not enough of anything to turn that into something quickly. So what do you do? You've got to build up enough assets to either organically cultivate your team or to trade for win now players when the time is right. Either way you do it, I don't care, but the start is the same.
Right now, you've got a ton of cap space, and other teams might want to get rid of bad contracts. My rule of thumb is that a max salary vet min is making just over 7 million dollars, so for every 7 million dollars in contract a team wants you to take on, charge 1 point. A 70 million dollar contract would be 10 points. If someone wants you to take on a longer contract, it should cost more than points. After all, you're going to want cap space next offseason. For now, talk to the Heat about Wemby. Talk to the Mavs about Funkhouser and his broken leg (but wait a sim....trust me). See if the Nets come back down to earth and then see about Supreme Cook. Let the league know that if there's a three way deal that needs a cap space team that you're the guy to talk to.
In short, lease that space and rack up those points, and whatever you do, don't trade any of your picks. I'll repeat that because it's important. Don't trade any of your picks. Don't trade any of your picks. Don't buy win now players for points from teams that are trying to cut salary, even if the players are green/green or blue/blue. And don't trade any of your picks.
If that doesn't sound fun, it's because it isn't. But if you try to have some fun by making premature trades before you're ready to assemble a winning team, there's not going to be a lot of fun in the long run. With what little you have now to offer the trade market, your team will still miss the playoffs, and you'll have to start over eventually.
HOW TO MAKE THIS SEASON FUN
If you think learning is fun, make sure you've read the Guides and Info for Newbies posts. If you want to take a deeper dive after you get what's going on there, head to the In/Off-Season Media board and comb through for articles with interesting titles.
But as for something that's truly fun, get involved with everything you can. Get into the Facebook group chat if you're on there. Do all the stuff on the Sim Vegas board: Answer the Town Hall questions, even if you have no idea what you're talking about. You get one point whether your answer is clever or stupid as long as it's a bare minimum of five sufficiently thought out sentences. Make sure you do the Pick 'Ems. You could win a point, and you could learn a lot about which teams are good at what.
Wait...you're already doing both of those things? Well, shit. Looks like you're further along the right track than I thought. Seriously, though, participation goes a long way.
You're probably already doing this, too, but mess around with your depth charts and game plans to see if you can learn anything. Honestly, you probably won't learn too much. You won't unlock many secrets about winning by switching your defensive schemes or picking some different green/green guy to be your key player. Even if you do that and see results, there are way too many variables for those results to mean anything. The sample size is small, and the schedule doesn't afford you a lot of apples to apples opportunities as opponent strength, home court advantage, and loads of other tiny factors make each game a unique experience.
Instead, you'll want to focus your energy on what other teams are doing. What do the good teams look like and what are their GMs doing? What do the bad teams look like and what aren't their GMs doing? What good teams look like they should be bad and what bad teams look like they should be good? You can really put a maddening amount of time poring over research and diving into the numbers to try and figure this stuff out, or you could just be satisfied knowing that you know the difference between several colors.
ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?
Let's fast forward to next offseason, because that's going to be where the fun truly begins. Your books are wide open, and you're not stuck with anything the previous administration left you with. Once you get going as a GM, you'll realize how rare it is to have this much freedom in the offseason. In fact, it probably would take a lot of planning and purpose to be in this spot again. Hopefully, if you find yourself with a blank slate, you'll be seasoned enough where it will be less dangerous and less terrifying.
Even as a veteran GM, it's much easier to go into the offseason with limitations. If you're stuck with resigns and mins or MLE, it becomes straightforward. When you have multiple max money to play with, it's a lot more of a balancing act to get everything right, and getting things wrong can have consequences for seasons, While sometimes weaseling your way out of tricky contract situations can be one of the more fun parts of the game, there are some contracts that you're going to be stuck with if you make a bad move. But we'll get there in exactly 25 list items.
THE DRAFT
This is easy. Just don't screw it up by trading your pick.
1. Remember, don't trade your pick
2. Your team needs everything. If the lotto keeps you in the top two, just draft for the best looking player overall. If you get knocked back to four, that's still good advice, but usually around the middle of the lotto, blue potential players begin to look more evenly matched in terms of overall best-looking-ness, so here's where you might want to take a guy who plays C (if there's one who is dominant at 4 out of 5 of these things: INS, ORB, DRB, PSD, BLK) or a blue potential guy who plays PG (there won't be one left).
3. Don't worry about their current rating.
4. Don't trade your pick.
RFA
Anyone who's been behind the curtain knows that RFA is an exaggeratedly exhaustive manual process that isn't built into the game, but it gives the game kind of a rubberband mode so that perennially good teams can't really screw over bad teams in this very distinctive single way, leaving good teams to screw over bad teams in a multiple of other ways, inlucding, but not limited to trying to get you to trade your pick. Anyway, here's a few quick points about RFA.
5. Nothing exciting usually happens. Most teams match pretty much anything, and if they decline a contract, you can rest assured that you don't want that contract. Don't give out any contracts you can't live with keeping.
6. Feel free to throw maxes at max-worthy guys to keep incumbent teams honest. If you don't know whether a player is max-worthy or not, they aren't. But feel free to refer to the Desired Contracts thread on the Free Agency board. That's a pretty helpful guide that becomes even more helpful once you are able to tell who wants more money than they're worth.
7. Feel equally free to do nothing. One late-phase strategy that I've employed in RFA is only going after players I want if I think I have a mutually beneficial sign and trade deal to offer.
UFA
This is it...the jewel of the offseason. Putting in bids and landing free agents is my favorite part, and it's a deep part of the game that could be strategized in too many different ways, so I'll spare you the philosophy of everything and instead focus on a handful of quick guidelines I'd suggest going into your first UFA.
8. Don't waste your time bidding on green potential guys in round 1. These guys are a dime a dozen, and you're not in a position to need role players.
9. Don't give long contracts to anyone over 29. Not this year. After 30, players start to decline every year, so until you're comfortable predicting a players' year-over-year declines, don't try to lock these guys up for 4 years. That being said, once you're more comfortable, some of these players do have years of juice left, enough that it is worth the squeeze.
10. Buying to sell is always an option. What I mean by this is picking off mid value guys on one year contracts with the intent of trading them midseason to teams that need them. Usually, just over the MLE value is a safe spot where many teams can't make the same offer, but there will be other teams that are putting in similar bids.
11. On that note, be aware of how much cap space other teams have...just in general. Maybe not as a main focus this year, but remember that this is something to do down the road.
12. Learn how the financial aspect works. If you have 100 million left in cap space, and you offer two 60mm contracts in a vacuum, once the first guy signs, you can no longer afford the 2nd guy, and the bid goes away. This can be a helpful safeguard to make sure you don't get too many of the same kind of target.
13. Read the UFA rules when the UFA thread gets posted and understand them. Read them every season for 10 seasons. Understanding things like bird rights and contract structuring will be important when you're putting together massive builds.
14. A yellow/blue player is pretty much useless in UFA unless you're sure you're going to max them in 4 years.
15. If a player doesn't get the money he wants on a long term contract, they are more likely to sign a one year contract than a four year contract at a noticeably lower value than they were asking
16. For the love of God, don't trade your pick.
17. Offer some one year contracts. That is a good idea, and I stand by.
18. All else equal, players prefer to sign with teams that have had recent winning records. I'm not positive, but it's likely they only look at the previous year's records. So you might have a hard time landing free agents on mins or maxes for a while if there's a lot of competition. This is where developing players and the trade market help vault you into contention faster than free agency will. And that in turn will make your future free agency periods more fruitful.
TRAINING CAMP
19. Just go recommended
20. It's worth it to pay for extra insurance if you have more than three blue or purple potential players under 27. Definitely use your 3 free ones regardless.
PLAYER TRAINING
21. Don't go hog wild here. A lot of teams will run their point banks down to 0 to train their players. Having some savings will serve you much better than making a young player slightly better.
22. Don't train anyone old. There are very few reasons to do this, and they're mostly for vanity's sake.
23. Don't train anyone that you don't have team control of for a while. If you get a stud rookie and want to give him a small amount of love, go for it--you've got him for 8 seasons if you want. Anyone who's hitting free agency in the next few seasons, though, don't waste your points.
OVERALL
24. Have fun...fun is the true point bank of this game.
25. Don't trade your 2063 pick either.