The S70 Presidential PBSL Prop Debate

[garbageman]

MODERATOR: Hello, and welcome to the S70 Commissioner Debate. We have a lot of items on the ballot this season for the GM electorate to vote on, and we have two very special guests here to discuss the issues. Joining us today will be former Commissioner Darthald John Trump and more recent former Commissioner Joseph Robinette Bi-sohard-en. I will ask questions about the issues up for vote, and the first candidate will have two minutes to respond. The other candidate will have two minutes to rebut.

Commissioner Trump won the jump ball before the debate, so he will get to answer the first question. We're going to start out with the feelers. They both have to do with the very controversial issue of Player Training. The first feeler thrown out is whether or not we should eliminate athletic training. The second is whether or not we should eliminate All Star Break training and only have a training period during the offseason. What do you think of these two proposals?

DJT: First off, I just want to say that I didn't want to be here writing articles. I could be sitting at a beautiful resort somewhere, but PBSL is the worst it's ever been, so I had to be here to make PBSL fun again. It's just a mess, and when I was Commissioner, that wasn't the case. PBSL was just absolutely incredible. We had more teams, and there were GMs on every team that were active, and now we have people sneaking in from AngryBanana's tree who are here illegally taking teams from hard working GMs, and that's not fair.

MODERATOR: Commissioner Trump, the question was about the training feeler questions. Do you have any thoughts on those? You still have 50 seconds.

DJT: When I was Commissioner, training was great. Everybody did it, and the points economy was great. Everybody had points to train, and we had some of the best trained players around. I had athletic training myself, and I'm in fantastic shape. I'm 78 years old, and I'm still b/b because I had the best athletic training. I was talking to Al Horford the other day, and he was marveling at what great shape I'm still in. I'm just 3 points away from getting my purple potential back. I think really athletic training is a wonderful thing. SLOE Joe over there is orange current because he opposes it, and I'm one training away from being purple. Just one training.

MODERATOR: Commissioner Bi-sohard-en, your response?

JRB: I grew up in a working class family. Sometimes we had to stretch real hard to put points on the kitchen table, and I understand there are GMs out there who want to train players but they don't have enough in their point banks to know if they'll be able to pay their tax bills if they train their players' athleticism. My opponent gave points to people who already had millions of points while single digit point GMs struggled to make ends meet. I say we close athletic training so the rich can't stay in the repeater tax forever and have dynasties.

MODERATOR: Do either of you ever have any thoughts on getting rid of all star break training?

DJT: PBSL is a hellhole right now and whether or not we close all star break training, that's an issue, and it's an important issue, and it's an issue that experts say I did very well on. Probably better than anyone else. An article just came out about it. But my opponent wants to redistribute all your hard earned tax points and give them to teams run by illegal immigrants. We're talking 50 to 60 points a season.

JRB: That's a gallon of horseradish. When my opponent was in office, he gave points to all of his rich buddies. That's who went to the all star break, and if I'm elected to another term, we're going to beat the all star break and fix that.

MODERATOR: I don't know what most of that means, but in the interest of not going too far over 3,000 words, we'll stick to training but move to the next. Current rules state that you can train a player into purple, but then you have to stop. The proposed rule change no longer allows you to train a player into purple. How do you think this would affect the league? Commissioner Bi-sohard-en has the floor first.

JRB: When my opponent was commissioner, he racked up the single greatest tax bill of any GM, and when he was in tax jail, he whined about it the whole time instead of trying to pay it off. If we put measures like this in place, there wouldn't be as many purple players and a team like the Pistons wouldn't have 3 or 4 purple players. The playing field would be more even, and this would be good for the trade market. Right now, GMs see teams hoarding all the purple players and they won't trade for a blue player. There are 1,000 purple players out there, and my opponent wants to keep the rules as they are to make it harder for hard-working blue players to get a fair shake.

DJT: Bi-sohard-en has been the worst commissioner on blue players, and I think blue players were much better off when I was commissioner. If you take away training into the purple band, you've got a bunch of fake blues out there who are going to be going around getting traded for guys who are one training away from purple. It's horrible. I've talked to the mother of a GM who signed a fake blue to a huge contract under Commissioner Bi-sohard-en's reign. It's devastating for the families. And if he was such a good commissioner for blue potential players, the Van Gundy for Pee Wee trade wouldn't have happened under my watch. I would've told IamQuailman not to do it, and he would've stood down. I would've brokered an amazing deal for Alvarado that would've saved the league. After the shambles Bi-sohard-en left the league in, nobody respects PBSL anymore.

MODERATOR: Commissioner Bi-sohard-en, I'll let you respond to that.

JRB: That's a fat satchel of poppycock. I had an Alvarado deal on the table and all the Make PBSL Fun Again branch of the Shadow Council blocked it from going through. Well, I tell you what, Jack. It doesn't make PBSL very fun when you've got GMs like Quailman out there training guys purple while average GMs are stuck at the kitchen table.

MODERATOR: Here let's get to an easier question. At the All Star Break, GMs get points for having All-Stars and Slam Dunk or 3-Point Contest participants, but none for the rising stars game. Should they get points for the rising stars game?

DJT: This would be a complete disaster, and my opponent supports this. He wants to give more points to rookies and sophomores than he does to actual all stars. But if you have players in this game who are making these kinds of teams, their GMs are losers and suckers. Good teams don't have a bunch of rookies and sophomores playing, so why should shithole teams get rewarded when good teams are the ones putting in points to pay the tax?

JRB: Those teams are our allies, and they deserve points for being bad just as much as you and your wall street cronies. You see, points previously were throw-ins in deals and the new league oligarchy wanted to make points a living breathing sim league economy.

DJT: Would you listen to this guy? And it's not just this vote, he wants to give points to people who are coming into this league illegally and not paying tax. They're using our training facilities and stealing our league responsibilities, and the price of the repeater tax has gone up two, three, in some cases four times.

JRB: That's a briefcase full of bath tissue! I haven't raised taxes on teams with salaries less than $400 million.

MODERATOR: Once again, you've both strayed from the question, so I think we can talk about the next topic. It's a similar increase from 1 to 2 points for Most Improved Player and Sixth Man of the Year. Commissioner Bi-sohard-en, you get first crack at this.

JRB: I don't live in a big resort or a high rise. I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania where families would gather round the kitchen table, and we'd have GM votes on all sorts of things like this, but that's been replaced by Jib Jabs which further reward guys like my opponent Darthald over there who live in mansions and don't pay their fair share in tax.

DJT: That's cause I'm smart. I've got a good brain, and I know all the best strategies and tactics. If you don't like the way tax works, put some rules in place and fix it. Meanwhile, we've got people who snuck over the border coming in and making dumb suggestions about things like hard cap after two seasons in the tax. It's just huge stupidity, and they all love this guy. Because he wants to put rules in place where GMs will sneak in, and it's not the best and brightest, I'll tell you that...but GMs will sneak in and win championships without even having to be good at managing a team. It's ridiculous.

JRB: The only thing I find ridiculous is that everything my opponent says is a bathroom full of tables. Tables belong in the kitchen, folks, and we can't live in a world where people don't care about the tax. There was one more nefarious situation that needed to be accounted for that wasn’t through all this planning. What if someone didn’t care about points anymore? What stops them from playing the game differently, forgoing the economy and beating the competition through exploitation without any real consequences? Under my watch, we're going to get rid of points. *Coughs* Excuse me...we're going to reduce the number of points for things like Jib Jabs and make sure there are no real consequences for lotto teams.

MODERATOR: The question was about extra points for computer awards that are only currently worth 1 point as opposed to the 2 points that Rookie of the Year and MVP get.

DJT: I don't think the computer should give points at all. You want to talk about computers, let's talk about Hunter Bi-sohard-en's laptop. There's a point bank that doesn't add up.

MODERATOR: Alright, that's a vote on a net of 2 extra points per season league wide. I don't even think that needs to go to a vote. So let's skip it and talk about something more significant: playoff expansion. Right now, the conference winner gets a bye. The current proposal brings back an even 8 teams per conference making the playoffs. Thoughts there? At this point, either one of you can go first as long as you stick to the question at hand.

DJT: We can't have every team make the playoffs. What's next? 10 teams? 12 teams? And none of these extra teams that get in have a shot at winning, so why waste everyone's time? But what I do support in all this is that if less teams make the playoffs, there are less player renames in there. I've heard some terrible GMs say that we should allow renames on all first round draft picks, but there are a lot of GMs out there who are helping illegals get into PBSL. Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes is a Mexican cartel member and thanks to my opponent's soft stance on immigration and inability to use Google, he was able to sneak onto the Cleveland Cavaliers. Nobody noticed him hiding out with 13 other green players. Look him up. I think we should ban renames completely, but if you ask SLOE Joe over there, he wants completely open borders. He wants Adolf Hitler in a basketball jersey and white guy shorts dribbling the ball around.

JRB: Bullhockey! That didn't happen under my watch, Jack. You had late 2nd rounders locked up in cages, and they were just trying to get into PBSL to look for a better life than they would've had in the G-League.

DJT: I've talked to the families of players who got nerfed with broken legs thanks to guys like Cervantes, and it's really a sad, horrible thing. They get their potentials slashed, and in some cases their currents, all because of renames, and if we let more people into the playoffs, that's less renames, and if there are less renames, you better believe that my opponent would open up the door to rename anyone in the first round to anything they want. I think the top team in the conference has earned the right to a bye. Maybe even the division leaders. We could cut to 6 and ban renames, and we'd be in a much better place than we were after Bi-sohard-en's commissionrship.

JRB: Where would this league be without renames? We wouldn't have Founding Fathers like Samuel Adams and George Washington hooping it up. We wouldn't have purple/purple Benjamin Franklin, inventor of electricity, being electric from beyond the arc. We wouldn't have mediocre point guards like Desus Mero and Ash Ketchum or Centers with names about how tall they are like Alton Towers or Hightower. Ramsay Bolton and Joffrey Baratheon would just be Game of Thrones characters and never gotten to show off their skills on the court. Tua, Antonio Gates, and Aaron Donald would have their careers cut short with concussions playing football instead of basketball. This is a league where anyone with a dream can be a basketball player whether they're a basketball player or a fictional character or an old person or a child or a cartoon or dead. Trump wants to take away those dreams.

DJT: I just have some common sense. This is where woke logic starts people. First it's just pro wrestlers' parading as basketball players under their kayfabe names, then suddenly it's a terrorist following your daughter into the wrong bathroom to give her a late term abortion.

MODERATOR: In the interest of getting things off track, I will say that I think the shift from 10 to 15 points in trades is too incremental of a topic to waste time on, especially with the RFA question looming and us getting close to the allotted word limit of just over 3,000 looming near. This season alone, we have 12 points available for Town Hall, 7 points earnable through league propositions as opposed to the normal 3 as is described in the Point System Breakdown Thread, Sim Vegas, Podcasts Not Counting Against Written Media Cap, and other new opportunities for bonus points, teams can earn so many points that it's mind boggling that any team can be in the tax if they don't want to be. I do think the points increase on trades is a step in the right direction at making bill management more strategic. But I do think increasing the limit will yield predictable results. 15 is a good number to start with because it represents a maximum athletic training should the league not smartly vote to abolish those. But ultimately, I think the best way to strategically regulate the sim economy regardless of the opportunities for points earned is to have no limit on the amount of points that can be sent out in trades. This way, if K-100 is out of the tax and nobody takes on the mantle of Sim Vegas, the market will reflect that. If the commissioner runs his point bank down to nothing to vanity spite train someone when repeater tax looms, and he decides to print more money to shower over the league and help overspenders avoid consequences, unlimited points allowable in trades will be able to adapt to market value. 15 points is a start, but if it were unlimited, it could act as a viable equalizer for shifts in the sim economy.

DJT: If we raise the point limit to 15 points a trade, a fast food hamburger will cost $80.

JRB: GMs in tax jail deserve a fair shake, and if NickMalone77 could've bought Pee Wee Kirkland for 100 points, we wouldn't have purple monopolies like the Detroit Pistons ruining the lives of middle class GMs like the good GMs of my hometown, Scranton, PA.

MODERATOR: Great. Well according to my word counter, we've got about 250 words to hit 3,000, so in as close to, let's say, 200 words as possible, how do each of you feel about combining RFA into round one of UFA?

JRB: Thank you. I want to take this time to directly address combining RFA and UFA. If we vote for the current proposed rules to pass, every RFA is going to stay with their team for their desired amount. No outside team really has any incentive to put a reasonable bid over the desired amount in UFA round 1 because unless it's an egregious overpay, the incumbent team will match, and it'll be a waste of UFA cap space. As the rules are currently written, a lot of scenarios weren't optimally considered. Some things we may be able to implement are things like small matching fees to the outside team (so there's some reason to work a sign and trade or decline) or separating the vote to get rid of the year-long trade restriction as this takes away more reason to work with the outside team in a sign and trade when incumbent teams can just match and trade a player to any team three sims later. We need matching to have set contract and tax implications.

DJT: This is one area where I think, believe it or not, SLOE Joe and I are on the same page. The increased ability of an incumbent team to try to sneak in the best UFA contracts before RFA is settled...especially given that they're guaranteed cap space before they have to accept another team's qualifying offer is a huge change. It'll be a complete disaster. Normally, I think SLOE Joe is ruining this league and is also a terrible golfer, but on this issue where we're in agreement, it's important that we spend more time considering the effects of a rule with so many moving parts coming together at once so that we can implement the best of each part instead of getting discount parts from China that'll drive up inflation.

JRB: I just want to say that I am also good at golf, and folks, it''s important to vote against combined UFA/RFA. Seasoned GMs like MexicanMamba are going to be able to steal your UFAs before they have to make a decision to resign guys like Trayce Jackson-Davis and Jody Kinsella. Your UFAs would be safe and sound otherwise.

MODERRATOR: Well, those are the first coherent thoughts of the debate, but that's all we have time for. Remember, RFA as we have it is already a good balance between conserving the viability of incumbent teams and allowing for player movement. Unless the riders attached to the UFA/RFA combination bill are voted on separately, this vote might only benefit someone who would benefit from all the independent measures of this coming together in tandem, and chances are, that someone isn't you. Good night everyone, and remember: either way you vote, we're all gonna die.

[greepleairport]

3200+ words, +10pts
I have yet to read in full, but what I have read? Dynamite.

[greepleairport]

Thanks DJT and JBR for pointing out some of the intricacies of the UFA/RFA vote. This had NOT occurred to me, dudes. Not cool.