Switching Teams

[garbageman]

Recently, there have been a few requests to switch teams (in more ways than one). As far as I'm aware, we don't have a formal policy on switching teams, but there are many things to consider when getting this done in a way that's fair.

Switching Your Team Name / City

This is probably easy to do. I don't know how to do it. I don't necessarily want to learn since as far as I know, market size, team name, fan loyalty, crowd size, and the actual financials of a team don't really affect anything. If anyone has evidence to prove this wrong, I'll revisit policy, but given that player renames--something seemingly simple--have caused a lot of headache and kvetching, I'm not really keen on opening up the flood gates on switching team names/locations. That being said, I'm certainly open to hearing arguments for it, and if another member of the input team (looking at you, IamQuailman) already knows how to do this and wants to do it, I don't care too much if your team is called the New Orleans Pelicans or the North Pole Santa Clauses. I just don't want to create extra work (which it would create beyond just changing the names/logos...there'd be a lot of keeping track and reconciling of what teams owed what in tax, and which teams changed to which other teams). Overall, I think it's simpler to keep things as consistent as possible here when they don't affect the game's outcome.


Switching to GMing a different team

This is where it gets tricky. One of the key aspects of sim league is that you manage your team not only in a smart way for the upcoming year, but for a team's foreseeable future. Allowing team switching has a lot of things to consider and that's why there's probably no formal policy on it. I also understand that it could keep things fresh to be able to switch teams.

Now, the current rules state that positive points stay with a team, negative point debts stay with a GM. If a GM leaves a team with a negative point total, the new GM starts from 0. If a GM leaves a team with a positive point balance, the new GM gets those points. I support this, and so did the vote at the time, and here's why:

Point banks are not just in place for the current season/tax debt. They play into a team's longevity and ability to pay future taxes, especially since contracts are able to be structured in a way that a GM could leave a team with a positive point bank, but in a position where that team's new GM will have a bunch of hard-to-trade contracts and repeater tax status. Thus, a new GM is walking into a position where they'll either have to start from 0 points to pay impending tax on players they didn't offer oversized, long contracts to...or, trade away their futures to get out of that bad tax situation. This could mean that new GMs have to wait quite some time before they can be in a decent spot to compete (just ask greepleairport about that Antetokounmpo contract he inherited).

Therefore, if someone wants to switch teams, I think the following prerequisites must be required:

To an open team:

1. The team is not in the tax. To switch to an open team, you should have to be out of the tax the previous season. Trading repeater statuses from team to team would be dumb to manage.
2. There should be no year in the team's future where salary percentage increases put them over the cap...or in a situation where to field a 10 man roster, it would be necessary to go over the apron.
3. The GMs new team starts out with whichever team's point bank was lower, and the old team gets the higher point bank. (If the Bulls have 150 points and the 76ers have 13 points, and garbageman abandons the Bulls to GM the 76ers, the points stay with the team. If the Bulls have 13 points and the 76ers have 150 points, and garbageman abandons the Bulls to GM the 76ers, the team's point banks swap...open to other ideas here, but no GM should GAIN points by hopping to another team, and GMs with a negative balance shouldn't be able to cut into that negative balance by switching teams).
4. If multiple people want to switch to an open team, we need a way to decide it. Either first come first serve, or the team with the lowest total future salary, or something else entirely, should be the decider.


GM team trade

I believe that two consenting GMs should be able to trade teams...and this could get complicated...but even to the point where the GMs could decide how to split the point banks. If Nick has 100 points and Doug has 200 points, but Doug is such a homer that he wants the Pelicans at any cost, they can swap teams, and all 300 points can go to Nick while Doug starts from scratch. It's up to them.


When should this be able to happen?

I don't want people switching teams willy nilly. That'd get messy real fast. I think the beginning of the offseason is a decent time to allow it, and maybe not every year? Might be something we have to play by ear to see how it works depending on demand.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what people think about any of this...especially if there's any unintended negative consequences to any of these ideas, I'd like to make sure that anything enacted is as fair as it can be and isn't detrimental to future seasons of PBSL.

[false9]

I’ll have more thoughts on the other points, but as far as switching team names/cities....my feelings are kinda mixed. I really don’t want to see the “Winterfell Whitewalkers” in the league. I’d propose that they be limited to franchises that no longer exist, old D league or ABA teams, or concepts that never came to be (Seattle SuperSonics, Austin Toros, Brooklyn Swampdragons).

There is the other matter of “extra work” that someone else more knowledgeable would have to speak about- logos, actually doing it on the simputer. How much demand is there really for this, for what is essentially a cosmetic aspect of the game? How often would we do this? Would we lose some luster if half the league were suddenly some unrecognizable franchises in international cities? Some more discussion would probably be good.