RFA Madness
Posted: Tue Jun 11, 2024 10:16 pm
RFA MADNESS
A Garbageman Production
As many folks already know--but none so well as commissioners, both past and present--RFA is not a natural part of the Fast Break Basketball software. There was a time in PBSL before RFA existed, and it was a time before my time. There are still a bunch of OGs here who did experience a league without restricted free agency, and for at least 50 seasons, nobody's ever really made a push to get rid of it. It stands to reason, then, that the GMs who were here before the RFA workaround was implemented liked RFA better than they liked not having RFA.
But I've long wondered: what would it look like if we got rid of RFA?
First--let's review the current process
Right now, the process of RFA happens in a theoretical wrinkle in spacetime, also known as an alternate universe's save file. That's why there's a trade moratorium...anything that happens during RFA doesn't actually happen in a linear sequence. Once the draft is finished, the league explores an alternate timeline which is blinked back to the end of the draft as soon as RFA is complete. The more variables we introduce in this netherregion of PBSL, the more the thread of the SLOE universe unravels. If you've ever read the Three Body Problem, it's pretty much like that.
From the commissioner's standpoint, there are a lot of calculations that have to happen manually because the game simply isn't built to defy the laws of metaphysics. Financial data has to be accurately calculated without any safeguard from the software to determine actual salary flexibility against cap holds. Free agency has to be run in a vacuum where only about twenty players max can be bid on. And for some reason, everybody wants that extra 2mm in cap space (that wont make a difference on 99% of bids) from cutting 2nd rounders.
Once this faux-agency has been run, the commissioner has to post the results, wait for the decisions, and return to the previous save file right after the end of the draft to manually edit the contracts into existence (and editing contracts in manually is slightly less convenient than entering bids). Once this is done, Free Agency resumes as if twenty players didn't just magically appear on new contracts that the game itself doesn't track in transactions.
The obvious pros
The first four seasons of a player's career are usually very limited. Some rookies develop quickly (especially with training) to where they can be productive starters on good teams while they're on cheap contracts. But usually that isn't the case. Typically, there's still a lot of growing room going into that second contract for RFA players, so it's really nice for those doing a patient rebuild to be able to guarantee retaining a player's rights for eight seasons without having to risk losing a player if you don't automatically max them. Even players that get maxed and then get matched usually aren't worth the max during their second contract (until maybe the last season or two). It gives teams a chance to try to get their players back on reasonable contracts without losing them to a rogue GM looking to just watch the world burn.
This is especially a relief for teams who don't have the best recent reputation or record, and if you have a lot of rookie contract guys hitting RFA, chances are, you didn't just make a deep run in the playoffs. True max-worthy players would be at a greater risk of leaving for greener pastures
But...
If we took away RFA and just left everything up to UFA, it would make UFA a lot more interesting. The players that get their RFA rights exercised right now are, for the most part, players that would attract attention in UFA as well. Adding another 10 or 15 players that would command day 1 bids would stretch the amount of players that GMs have to bid on, so theoretically, more talent will be spread out across more different teams.
As it is, UFA is full of either good players going to their third contracts, quality depth players who can be had on veteran minimums, absolutely crappy players, and maybe one or two potential RFAs who got slept on in some stage of RFA or made it to the UFA pool by way of either strategic decline or completely unstrategic tax delinquency.
This influx of 2nd contract players that are worth bidding on not only adds an entirely new slate of guys to decide on for any team, but it also adds a new level to UFA where you have to decide between going after 2nd contract win-soon guys or 3rd contract win-now guys at different max price points. This leaves a lot more options for teams going into UFA who aren't ready for the championship conversation but aren't in full on tank mode either.
And before we get too far...the cons
So other than the administrative aspect of RFA, there are some cons to the system. Cons might even be too harsh a word for some of them, so maybe this one in particular is a quirk, but RFA adds some game theory with the contracts offered by outside teams. There is a sense of justice that if a team is going to resign one of their guys, there should be some form of competition to drive that salary up to at least market level. And because a market level contract is pretty much a no brainer to max, a lot of those RFA offers are considerable overpays. Even so, those players still get maxed because a lot of GMs refuse to give up an RFA player for nothing. You show me a GM that declines a bad contract on one of their RFAs, and I'll show you a top-tier GM...or a complete wildcard. At least, nobody mediocre.
In any case, the mentality of sticking other GMs with bad contracts is a quirk, which is why rules exist that require a minimum of two guaranteed years for all RFA offers and any RFA player must remain on the team for one full season. If an outside team offered a one year severe overpay, it would almost always be preferable for the player while screwing over the incumbent team from being able to sign or match on a contract of worthwhile length.
The one year no-trade clause is also a further safeguard that aims to disincentivize teams from offering contracts they wouldn't want to eat themselves. I think an unforeseen benefit of the no-trade clause is that it might lead to more variety in terms of what happens in RFA. Without the no-trade clause, most teams would really ever have a reason not to match. They could seek out better deals immediately from other teams (Unless a matched offer sheet imposed the same 60 day trade restriction as a new contract), and that would alter one of RFA's most strategically interesting aspects.
So would getting rid of RFA be better?
It'd be different, that's for sure, and it would necessitate new strategies into UFA that could add to the excitement of what I consider the best event on the PBSL calendar. Whether it would be better would be in the eye of the beholder. To rephrase this section, let's take a look at what effect removing RFA would have on the league beyond just the mechanics of a unified free agency:
1. Win-now players would regain value
One of the huge draws of RFA is that it gives a team guaranteed control of any rookie they want for a significant chunk of time. In the vast majority of cases, a young player can usually be had for 8 seasons if you're willing to pay any amount to retain him. And in an intersecting vast majority, all players retained in RFA are usually too young to ever decline in TC in a way that can't be restored--or at least preserved--with insurance. Without the assurance that you don't lose a player before they're playable, rookie contract players lose value, and that value goes somewhere. With RFA and insurance, any rebuilding team can absolutely guarantee that their build will see through to completion. Some may see that as a good thing, but I do think that this game would have no soul if we eliminated unpredictability and with it, the need for adaptability to be an effective GM.
Doing away with the RFA system would make surefire win-now players more valuable, and it would split the value of rookies. The elite level rookie contract prospects would become more valuable as they're worth protecting and now fewer and further between. The rest of the rookie contract prospects would lose value in that retaining them for a second contract would not be as sure a thing.
2. Training would change
If we got rid of RFA, using the principle involved in splitting the value of rookie contract players outlined above, training would change in multiple ways. Teams would have to find new midpoints at how good a rookie contract player is before they'll invest in that player, either as a way to build a sure thing into purple territory or to make an on the cusp player good enough to justify maxing. After all, why spend a bunch of points for a player who could easily walk?
3. Sign and trades might become more common (but they probably won't)
Without RFA, there'd be no reason to keep the one year trade restriction, so in order to at least get some value out of players that would've qualified for RFA's, sign and trade would become more crucial. If your team is iffy about maxing a guy that another team's more triggerhappy on, it's probably better to have more options than simply the team with the winning bid in RFA. In RFA, that winning bidder is assuming all the risk of putting out an oversized contract, so it makes sense that they should have more rights to trade with the incumbent team. If the incumbent team is the one taking the risk of putting out an overvalued UFA contract on the same player, they should be allowed all sign and trade options, just as they would be for an RFA eligible player whose rights they didn't exercise. This could see an increase in sign and trades as it opens up the negotiations for the second contract player to every other team regardless of cap space.
4. It's less realistic than the real NBA
In the real NBA, RFA and UFA would be able to overlap, which is just an impossibility with the complexity of calculating cap hold changes on the fly. We could allow RFA teams to match without a cap hold, but allowing teams to match players in UFA makes it so much less desireable to bid on a player when you're not the incumbent team. The incumbent team would have an incredible advantage because of this. While our RFA is more realistic than no RFA at all, switching to a more realistic RFA would be a much bigger nightmare than doing away with it if we want to change. If parallels to the actual NBA are more important to you than they are to me, it's something you might want to think about if a vote ever comes up to ditch RFA.
5. Draft priorities might change (but they probably won't)
Right now, in the golden era of PBSL, we have 3 free insurance spots for life to go along with RFA, so drafting a raw player with insane potential is a no brainer, and it probably still will be. But at a certain threshold, a player's readiness to contribute to a team now will become more important and could be the deciding factor between maybe a single draft decision.
6. Hey, here's a wild idea:
We'd have 3 or 4 extra days and no trade moratorium for the offseason. We could just speed things up and get to the regular season faster...or we could add an extra phase or two to UFA. This would require a WHOLE lot of research as to when the best way to split things up would be and how many bids we'd allow per day if we had, say, 5 sets of bids instead of 3. Nobody signs on the first day, but if we had UFA Day 1 be too soon after that, there'd be a round SOLELY of big swings and attempted robbery. Just putting this vague idea on the table in case it spurs further discussion. Maybe we could alter RFA to where the first X days of UFA, incumbent teams still have Match/Accept/Decline rights. But as it is RFA is 3+ days of work for very little player movement and a lot of incumbent teams just auto-matching. It's basically a check to make sure nobody gets a sneaky good deal on their RFA unless it's extra sneaky. Anyway, this is another idea for another day.
IN SUMMATION
It's hard for me to imagine a league without RFA. I think it would put a higher emphasis on competing, and perhaps with more teams competing, there would be more parity in the league making it harder to stack teams by either having all the best UFAs go to the good teams with cap space or hindering the strategy of just being bad for a while, get draft picks, spend all your points on training, have 3 or 4 purple pots at once, get an untenable tax bill, and either retire or repeat the process. When I envision a league where more and more people are seeing how Doug's strategy worked (LTS and K-100 seem to be in various stages of that strategy, the Pels and Cavs too), it's a more boring league. Less teams want to move players and take big swings on the trade market, and fewer and fewer teams compete when they see a dynasty-caliber team or two rise above the ranks.
I think that getting rid of RFA is also a risk. Like I said at the start, there's a reason why RFA stuck around after implementation. It might make it hard to get any momentum, and it'd be a huge bummer to lose a player you've been building. It's also a nice parallel to real basketball contracts, even if some people treat it like they're not real basketball GMs.
If we had to vote on getting rid of RFA now, I don't know which way I'd go. On the one hand, making major changes to the game keeps it fresh. On the other, I think it's a tried and true system, and I wouldn't want to disadvantage less experienced or successful GMs. But either way, I'm only one vote. If you like some of the possibilities here, let folks know you want to vote on it. At the very least, you can call for a vote, vote for things to stay the same, and you'll get howevermany points we get for voting on league referendums to train some guy's QKN one point higher.
A Garbageman Production
As many folks already know--but none so well as commissioners, both past and present--RFA is not a natural part of the Fast Break Basketball software. There was a time in PBSL before RFA existed, and it was a time before my time. There are still a bunch of OGs here who did experience a league without restricted free agency, and for at least 50 seasons, nobody's ever really made a push to get rid of it. It stands to reason, then, that the GMs who were here before the RFA workaround was implemented liked RFA better than they liked not having RFA.
But I've long wondered: what would it look like if we got rid of RFA?
First--let's review the current process
Right now, the process of RFA happens in a theoretical wrinkle in spacetime, also known as an alternate universe's save file. That's why there's a trade moratorium...anything that happens during RFA doesn't actually happen in a linear sequence. Once the draft is finished, the league explores an alternate timeline which is blinked back to the end of the draft as soon as RFA is complete. The more variables we introduce in this netherregion of PBSL, the more the thread of the SLOE universe unravels. If you've ever read the Three Body Problem, it's pretty much like that.
From the commissioner's standpoint, there are a lot of calculations that have to happen manually because the game simply isn't built to defy the laws of metaphysics. Financial data has to be accurately calculated without any safeguard from the software to determine actual salary flexibility against cap holds. Free agency has to be run in a vacuum where only about twenty players max can be bid on. And for some reason, everybody wants that extra 2mm in cap space (that wont make a difference on 99% of bids) from cutting 2nd rounders.
Once this faux-agency has been run, the commissioner has to post the results, wait for the decisions, and return to the previous save file right after the end of the draft to manually edit the contracts into existence (and editing contracts in manually is slightly less convenient than entering bids). Once this is done, Free Agency resumes as if twenty players didn't just magically appear on new contracts that the game itself doesn't track in transactions.
The obvious pros
The first four seasons of a player's career are usually very limited. Some rookies develop quickly (especially with training) to where they can be productive starters on good teams while they're on cheap contracts. But usually that isn't the case. Typically, there's still a lot of growing room going into that second contract for RFA players, so it's really nice for those doing a patient rebuild to be able to guarantee retaining a player's rights for eight seasons without having to risk losing a player if you don't automatically max them. Even players that get maxed and then get matched usually aren't worth the max during their second contract (until maybe the last season or two). It gives teams a chance to try to get their players back on reasonable contracts without losing them to a rogue GM looking to just watch the world burn.
This is especially a relief for teams who don't have the best recent reputation or record, and if you have a lot of rookie contract guys hitting RFA, chances are, you didn't just make a deep run in the playoffs. True max-worthy players would be at a greater risk of leaving for greener pastures
But...
If we took away RFA and just left everything up to UFA, it would make UFA a lot more interesting. The players that get their RFA rights exercised right now are, for the most part, players that would attract attention in UFA as well. Adding another 10 or 15 players that would command day 1 bids would stretch the amount of players that GMs have to bid on, so theoretically, more talent will be spread out across more different teams.
As it is, UFA is full of either good players going to their third contracts, quality depth players who can be had on veteran minimums, absolutely crappy players, and maybe one or two potential RFAs who got slept on in some stage of RFA or made it to the UFA pool by way of either strategic decline or completely unstrategic tax delinquency.
This influx of 2nd contract players that are worth bidding on not only adds an entirely new slate of guys to decide on for any team, but it also adds a new level to UFA where you have to decide between going after 2nd contract win-soon guys or 3rd contract win-now guys at different max price points. This leaves a lot more options for teams going into UFA who aren't ready for the championship conversation but aren't in full on tank mode either.
And before we get too far...the cons
So other than the administrative aspect of RFA, there are some cons to the system. Cons might even be too harsh a word for some of them, so maybe this one in particular is a quirk, but RFA adds some game theory with the contracts offered by outside teams. There is a sense of justice that if a team is going to resign one of their guys, there should be some form of competition to drive that salary up to at least market level. And because a market level contract is pretty much a no brainer to max, a lot of those RFA offers are considerable overpays. Even so, those players still get maxed because a lot of GMs refuse to give up an RFA player for nothing. You show me a GM that declines a bad contract on one of their RFAs, and I'll show you a top-tier GM...or a complete wildcard. At least, nobody mediocre.
In any case, the mentality of sticking other GMs with bad contracts is a quirk, which is why rules exist that require a minimum of two guaranteed years for all RFA offers and any RFA player must remain on the team for one full season. If an outside team offered a one year severe overpay, it would almost always be preferable for the player while screwing over the incumbent team from being able to sign or match on a contract of worthwhile length.
The one year no-trade clause is also a further safeguard that aims to disincentivize teams from offering contracts they wouldn't want to eat themselves. I think an unforeseen benefit of the no-trade clause is that it might lead to more variety in terms of what happens in RFA. Without the no-trade clause, most teams would really ever have a reason not to match. They could seek out better deals immediately from other teams (Unless a matched offer sheet imposed the same 60 day trade restriction as a new contract), and that would alter one of RFA's most strategically interesting aspects.
So would getting rid of RFA be better?
It'd be different, that's for sure, and it would necessitate new strategies into UFA that could add to the excitement of what I consider the best event on the PBSL calendar. Whether it would be better would be in the eye of the beholder. To rephrase this section, let's take a look at what effect removing RFA would have on the league beyond just the mechanics of a unified free agency:
1. Win-now players would regain value
One of the huge draws of RFA is that it gives a team guaranteed control of any rookie they want for a significant chunk of time. In the vast majority of cases, a young player can usually be had for 8 seasons if you're willing to pay any amount to retain him. And in an intersecting vast majority, all players retained in RFA are usually too young to ever decline in TC in a way that can't be restored--or at least preserved--with insurance. Without the assurance that you don't lose a player before they're playable, rookie contract players lose value, and that value goes somewhere. With RFA and insurance, any rebuilding team can absolutely guarantee that their build will see through to completion. Some may see that as a good thing, but I do think that this game would have no soul if we eliminated unpredictability and with it, the need for adaptability to be an effective GM.
Doing away with the RFA system would make surefire win-now players more valuable, and it would split the value of rookies. The elite level rookie contract prospects would become more valuable as they're worth protecting and now fewer and further between. The rest of the rookie contract prospects would lose value in that retaining them for a second contract would not be as sure a thing.
2. Training would change
If we got rid of RFA, using the principle involved in splitting the value of rookie contract players outlined above, training would change in multiple ways. Teams would have to find new midpoints at how good a rookie contract player is before they'll invest in that player, either as a way to build a sure thing into purple territory or to make an on the cusp player good enough to justify maxing. After all, why spend a bunch of points for a player who could easily walk?
3. Sign and trades might become more common (but they probably won't)
Without RFA, there'd be no reason to keep the one year trade restriction, so in order to at least get some value out of players that would've qualified for RFA's, sign and trade would become more crucial. If your team is iffy about maxing a guy that another team's more triggerhappy on, it's probably better to have more options than simply the team with the winning bid in RFA. In RFA, that winning bidder is assuming all the risk of putting out an oversized contract, so it makes sense that they should have more rights to trade with the incumbent team. If the incumbent team is the one taking the risk of putting out an overvalued UFA contract on the same player, they should be allowed all sign and trade options, just as they would be for an RFA eligible player whose rights they didn't exercise. This could see an increase in sign and trades as it opens up the negotiations for the second contract player to every other team regardless of cap space.
4. It's less realistic than the real NBA
In the real NBA, RFA and UFA would be able to overlap, which is just an impossibility with the complexity of calculating cap hold changes on the fly. We could allow RFA teams to match without a cap hold, but allowing teams to match players in UFA makes it so much less desireable to bid on a player when you're not the incumbent team. The incumbent team would have an incredible advantage because of this. While our RFA is more realistic than no RFA at all, switching to a more realistic RFA would be a much bigger nightmare than doing away with it if we want to change. If parallels to the actual NBA are more important to you than they are to me, it's something you might want to think about if a vote ever comes up to ditch RFA.
5. Draft priorities might change (but they probably won't)
Right now, in the golden era of PBSL, we have 3 free insurance spots for life to go along with RFA, so drafting a raw player with insane potential is a no brainer, and it probably still will be. But at a certain threshold, a player's readiness to contribute to a team now will become more important and could be the deciding factor between maybe a single draft decision.
6. Hey, here's a wild idea:
We'd have 3 or 4 extra days and no trade moratorium for the offseason. We could just speed things up and get to the regular season faster...or we could add an extra phase or two to UFA. This would require a WHOLE lot of research as to when the best way to split things up would be and how many bids we'd allow per day if we had, say, 5 sets of bids instead of 3. Nobody signs on the first day, but if we had UFA Day 1 be too soon after that, there'd be a round SOLELY of big swings and attempted robbery. Just putting this vague idea on the table in case it spurs further discussion. Maybe we could alter RFA to where the first X days of UFA, incumbent teams still have Match/Accept/Decline rights. But as it is RFA is 3+ days of work for very little player movement and a lot of incumbent teams just auto-matching. It's basically a check to make sure nobody gets a sneaky good deal on their RFA unless it's extra sneaky. Anyway, this is another idea for another day.
IN SUMMATION
It's hard for me to imagine a league without RFA. I think it would put a higher emphasis on competing, and perhaps with more teams competing, there would be more parity in the league making it harder to stack teams by either having all the best UFAs go to the good teams with cap space or hindering the strategy of just being bad for a while, get draft picks, spend all your points on training, have 3 or 4 purple pots at once, get an untenable tax bill, and either retire or repeat the process. When I envision a league where more and more people are seeing how Doug's strategy worked (LTS and K-100 seem to be in various stages of that strategy, the Pels and Cavs too), it's a more boring league. Less teams want to move players and take big swings on the trade market, and fewer and fewer teams compete when they see a dynasty-caliber team or two rise above the ranks.
I think that getting rid of RFA is also a risk. Like I said at the start, there's a reason why RFA stuck around after implementation. It might make it hard to get any momentum, and it'd be a huge bummer to lose a player you've been building. It's also a nice parallel to real basketball contracts, even if some people treat it like they're not real basketball GMs.
If we had to vote on getting rid of RFA now, I don't know which way I'd go. On the one hand, making major changes to the game keeps it fresh. On the other, I think it's a tried and true system, and I wouldn't want to disadvantage less experienced or successful GMs. But either way, I'm only one vote. If you like some of the possibilities here, let folks know you want to vote on it. At the very least, you can call for a vote, vote for things to stay the same, and you'll get howevermany points we get for voting on league referendums to train some guy's QKN one point higher.