Policing Dump Trades

In response to my ongoing series reviewing rebuilding trades, tom writes:

any tips on rule changes to prevent lopsided dumps in a league? We've got some shenanigans going on, and any protests get shouted down as sour grapes--mainly because the teams most affected by the deals are also the most vocal about their shadiness. This is a 12-team league where the owners have all known each other for almost 15-20 years, so no punches are pulled.

In a recent post you stated, "In these cases, you need some sort of mechanism to overturn trades." Any specifics on how to do that?

tom's right; I have talked about this recently. But it is a very important topic, and I'm glad to address it again.

One thing that Toz mentions in his response to tom's comment is a salary cap. I've been in leagues that use a salary cap for almost seven years now, and I think that this is one of the most effective tools in place to make sure that you can still allow rebuilding trades without allowing one team to reap all of the benefits of said trades.

The A.L. Toz and I are in uses a $375 salary cap (the draft has the standard $260 cap). I wouldn't mind seeing a lower cap - say, $350 - but in my experience the $375 cap is a satisfactory compromise for owners who still want to make aggressive deals for next year versus owners who don't want to see 8-for-8 trades that ruin friendships and force people to use small armaments.

Besides allowing dump trades, another advantage of the salary cap is that it forces you to make hard choices at the trade deadline and down the road with your FAAB. Three teams in my A.L. are right up against the wall with the salary cap, and we've had to do some fancy maneuvering in order to make sure that we could make the trades we wanted to make, FAAB the guys we wanted on our teams and, sometimes, it forced us to waive a few players we otherwise simply would have kept.

The biggest drawback is that you can still use players under long-term contracts or in their option years to finagle the system and make your team a little more powerful than it otherwise would have been. It can be argued that this is part of the strategy of building a powerful team within the salary cap, but it could also be argued that this is a weakness.

The other drawback is that there still will be sour grapes. Like I said before, a salary cap doesn't eliminate dumping, unless the cap is so close to $260 that only fair trades are possible. One problem with making the cap too low is that you'll eliminate most trades, even fair trades that might have otherwise happened if not for such a strict cap.

Another variation on the salary cap is a "soft" cap. This cap is only enforced up until your league's trade deadline. After the deadline is over, you can put as many dollars on your roster as you want. The intent of this rule is that it permits owners to continue aggressively using their FAAB right up until the end of the season. It also allows them to activate injured players who would otherwise put them over the cap.

For that very reason, I don't like this variation on the rule. Why should an owner with injured players or unused FAAB have a tactical advantage over his opponents? You could argue that this owner has already been penalized due to the injuries in question. However, injuries are a matter of bad luck; making the cap soft gives some benefit to owners who have a few injured players.

The biggest problem with a soft cap, though, is that it could allow a team in the basement to trade all of his injured players to a contender at the deadline, then allow that contender to activate all of these players as they come off the DL. This defeats the very spirit of the rule, and for that reason I wouldn't recommend instituting a soft cap.