Salary Cap 101 for the newbs

[bonscott]

This is for the newbs to make sure you understand how the salary cap works all season.

As you have seen, whatever money you haven't spent is available now for your auction funds.
However, keep in mind you probably don't want to spend it all as you need to have enough free cap space sign your rookies in May.
The auction will run all the way until the season starts as well.
And in season whatever free cap money you have will be what your available funds are for the weekly blind bidding on free agents.

Right now there is no roster limit but in mid August we have roster cut downs similar to the NFL and you must get under the limits (max 22 plus your 3 taxi squad spots for rookies only).

When you drop players you take an immediate 50% cap hit (so if their salary is 3 million you take a 1.5 million cap hit, but obviously get the other 1.5 million back). In addition if the player has 2 or more years you will take a cap hit next year based on a formula, see the constitution for details. On the left side is a link to "cap hits" where we keep track of any future year cap hits. This spreadsheet is ready to go for 2011 cap hits. I try to keep it up to date on a weekly basis at least.

Hope that clears it up and feel free to ask any questions.

[Georgia Punishers]

Good post... I was aware of the 50% hit and more for multi year deals but the way you made it sound in the chat that the cap hit was minimal... 50% to me is big cheese. I'm glad you listed the 22 roster spots cause I missed that one so I need to know where I'm at on my player bidding...

Again, great post for all us newbies....

Georgia Punishers

[bonscott]

No problem!

I guess what I mean by "minimal" is that a 50% hit on a 425K min player isn't that much. BUT it would add up if you had a lot of them.

As for 22, that is the max. And you get three taxi squad spots for rookies so 25 total. I think the min is 20 total so you could have only 17 plus the 3 TS spots as well.

So for example on my team (and I'll give away some of my strategy), I've already got 15 signed players. I have a *ton* of draft picks. So I can't really sign too many vets from the auction *and* sign all my rookies after roster cutdowns. Something has to give. So I'll either be not signing all my rooks or pulling off some trades this summer or just plain dropping some guys to get under the limit. It's a nice problem in some ways. However my team has been pretty bad from the start so I'm not doing something right.

Sometimes I wish our roster limit was 25 or something. And to think our first year it was only 20 plus 2 TS for rooks.

[bonscott]

Also remember you have 24 hours from when you win a bid to assign a contract to the player by posting in the Contracts forum. If you don't then a default of 1 yr will be applied.

You will have until cut down day in August to assign contracts to rookies from our rookie draft in May.

[Achon44]

Also, if you are going to just sign your player for 1 year it would probably help the commish out if you just did not post it at all. Seeing all players default to 1 year he's just going to ignore those post anyway and this would make it easier for him to go through the message board.

[bonscott]

Also, if you are going to just sign your player for 1 year it would probably help the commish out if you just did not post it at all. Seeing all players default to 1 year he's just going to ignore those post anyway and this would make it easier for him to go through the message board.

Yea, I violated that one myself today.

[braven112]

Also, if you are going to just sign your player for 1 year it would probably help the commish out if you just did not post it at all. Seeing all players default to 1 year he's just going to ignore those post anyway and this would make it easier for him to go through the message board.