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Promoting to the GHL is a difficult thing to do. Promoting and surviving your first season at this point is extremely difficult because the free agency is garbage. It's been garbage for many seasons now. Why is the FA trash? Because managers have entire team's worth of players just rotting away in the minors with no intention of bringing them up, or trading them. So then the very very few players available in the FA are bid on wildly getting double the salary that they ask for because the demand is so high. Whether the fix is creating an engine to make players refuse to sign with a manager known for player hoarding, or just putting a 6-8 player cap on the minors... Something needs done because this is embarrassing. Here's the proof. Harrow, Batchawana, Oshawa, and to a lesser extent - North Shore since most of those players are from his SHL club and just recently promoted - are prime examples. Think of the value these players could add to promoting teams. It's a s*** way to manage a team and screw over other managers.

I can see a legitimate argument for 30 but not much more than that. The bigger thing that will go into fixing a lot in terms of player hoarding and a lack of FAs is having players demand more salary. To give everyone a perspective on how easy it is to keep an absolutely stacked team together top players ask for around 6-7 million a season tops, unless they are greedy. The cap at the GHL level is 71.5. So top players are only asking for typically, at most, 10% of the cap available to a team. That means that teams can easily hold onto 6-7 of the top players in the league and still have enough room cap wise to fill the rest of their team with high end players. Those high end players playing more depth roles will, because they are playing depth roles, never ask for much more than depth role money even though they are players fully capable of playing top line roles in the league. Compare this to the NHL where top players get paid at least, with new contracts, 15% of the cap when you ignore the AAV adjustments due to back-diving contracts. Crosby, when he signed his current deal, signed for 8.7 million against the cap, due to the contract being back-diving he was getting paid 12 million actual, when the cap was at 64.3 million. Cap wise he was getting paid 13.5% of the cap while salary wise he was getting paid 18.7% of the cap. It was rumored that Crosby was going to get 10 mil a season average against the cap. He would have if the last 3 seasons of his deal weren't 3 mil each. Either way, we can't back-dive contracts in this game so I am removing those 3 seasons from the discussion. Crosby demanded, and got, 18.7% of the cap. The next big contract to look at is Malkin. He signed for 9.5 the next season when the cap was at 69 million. That is a cap hit of only 13.8%. Why was his lower? He took a "home team discount," partially forced by Crosby's contract the season prior and partially because Malkin didn't want a back diving contract. His cap hit should be higher as he is clearly the statistical outlier as I will show later. The next big contracts were the duo of Kane and Toews. They both signed the exact same back-diving contracts of 10.5 aav and 13.8 actual when the cap was 71.4. Because we can't do back diving contracts the actual salary is what we are concerned with and 13.8 is 19.3% of the cap. The next big contract to look at is McDavid's. AAV of 12.5 but a slight back-diving contract means that his actual early salary is 15 mil when the cap was at 79.5. That is 18.9% of the cap. We are missing one massive contract example though. Ovechkin's 08-09 resigning. The AAV is just over 9.5 million but his contract was 13 years total with the first 6 being 9 mil a season and the last 7 being 10. So how do we calculate this one as it isn't back diving? It really won't matter as the cap was only 56.7 million that season. It is going to be 16.8% if you use the 9.5 something AAV or 17.6% if you use the 10 mil seasonal pay. That is what NHL players are getting payed relative to what the cap is. The closest example we have to go by to our cap in the game is Kane and Toews. If we go by that and compare what top player demands are for us in game you will find that top players are asking for about half of what they should be percentage wise. Imagine McDavid getting paid around 7 million a season and how much that would help the Oilers cap wise. That is what is going on in our game at the moment as top players should be asking for about double what they are actually asking for at the moment. This doesn't mean that all players should be asking for about double what they currently are. However, players that fall just under the top rate players should easily be asking for 7-8 million rather than the ~5 million that they are asking for at the moment while 3-4 million players should be asking for 5-6 million. Players asking for more appropriate salaries relative to their actual skill level, as well as relative to the cap, would go a long, long way into fixing both of the issues presented here. I'd even go so far as to say that a roster limit would be made redundant with the increased salary demands. Also note that I only think that player salary demands need to be adjusted at the GHL level. They seem fairly appropriate at every other level.

These are super useful. Thanks for putting in all this work, the insight into the national teams is something that’s definitely missing in this game. Maybe Anders can look at this and finally implement national teams since you’ve done half the work here. May be worth asking him about it. Having a World Cup in the off-season would be extremely cool.