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peyton is my favorite qb of all time, always thought he was better.

Oh - and going back to a discussion that hasn't been had in quite some time. Roster Limits!!! I have always felt for GHL level it should be 30. Maybe offer a bit more leeway for the lower leagues, but I can't imagine why any GHL manager would need more than 30 spots. This would be the ultimate measure against hoarding players and creating a larger FA pool. 6 C - 11 F - 9D - 4G = 30 players. Easy peasy. You can even get creative and do 7C and 12F and 2G, the options are endless.

Just re-read this part and I see what you're saying. Personally, I think the problem is contracts. Players are signing way too cheap. I had hoped that the release would have solved that - for example, players in the 90s should sign for 6M+. I see some signing for less than 3M, which allows managers to hoard (along with potentially getting a team of all 90+ players, but that's another topic). If hoarding is keeping other managers from getting players, then it seems like an effective tactic to be honest. I personally don't agree with it because having too many players on your roster, especially on one way deals, will kill your confidence as those players would become anxious - and having too many salaries prevents managers from splurging on those top tier players. I think if the contracts were fixed it would solve a lot of this.

Definitely agree with everything you said, rain. I just understand the mentality behind managers finding comfort in signing their own players. Many might think the current roster is good, they just need 1-2 more pieces to make it all work. Season 3 FA was a great example for me. I placed a 2nd/3rd line player on waivers to go after Rackley in FA. That plan didn't work out and I lost the player to waivers, having my worst season so far. But overall you are right. I think the FA market will continue to get better each season. In S2 it was awful. Got a little better for S3 and this past season there were plenty of players there for signing. As new players continue to pour in, more players will become available - managers will start doing exactly as you said above in hopes of signing "better" players and improving their teams. Just a bit limited at the moment. I think we are a few seasons away from the FA pool being really good. In terms of trading, I think there are a fair amount of moves made each season. Almost every manager has made a trade or two at this point. But trading is tough in general. You need to find a fair balance and also offer something that the other manager needs, taking into account team tactics and cap space. If you find value in a player on another team, chances are that manager also values that player and it will take a bit to move them. I thought the trade between Cedar and Slaughter was a great example of a fair trade benefiting both teams. I also think the trade between me and Cedar was a benefit to both teams. Cedar got the younger, better, bigger player on a cheaper contract, so on paper it looks lopsided, but I was up against the cap and it provided me some breathing room to make moves in case of injury... and it provided me positional balance in that I now have a C who can fill in in case of injury - and I already had depth at D. I needed to move Obeng after this season anyways and Kozak is a great example of a player that will walk without a contact next season. I've offered quite a few trades for G this year as well to no avail - and some of the offers I thought were really good, but can understand why they were rejected.

While there might be some truth to it there is a massive negative drawback that goes along with it. Holding on to those players is an active restriction to what you can do in FA while also being an active handicap to your teams performance. You are holding on to a player, bringing several detrimental side effects to your team in the process, just for a, most of the time, modest trade value. It isn't worth holding back your team because of that. Yet the reason the latter part of 2 and the entirety of 3 is true at all is because managers hoard players that don't work for them when they shouldn't. If they let them go to FA the FA pool would have many more players in it and so long as you went in looking for what you needed rather than strictly the best overall player there wouldn't be many bidding wars. The only getting lucky there would be would be in outbidding for the top players. Which, to be honest, should be how that sort of goes anyways. It is literally a self perpetuating issue. The fact that there is no real cap crunch for the really deep GHL teams only serves to add to it. If I had this same mindset I never would have gotten any of my current 4th line players. A 4th line that is, performance wise, one of the best 4th lines around. I traded better overall players for Stubna, Stang and Reason. I traded those players because they weren't working in the role that I had them filling. I didn't trade for Stubna, Stang and Reason knowing, or even thinking, that they would be as good as they are. I traded for them thinking that they had the skill set to perform good enough on the 4th line for the duration of the contracts that they were on. Meaning that they would fill that role until I let them go and filled their spots with better players. Some of those players were from AI teams. The rest Anders created because the player pool that was generated at the start was strictly to fill the teams meaning that there were no extra players to go around at any level. As I said above though, if managers weren't hoarding players that they didn't need or players that weren't performing for them the FA pool wouldn't be nonexistent. Top end players would still be a rarity, as they should be, but quality 2nd and 3rd line players would be notably more abundant if managers didn't unnecessarily hoard players. This is really going to become a pointed problem in the GHL the further we go because teams with great depth are allowed to keep their rosters due to players not increasing their salary demands enough. It was a serious problem in the past and it will be a problem in the future too if the two faster leagues are any indication.

So I was wondering if, in the future, it would be possible for us to manage our affiliate teams too. It kind of sucks when a free agent or bad player is getting better playing minutes over a prospect that I want to grow. I also think it would make the developing system a little better as if you want to work on a player's defense, you can play them in a more defensive role as opposed the the computer tossing them wherever. I know training is partially available to do this, but being able to make a player more well-rounded in the aspects we want would be cool by setting up and managing affiliate team lines. Also, I saw in a different forum, the idea of adding national teams. To expand on that, having a world cup would be really cool and it would also add something else for us to follow when our team gets eliminated from the playoffs, as there is only so much you could do with scouting and contracts at the end of the season. Just a couple of suggestions. Hope to see these added, but otherwise, I've been liking 2.0 so far

Was pushing this about a year ago for prospect development. One thing that used to baffle me was players would be playing out of position. I'd have top defensemen prospects playing as centers because they were the highest overall on my affiliate while my center prospects were playing wing. As far as I'm aware the only way to improve faceoff rating is by the player taking a high volume of faceoffs. So my centermen would always be left in my affiliate longer because I could get them almost 800 faceoffs in the minors as opposed to only 300 when playing in my bottom six. As for players getting stuck behind bums in your affiliate. If you have the ability to create a second affiliate I'd be sending the older players to the bottom affiliate while having only top prospects on the top affiliate. That allowed my top prospects to all get top 6/top 4 minutes.