The official beginning of FA will be Sunday at 3PM. However, all teams are free to send in one PM with their initial bid(s) anytime between 6PM tonight and 6PM tomorrow. At 6PM tomorrow I will begin opening all PM's with teams initial bids so we can get a head start on this mega FA class. Bids will begin to be posted after 3PM Sunday.
ANNOUNCEMENT
Free agency will begin on Sunday afternoon at 3PM. At that time bids can begin being made via PM. As discussed and voted on, each team will have a different minimum bid for all 1-5 year deals which will be customized based on where you stand on the FA destination list. GMs will be given these numbers from me via PM in the next couple of days.
Due to my work schedule being a lot more demanding this year then in years past, FA will have to be broken down into phases. The first part will begin Sunday at 3PM. The schedule for phase one is posted below. Offers can only be made during these times. Please be flexible and understand that changes to the schedule may have to be made as I am on call and may have to adapt the FA schedule accordingly. But as of now, the below will be our schedule. I am hoping that we can complete the first phase in the 28 hours I have allotted over these three days. If there are any outstanding bids on Tuesday night, they will carry over to the next phase of FA which will begin sometime after Tuesday.
Phase 1 FA ScheduleSpoiler:
As far as the actual bidding process goes, we will mostly be reverting back to how we did it in years 1-4. Teams can place as many bids as they want in the allotted time as long as they bid above their minimum bid. Teams can bid on multiple players in each bid but must be aware of salary cap space and also roster spots available. If your team has no roster spots available and you place a bid on a player, in your PM you must let me know the corresponding roster move that you will make in the event that your bid is high on the FA you are bidding on. This applies throughout FA whenever you are offering a contract for more players then you have roster spots available. You must indicate how you will keep your active roster at 15 players in each PM. The soft cap for this upcoming season is $1050. The hard cap is $1155. Teams can use that extra $105 only to resign their own Birds rights FA's.
Teams are allowed to bid on multiple players but will obviously only be allowed to sign players up to the salary cap. If you have $800 in cap space and make multiple offers, only the high offers that get you to the cap will be accepted. All other offers will be discarded. For example, a team with $800 and three roster spots can submit this offer:
Player A- $500/4
Player B- $350/4
Player C- $325/4
Player D- $350/3
Player E- $250/1
If all offers are high, only A and E would be accepted. Once A is listed as high offer, then B, C and D's offers would put that team over the cap and would be discarded. Player E's offer however would still fit into the cap and would be accepted. That teams salary cap would be tied up in those two players until they either sign with them or another team beats the offer. If in the above example, player A is not the high bid, but players B-E are high, then players B and C will have accepted offers and the team would have that $675 tied up until the player signs or another team beats the offer. In both of these examples, the team would not be able to place another bid until one of their high bids has been beaten because they would not have enough cap space to do so. There is no way for a team to rescind an offer once it is made so teams must be careful when bidding on multiple players that they do not get stuck with their 4th or 5th options. These numbers above are just examples as the actual minimum bids would not allow a $250/1 offer in the first phase of FA.
There is no maximum offer as long as your team does not violate the salary cap. Any offer that would violate the cap will be discarded. Please remember your $1 cap holds when making an offer.
Teams can submit offers for a maximum of four years for all non Bird FA's and a maximum of five years for all Bird rights FA's. If you are offering a contract for one of your own Bird rights FA's then you are allowed to offer a five year deal and also allowed to go over the $1050 soft cap by $105. Teams can use that $105 to resign their own players. Once a Bird rights player has signed, he will be placed onto your team roster page but his money will not count until the team has reached the hard cap. Bird rights players will resign with their teams last so that teams can get right up to the soft cap before using that extra $105.
Sign and trades are allowed. Rules for how those work can be found in the rules section in the stickied BaF thread.
Once an offer has been made via PM, read and responded to, all high bids will go "on the clock". Offers will be posted in the FA section (the final post after the draft) on page two of the stickied BaF thread. No actual offer will be posted as far as dollar amount or team leading, but next to the players name will be "has been offered a contract. Will sign at x:xx if this offer is not beat." For the first two phases of FA, players will be on the clock for six hours. If no offer beats that high bid in six hours, then that player will sign with the team with the leading bid. I will be opening PM's throughout the time FA is open so there will be delayed responses and potential last minute bids. It is possible that a bid gets beaten even after the clock has expired if another team places the bid prior to the clock running out but I had not had the chance to read it yet due to the volume of PM's I am sure to get, especially early on. Nothing is official until it is posted by me. No player has signed until they are on your team page and an announcement has been put into the discussion thread. If a leading bid is placed at 10PM on Sunday, that player will sign at 4PM on Monday (six hours of bidding time) assuming no other bid beats it before then.
No straight up inquiries will be allowed. If you want to know what someone is going for you must place a bid on that player. I will respond to teams top three bids with what would be needed to beat the current bid. Also, due to the number of Birds rights FA this year, I will not be PMing each GM every time their player gets a new bid. However, teams are free to inquire at any time about one of their own Bird rights FA's. So if you see that your player has an offer and is "on the clock", you can inquire about that player. Please put the players name into the subject heading of your PM to let me know that it is in inquiry and not a bid.
Once FA begins, there is no more discussion about FA's until the player has signed or that GM will be disciplined for "tampering". Punishments for these actions can be found in the rules sections of the stickied thread.
This FA period is sure to be the most challenging one to date. Please be patient as we work through the early stages as my inbox will be flooded. The last time we held FA this way, after season three, I received 469 PM's in the first three days. This number will hopefully be less considering the minimum bid in effect but I'm sure it will still be pretty crazy. There is a lot of info in this post so if you have any questions, now is the time. Once we get to Sunday, I will not be able to respond to anything but offers and will not be checking the discussion thread often. Look in your PM's for your minimum bids before Friday.Spoiler:
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