Should free agents demand bigger contracts?
 

For example Erik Karlsson signed 6 years 10,9 mio coming of a career best, Norris winning campaign. He is predicted to get 8 years 11 Million in real life.

Jeff Skinner signed for 3 years 4,6 mio. Scoring less than irl this year, but still recording a career high in points. Some say Buffalo will offer him 8x8 mio.

Bobrovsky got 6 years, 7,8 mio. He was way better than he is irl this year. Still it seems likely somebody will give him 8 years with a higher salary.

Auston Matthews resgined for 4 years, 5mio. Irl he singed 11mio/5years.

Artemi Panarin resigned for 5years/6,7 mio, after a 40goal/90 point season. Without checking my sources, such player would get way more irl.

The list goes on, generally I feel the free agents demand too little in money and especially term. What you think?

I think it works pretty well. Some players end up being a bargain, others demand way too much - I had a LW with 40 point seasons ask for $8M a year on a renewal and had to ship him out.

Also remember you can't directly compare real-life contracts with the game because there's no inflation in the game. In real-life, teams can offer larger contracts than normal because the assumption (which so far has been validated) is that the back-end of a long contract will be a smaller percentage of a larger cap (ie someone who signs for $10M a year for 7 years might take up around 12.5% of the cap now, but only 10% of the cap in year 7).

To account for that difference I increased the cap in my universe to $85M, but it's not necessary. I do enjoy the need to make decisions and have a wide variety of players and the need to infuse rookie talent to balance the books.

Also every game you start is going to be different. What a player wants in one game may not be the same as another. One time it might be a 2 year contract, the next he may want 6. It does change.

One other thing: the game is intentionally a little conservative with contract values. We learned very early on that erring in the other direction led to big problems. If the aggregate amount of available cap space around the league dries up because all the teams are overspending, the teams will start to do very strange things to stay under the cap, like burying a good player in the minors and replacing him with a minimum wage guy to get the $375,000 in cap savings that creates. And that amount is rarely enough to help, so they do it multiple times.

Ok so I get the thing with the money, but still shouldn't some players ask for longer term deals? Especially those good 28,29 year old players. Like most them accepting often 3 year deals doesn't seem realistic. I really don't think its off by much but still.

Examples, real life, from last 2 years, all solid to good players, no real stars:

James Neal 30, 5 years
Alzner 28 5 years
Radulov 30, 5 years
Shattenkirk 28, 4 years
Perron 30, 4 years
Van riemsdyk 29, 5 years
Radulov 30 5 years

Guys in that mold in my recent save:
Silfverberg 3, years
Skinner, 3 years
Simmonds, 3 years
Lee, 3 years
Gardiner, 3 years
Nelson 3 years
And the deals don't look like they took money over term.

Only guy on that level that got smth longer was Jordan Eberle, he got 5 years.
I'd have liked to see 1-2 more of those getting 5 years, 1-2 getting 4 years.

On top of that those real stars like Karlsson, Bobrovsky, Panarin, all of them got 6 year deals in my most recent save. I feel some of them will get longer deals in real life in the upcoming free agency.
If in game one of them got 6 another 7 and one an 8 year deal would have been closer to real life.

coming back to this one more time, anybody with thoughts on the contract duration? would a slight increase in the contract length UFA are getting be realistic?

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sorry to revive an old thread but I just got this game and have the exact same issue.

Is there any plan to correct this in FHM6? It's completely unrealistic and creates a real inequality when contracts users sign players to are compared to real-life contracts (ie: Mitch Marner signs to a 3 year/4 mil deal whereas Auston Matthews is signed to his real-ife 6 year, 11.6 mil deal).

Considering this is a fairly in-depth sim and has a huge impact on how the game is played, I hope reconceptualizing how the cap works is at the top of the priority list for future editions of the game.

As the guys elaborated it is not as black and white as it might seem at first glace. However I still believe we could do well with a slight increase in average contract length as well as players asking for a slightly higher average value.

(Posted this on /r/FranchiseHockey on Reddit as well, but I'll repeat it here, some of it covers the same ground I mentioned above)

We tried having it increase every year in a previous version. The problem is, people's frame of reference for salary values is very firmly anchored in the present. And when you increase the caps and salary standards by even 5% a season (roughly the avarage amount the real cap has increased by under the current CBA) that increases salaries very rapidly - a player worth a $3 million salary in 2019 will expect $7.5 million in 2039 after 20 years of compounded 5% increases, and that, understandably, looks very odd. It generated a huge amount of complaints, so we went back to keeping everything in current-day dollar values.

And, as I said in the forum post mentioned above, another lesson we learned early on is that it's much better to err on the side of salaries being a little lenient, than it is to risk running into a severe shortage of cap space leaguewide. That makes it very difficult for teams to dump salary, which leads to a lot of bizarre-looking player moves as teams try to scrape out cap space by using the small amount of relief ($375k) you can get by burying a higher-salaried player in the minors. If you look at the early FHM forum comments, you'll see a lot of complaints about stars getting sent to the minors and teams filling rosters with minimum-salary players. That was being driven by salary standards leading to excessive cap space use, so I toned those down, and the problem hasn't reoccurred since then.

I'll be revising the standards salary levels upwards a bit for FHM6, but I want to see what happens in July 1 to get an idea of how the current free agent market pricing looks this year. And I think we also may be changing the free agent mechanics a bit to make the signing process a little more competitive, which should push up prices. But I'll always be cautious about getting into a situation where salaries run too high, because I know that the consequences are game-breaking.

This does sound damn awesome :flowers:

As we are in the same mood, I also hope that contracts renewals will be more challenging.
In Europe for example it's way too easy to keep your players and not having them going to the NHL. At least in some leagues you will eventually lose the best ones in summer (although I hate that you first sign them, then they sign in the NHL two weeks later these things shouldn't happen), but for example in the KHL you can just keep them at your own will, they'll always accept signing a new contract, no matter what their plans are. Or better, they have no plans at all.
Also, in Europe players never get clauses, this is also very unrealistic