[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by MathBandit

My recent experience in an online league has taught me that for a human player, to a certain extent, the financial/budget side is all made up anyways - which might actually not be that far from reality I suppose when you think of the ways teams circumvent the cap (either CBT in baseball or hard cap in other sports) in real life.

Assume it's May 1st, you're in the red (overbudget) for this year, have 0 allotted draft budget, and are projected to be overbudget each of the next X years (I think the game shows 3? Either way, assume you're projected to be overbudget indefinitely).

Draft comes up. You might reasonably assume that as a team with negative money and no funds allotted to the draft that you'll have to cheap out and only sign scrubs. Turns out, you are still allowed to offer Slot to every player you pick and your owner will approve the offer, so you can go Slot - you just can't go over-slot. For bonus fun, if you are in the negative but *do* have say $5M allotted to the draft, you can offer that entire $5M to one player then still go slot on every other player after that.

Now, the draft is over, you're even more in the negative than you were before (since you spent money you didn't have on Slot offers for picks 1-5). You might think that now you're really pooched and tapped out, and that while this works for a year or two since you can still draft it's not sustainable since you'll never be able to extend or sign anyone due to no budget. It's true that you can't sign FAs, but the other part not so much. Let's say you have Juan Soto with one year of control left after the current one, and an Arb Estimate of $15M. The game will let you offer him a 1-year deal worth up to $15M since that was less than or equal to the money you already have 'committed'. But what the game/owner will *also* let you do is offer him a 10-year deal where year 1 is $15M and then years 2-10 are any number you want - because the owner only checks Current Year and Next Year when deciding if you have enough funds to offer the contract/extension.

So a team with negative money and no budget for the foreseeable future can still draft slot every year, and lock up their star homegrown players to insane deals beyond the years of control as long as the first year of the extension is less than the arb estimate for that year.

I know I’ll get the argument “because it’s a game” from many, but to me this just sucks all of the fun out of being a GM. There aren’t many consequences for fiscal mismanagement it seems.