Rule Thoughts

In follow-up to Doug's comments, some things to think about for this summer, and rule change/clarification. I concur with Doug, this is NOT applicable to the 2007 drafts.

Prospect draft - I would agree with Doug that a weighted lottery, much like the one for the Entry Draft, be adopted. I'm personally not sure if we should connect it to the Challenge Cup, but rather a simple weighting where the last place team has 12 ballots, second last has 11 etc up to the Predator Cup winner, who would have one ballot. Alternately, we could say the Cup winner drafts last in the upcoming PrD, and give Herbi 11 ballots, down to 1 ballot for 2nd place in the Cup race. Alternately again, we can adopt a system like Doug describes, where the PrD is reverse order of finishing, but the bottom "x" teams have a weighted chance to move to top pick. For example, if we DO use the Challenge Cup, we have 8 teams not in the playoffs. We give 8 ballots to Herbi, down to one ballot for 5th place in the Challenge Cup (might need lots of tiebreakers to rank them all). We draw ONCE, and that team picks first. After the first pick, we continue in order of Predator Cup finish in reverse, so Herbi would pick next if they lost the lottery, and if they win the lottery, things remain 12th to 1st in order of selection. Clear as mud?

Entry Draft lottery - Ideally, we should use this to offset the above. For the PrD, finishing lower in the scheme above would mean a better chance at a better pick. For the ED, I think it should reward the higher teams (which is more or less what we do already). One question would be whether to give the Cup winner 12 ballots down to Herbi with 1, or give 2nd place 12 down to Herbi with 2, and the Cup winner gets 1 (after all, they did get the Cup...). We want to motivate teams to finish as high as possible, so the season end sell-offs don't become ludicrous (eg giving a front runner 6 players with none back and having no-one on your bench for the rest of the year)

Waiver Draft - clarify if a player, once picked, can be dropped during the draft, and how we handle that. Since we are required to announce our 8 drops before the draft, there will always be at least 8 rounds, however we have allowed teams to drop a 9th or 10th player after the 8 rounds are done if there is still a player out there they would rather have. Again we need to clarify what happens if a player is cut at the end of the WD. Or we can simplify it by saying ALL drops must be announced before the WD, so if you plan to drop 9, you must announce 9 by noon Friday like everyone else, no player once picked can be dropped, and we have only as many rounds/picks as are needed for each team to refill their rosters.

I'm sure there are other issues, but I think we need to track them as they arise so we don't forget to address them in the offseason, in this case for the WDs in 07-08, and the ED and PrD lotteries in 2008.