Posted By MBravard

Please comment on two ideas that have been put forth to make the contraction draft more favorable to weaker teams:

1. Eliminate consideration of 2002 wins and use PB only to determine draft order.
2. Use the same draft order in every round rather than the serpentine method.

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1. Obviously, I'm assuming he meant 2001 season wins (this year's season). I'll first tell you that all four of my teams went to the post season, with the worst team having 98 wins. Using 2001 wins to calculate the draft WILL hurt all of my teams chances on getting an impact player in the contraction draft. Even so, I think this year's win total should remain in the equation to help out the losing teams. Like Tim said in his post, when you go all out and trade to win this year, you assume the risk of being drained on talent, picks, etc for the next season. However, I think that many many teams would not have been so liberal with their trading if they had known we would be having a contraction draft based on wins the very next season. Alot of marginal teams wouldn't have gone for broke and risked their futures. That said, I think PB value should be mixed into the draft order equation, and I like how Mike proposed doing it (4 groups of 5 teams, then re-sort within those groups by PB value). This is the best of both worlds IMO. While it primarily orders teams based on their 2001 performance, it will give a 1-2 position increase in draft position to those teams that are depleted for the 2002 season.

2. IMO, I think draft order should be serpentine. If you look at the 4 potential teams that might get contracted, many do not have more than 5 players that would get drafted and kept in the 27 player cut. Even if you double that amount to 10 servicable players per team (highly unlikely on most of these teams), that's only 2 good rounds of drafting....the other rounds will be all players that will end up back in the FA pool (much like the rookie draft typically has only 2 or 3 decent rounds). That said, for a good team that will be picking late in the draft, they might only get a shot at 1 player that they will actually keep. The teams that picked high in the draft will likely keep their 2nd round pick (since they are depleted anyway and aren't really concerned with that 27 player limit as much as the better teams).

I think picking high in this draft is reward enough for the lower teams. There are alot of total stud players on some of these contraction teams (in some cases, they are the whole team)....All Star caliber players (maybe 5 total in the whole draft) that will get picked up by the lesser teams and make a HUGE impact. The players that are drafted at the end of the 1st round, and every other round will likely be role players, bench backups, etc etc.... If we keep it a serpentine draft, then all teams will likely get the benefit of keeping at least 2 players. If you do non-serpentine, then only the teams high in the draft will likely keep 2 players (and probably 3 in their case anyway). We already have that format in the rookie draft, and I think this is the only draft that should be using that type of format.

Jon, STL Trash