Free Agency Primer!

 

NSL Free Agency is upon us after months of waiting through the NBA offseason. Watching players in the NBA be traded, sign with new teams, hold out for more cash and then finally settle into new or old teams and go through the NBA pre season. They came out the other side, finalised rosters and now we too are gaining steam as we are only a week and a half from a brand new NSL season! Ahead of this weekend when we will be doing our live Free Agency day of bidding, here’s some important information and a bit of a primer for everyone, new and old, as we all need a refresher on things.

 

The Order of Events

The day kicks off at the given times depending on your time zone:

November Saturday 8th:
- 8pm NSL time
- 5pm San Antonio/Dallas
- 6pm Indiana/Atlanta/Jacksonville
- 8pm Brazil
- 11pm London

November Sunday 9th:
- 7am Manila
- 10am ADST
- 7am Perth
- 12am Germany

All things going well, the live radio show will begin minutes before this start time.

Things will then proceed as follows:

1.     Above MLE Players will be randomly selected and bid on.

 

Pause. During the Pause, we calculate and allocate the Mid Level Exceptions for each team, and the Biannual Exception for teams that have one available (didn’t use it last year). This is done as per below, and is likely to be done before any transactions are processed, but not for certain, so please plan accordingly.

 

2.     Below MLE Players will be randomly selected and bid on.

 

3.     The Day will conclude and 2way players will be put on the site for bidding offline over the following 24 hours an on going.

 

The Mid Level Exception

Every year the most common theme of questioning comes around the MLE and what value everyone is going to get based on when it is calculated. This is calculated on your teams salary including guaranteed and cap holds after the above MLE players have been resolved and comes at 3 levels.

Room: For the teams below the Salary Cap.

Full: For the team above the salary cap, but below the Luxury Tax line by more than or equal to the amount of the Full MLE. This year that value is $14.1mil.

Taxpayer: For the teams that are in the Luxury tax, or are within $14.1mil of the luxury tax line.

 

Above MLE Players:

This year there are only 18 players in the above MLE category. Of these 18, 14 are still associated with an NSL team and thus would like to be retained by their team. These guys also are basically only able to be afforded by their rights owning teams, as there is a distinct lack of salary cap space at the moment. Bird Rights are key. 7 of these are Restricted Free Agents and are automatically going to return to their teams.

There are however 4 players that aren’t owned by a team currently and all fall into the above MLE category.

Fred VanVleet ($25mil)
Duncan Robinson ($16.8mil)
Terence Mann ($15.5mil)
Nickeil Alexander-Walker ($15.1mil)

These guys are free game for whoever can afford them, and might in fact be only single bidders due to the lack of teams that can afford them. Only one team is expected to be a player in this space, and that is likely the Golden State Warriors as they could renounce Dante Exum to sign Nickeil Alexander-Walker, the cheapest but also probably choice player of the bunch (since FVV is so much more out of reach).

That will likely leave the rest sitting in the pool like we have seen with the likes of Doug McDermott in recent years.

 

Below MLE Players:

The rest of the pool is that done once the MLEs have been handed out and this includes 89 total players under the MLE with 45 of those being minimum players.

As it stands there are approximately 12 teams that will have a Full MLE of $14.1mil to spend in free agency, but there are 27 players that are going to be making above the TaxPayer MLE value of $5.65mil. 7 of these players are Restricted Free Agents whom will return automatically to their team, and a further 8 players are still held as Rights to their teams of last year. This leaves exactly 12 players that could be signed by only 12 teams, if they even choose to use the Full MLE on one of these guys. There is simply going to be more players in this range whom miss out of teams as multiple smaller contracted guys get signed into the larger MLE instead.

This then means that there are 62 players that every team in the land can afford to bid on either by cap space or MLE. That’s some fierce bidding! And, the minimum guys as always come at a premium as teams try to fill out a roster legally when dealing with constraints that allow them to only target minimum guys. This is where the big GM point bids come into play, and these targets have been heavily mentioned in recent articles around the league.

 

2way Players:

They may not be sexy, and they may not come with any kind of signing bonus’ with it all being random factor based, but if you land a 2way that knows what they are doing and earns a full deal along the way, then that can both be fun and a godsend for your roster down the stretch as they often convert to nice cheap deals (see Jay Huff, Scotty Pippen Jr and Ajay Mitchell as some top of my head examples). Of course, they also have no assurances and many get waived and barely heard of again, but that doesn’t stop them being useful depth pieces and drawing some big bids for players that can fill holes in injured teams. These guys will be up as offline bids after free agent day.

 

The Final Word – A Touch of Algorithm Talk

And finally, a reminder and/or an eye opener for the newer GMs. Remember there are some key points that are taken into the equation for whether a player is going to sign for you or run for the hills!

NBA Status: What they chose to do in NBA free agency matters for us.

-         Returned to NBA team = 50 point resign bonus to Rights holding team.

-         Signed With new NBA team = 0 resign bonus.

-         Signed and Traded in the NBA = 18 point resign bonus.

-         Waived in the NBA, signed new deal = 19 point resign bonus.

NSL Record Last Season: The better your record last year, the more enticing you are to a prospective free agent.

Team Overalls: The quality of your team is taken into account based on how many players you have in respective brackets of 2k Overall rating. The higher, the more penalty to signing.

Team Glitch Players: Players who’s NSL ranking far exceeds their NBA ranking (rankings shown on team pages) are considered a glitch player and inflict a pentalty.

The Leveler: Based on the quality of teams overall rating.

Draft Picks Held: Holding 1^st round picks is considered a positive for your team and thus to give the less fortunate teams a leg up, the more picks you have, the more penalty you have in signing free agents as a levelling factor to combat straight team record. 2^nd round picks carry a weight too, but lesser given their volatile and less consequential nature.

Loyalty Years: For every year a player has played with your team in the NSL consecutively, you get 1 point resigning boost.

The Random Factor: Every bid is randomly assigned a point value between 0 and 15. This means there is in a lot of instances a comparative “coin flip” to decide where a big free agent is going!

GM Points: And last but not least, the GM points. Every GM point placed in a bid is worth 1 point towards the signing with your team calculation. And you can bid up to 99 GM points!

*Note*: Bids also cost 1 GM point, until you have 0 GM points left

*Double Note*: When signing players over the Luxury tax which incurs a fine of 1 GM point per Million rounded up, you cannot go into the negative in points to sign players in this way, so make sure you have some in the bank you Luxury Tax teams.

 

 

As always, have fun on free agent day and if you have any questions it’s best to get them asked before the day so that you don’t get yourself into trouble in your bid making and team building. Team finalisation is Friday after free agent day and then roster setting occurs for the start of week 1! Good luck!