Tanking or fair play?

I’m interested in hearing other owners opinions on this…

Owner X recieves the 1st waiver pic (worst draft) and proceeds to not participate in the waiver draft nor make any preseason moves thereafter, leaving his/her team unchanged and millions of dollars unspent. Is this tanking your team before the season begins or an owners prerogative and fair play?

Interested to hear your opinions
A.G.

Are you talking about ducyacy? He's maxed out RV in his other leagues. It's still preseason. The season starts Monday.
Missing waivers? It happens. Illness...vacation...space it out. I wouldn't sweat it.

Just because I ALSO want to hear about others opinions and experiences, yes it is ducyacy. There have been back and forth email discussions with me to A.G. and with me to ducyacy in the past several days. He did relay to me (just today) that he did miss waivers. I'm encouraged that he will find some moves to make on his team before first pitch to use up his cash.

But I would also like to know what you, the "Players" participants feel is the "commish's" duty to perform here when a player manages his team a little bit differently than most. I would go all the way to hearing about whether you think there is an extreme action you think I should take or no action? Does ducyacy's actions (or lack thereof) affect one or more teams in the league in any way?

Thanks for your opinions.

MM

Ducyacy responded and said he missed waivers (fair)’ and it’s his ‘strategy’ to make no moves and spend no money (4 million unspent) in the preseason. He states this is a choice he has a right to make. Tanking is defined as intentionally throwing games and not fully building your team during the preseason is a way of doing that. To answer Moose’s question, The people who stand to benefit from this inaction are the owners in his division, and in a tournament, owners in his league have an advantage over those not in his league. The more you compete with the tanking team the more advantage you have. I’m not making a call to action but I’m interested to hear other owners opinions..

A.G.

People do have lives. Is missing waivers a disadvantage for him? Probably. Does he have improvements to make?. I would think so. Does he still have time to make them? Of course. Up until tomorrow night. Even after if necessary. I don’t know what’s going on in anyone else’s life I do know SOM is not the most important thing for any of us. And I’m personally somewhat contrarian so if someone was complaining this much about how I am putting together my team I’d be somewhat resistant to making any changes. I might make some but would wait until the last possible minute just to mess with them a bit.
My inclination is that this isn’t a case for the commissioner unless he has reason to believe a team is intentionally losing to one team and not others.

I think it is a little too early to panic. He is a good player and still has time on the clock.

In the past I've alerted Moose to a similar situation where it was nearing Opening Night and the owner hadn't made any preseason moves. Moose reached out and the owner got his roster in order soon after. I would guess the vast majority of time that's all that needs to happen.

Anyone who claims a strategy to leave $4M unspent going into the season is a poor player with little understanding of the game. I can see Axelrod's points. But if the player were forced by heavy-handed means to spend the last $4, it's highly likely that the resulting team would be just as uncompetitive and the division opponents just as benefitted.

The unspent money is a bright red sign that reads "I plan to hyperactively make in-season moves until I hit the salary floor and I want to be able to do that for a little bit longer than usual." Which is another way of saying "this team is going to be uncompetitive no matter what." Such players fund the credits the rest of us are winning. Ultimately we can't get too worked up about them being what they are.

In the end the most reasonable thing is to say that tanking is defined by the salary floor. Strat has effectively put an end to it with that helpful feature, therefore there is no reason for the commissioner to intervene beyond a preseason check-in as described above.

That's a pretty solid team to get the #1 waiver pick. Skenes, Woo, Ozuna, et. al. Clearly this manager is not tanking.

As for the bigger issue, intentionally waiting until the last minute to make major roster changes is a tactic within the rules, but extremely bush league.

ducyacy has spent all of his free cash and made quite a few transactions so I am bailing out of any further involvement in this topic. My very first discussion with A.G. was that - you pay your money, you have the right to craft your team any way you want even if it's few or NO transactions. To me, this was NOT an obvious case of tanking.