Roster Limits

One of the hardest aspects of any sports game is deciding which players you want to keep. Our game is no different.

The number of players you can carry is dependent on where you are in the course of your season. During the course of the Regular season, playoffs, and end of season, you can carry 53 players (45 active players and 8 inactive players). At other points in the season, you can carry up to 80 players (although you will probably not come close to reaching this limit). Please note : If you are not below your player limit at a given time, the game will make decisions on your behalf to get your roster cut down to a certain number of players! Also, if you have too many players activated, the game will deactivate players as well. The game will do it's best to make these decisions, but it is suggested you make these decisions on your own!

One thing you will notice from the "Roster Moves" page is that, when you click on a player, there is a field labeled Cut Order :



This field can actually allow the computer to make decisions based on your preferences if it must make cuts to reduce your roster. By default, this value is set to 50 for each of your players. You can, however, set these numbers for each player individually. If all players have the same cut order (which they do by default), the computer makes decisions based entirely on its preferences. If, however, you have set the cut order for one of your players lower than the rest of your players, the computer will chose to cut the player with the lowest cut order number first. Equally, you can set your cut order higher on your star players to make sure they are the last players the computer would cut. This can be very useful when signing free agents. See Free Agents for more details.

Salary Cap Overview

If your league has this option activated, one thing that makes roster decisions even a bit more challenging is the fact that different players have different contracts and make different salaries. To further complicate issues, cutting certain players before the term of their contract is finished can lead to salary cap penalties that make signing other players more difficult. This process can be quite complicated, but obviously adds great strategic depth to the game. We will explain what you need to know in this section to make educated choices on which players to cut.

You can see your current salary cap situation on your "Roster Moves" page.

Salary Cap

This is the amount of money you are allowed to spend on your players.

Current and Future Salary Cap Situations

This shows you what the sum of all your currently contracted players for the next seven years. This also includes any "Dead Cap" money (explained below). For the current year (in this example, 2008), your salary cap must be under the Salary Cap whenever your roster limit is 53 players (this is during the regular season, playoffs, and End of Season). If you are over the cap at any of these points, the computer will make cuts to get you under the salary cap. As explained above, you can avoid the computer making decisions on your behalf by either making sure you are under the cap and player limit at these times, or setting the cut order of your players to give the computer guidance on which players you would prefer cut in the instance that it must make such decisions for you.

The future years shown on this page can be used to give you a good idea of him much money you have already promised to your current players for future years.

Dead Cap

Dead cap is bonus money of players no longer on your roster that counts against your current salary cap. It also includes any bonus money of contracts you have decided to renegotiate. These things can occur if you cut a player, trade a player, or renegotiate a contract with a player that still has bonus money due to him. In these cases, his entire bonus amount will count against your salary cap in the form of "dead cap". Depending on when the action occurs, the bonus money of the player will count as dead cap entirely for the current year (if the action occurs during the Free Agent Period, Draft Period, or Pre June-1 Period), or his current year's bonus will count toward the current year dead cap and all future year bonuses will count toward the next year (if the action occurs at any other time of the year)

In this example, you will see a dead cap of $15,000 in 2008 and $60,000 in 2009. Why? Because I cut a player during the second week of the regular season that had a 5 year contract with a bonus of $15,000 in each season. The $15,000 due the player in 2008 counts against the dead cap for 2008 (the current year), while the other 4 years of bonus money (4 x $15,000 = $60,000) counts against the cap for the following year (2009).

Dead cap money includes bonus money ONLY. The base salary is NEVER counted against the dead cap.

Salary Cap Ramifications of a Particular Player

When you click on a player, his current contract situation will also show up on the screen. In this example, Manuel Obryan is currently signed to a 5 year contract.

The base salary for each year of the contract is $865,000 with bonus of $1,755,000. This amounts to a yearly total of $2,620,000 per year.

What would be the ramifications of cutting this player be?

For starters, you would get $2,620,000 added back to the Current and Future Cap Situation for each year that Manuel was contracted (years 2008 - 2012). That, however, would not be the end of the calculation.

Because Manuel has a bonus of $1,755,000 for each year of his contract, this amount must be accounted for as well. Since we are in the second week of the regular season, the current year bonus ($1,755,000) would be accounted for in the current year (2008), while the other 4 years (4 x $1,755,000 = $7,020,000) would be accounted for in the following year (2009). You can see how the game will account for bonuses on this screen by looking at the "CutCost" column of the player. These two numbers would be added to the player's dead cap.

So, if you were to cut Manuel, the following would occur :

Year	Original Situation	Salary Subtracted (-)	Added to Dead Cap (+)	Updated Situation
2008	$88,653,000	$2,620,000	$1,755,000	$87,788,000
2009	$50,228,000	$2,620,000	$7,020,000	$54,628,000
2010	$40,548,000	$2,620,000	$0	$37,928,000
2011	$30,458,000	$2,620,000	$0	$27,838,000
2012	$25,963,000	$2,620,000	$0	$23,343,000
2013	$0	$0	$0	$0
2014	$0	$0	$0	$0

Year	Original Dead Cap	New Dead Cap
2008	$15,000	$1,770,000
2009	$60,000	$7,080,000

The same would occur to these fields if you were to renegotiate the player’s contract or trade the player.

So cutting this player would give you a marginal amount of extra salary ($865,000 which is, not surprisingly, his base salary) for the current year (2008). For the following year (2009), however, you would incur an additional $4,400,000 of additional cost toward your salary ($2,620,000 was removed for player salaries, but the dead cap of $7,020,000 was added back). After 2009, you would remove the entire salary amount for the 3 remaining contracted years ($2,620,000).