(03-04-2020, 10:37 AM)steelsound Wrote:"Self-tampering" is a bullshit reasoning that can't ever happen, because that's called expressing your personal desires and planning for your player's future. Making it clear to FA suitors that you plan to play in the first season of expansion for an expansion team isn't tampering, it's communicating. If a team that doesn't exist yet gets punished for something their not-decided-yet GM didn't do for actions a player they didn't talk to did, then there is some ass-backwards underworkings to this league.
Well now you're catching on. In our case we're weren't supposed to talk to free agents because they couldn't play for us that year. Thus...tampering. Somehow. For a relevant example, imagine if one of those current prospective GM's (that don't quite exist yet) shared that they had future interest in a current free agent. So Edgar and Denver, our fictional GM's, are saying "Hey there Sermo. We see you're currently a free agent. Well we're gonna have a team in a few seasons." That's where the issue would come up. And there are people who would call it tampering. And there's been previous official rulings that match that idea. Thus why I'm stressing to you that what you see as "can't" is actually a "shouldn't".
Also fun story that even more closely aligns with this. Back during the early days of the league a person made a bet and if they lost, the result would be that they would agree to join a specific team in free agency. They agreed to the terms of the bet (and iirc had actually suggested it) and it was labelled tampering and the bet was not allowed to proceed. A season later.
So yes...a history of wonky wonky rulings and bass ackwards underworkings.
That said, it's basically an entirely different group of decision makers compared to those examples.