ok, some new rules/notes:
Trades
After all the trade suggestions, these would seem to work for most people I hope:
1) trading is allowed
2) from this post forward trades will be allowed to occur
3) I see no reason why trades could not include draft picks
4) HOWEVER, trades must all involve equal numbers of players or draft picks going either way. I thought about this, and I just don't see how it could be fair for one team to swap 2 player for 4 players, have to dump the 2 extra players back into the pool, and then have those players suddenly be available for whoever is picking next, or just happens on by. The only other option to avoid this would be players that have to waived as extra bodies in that situation would just blink out of existence, but that seemed far too much for what is at its heart an all time Kings draft.
5) there was also uneasiness with letting franchise players be traded, in fact my initial uneasiness was when I got an offer to get a 2nd one myself. Seemed too likely to make the voting at the end a foregone conclusion. So how about this: franchise players may be included...but only as part of a trade that brings back a franchise player too. In other words if your team just isn't built well to have Mitch as your franchise guy, you can trade Mitch and stuff to somebody for Webb and stuff. But you can't just trade a bunch of stuff for Webb, even if somebody would do that. So limit of one franchise guy to everybody, just with an outside shot to change which guy that is.
Free Agents
A rule that we already have, but just drawing attention to it: after the draft is over anybody is free to drop any player they drafted in favor of any player who went undrafted (or somebody else dropped) on a first come first serve basis. So if Capt. comes along at 8:09pm and wants to drop his Dwayne Schintzius pick for Randy Breuer, and Dime comes along at 8:17pm and wants to drop Ben Gillery to get Breuer, then Capt gets him just by being quicker on the draw. Doubt there is much use for that since we will have just got drafting the peeps we want, but the rule is just there in case you suddenly realize you forgot to draft a backup center or some such.
Voting
Since I didn't want to surprise anybody, after a little thought I think this is how we'll handle the voting. looks like we will e done by the end of August, so we'll have plenty of time before the season/training camp starts. So when we finish up, I'll ask everybody to provide me 4 things:
1) list of their top 3 choices for best offensive team
2) list of their top 3 choices for best defensive team
3) list of their top 3 choices for most entertaining team to watch
4) a list of what they think the record of each of the other 11 other teams would be in the NBA if they were the Kings team we were fielding this year. So Team 1 44-38, team B 32-50, Team C 73-9 etc. etc.
then we'll have separate polls for best offensive, best defensive and most entertaining, and the normal brackets. And yes this is in part to give more people/teams a chance to win something/do well.