The best sports simulation game on the market might be OOTP -- Out of the Park -- a baseball sim (there is also a top soccer sim of a similar nature). Its been around for about a dozen years now, and every single year the guy who created it makes it a little better and a little deeper and a little more immersive. Its really quite amazing at this point as it recreates every single level of baseball from the majors to AAA, AA, A, short season A, rookie leagues, every real life team and stadium, you send your scouts all around the world, every draft and stupid little annoying rule of the real MLB financial system is recreated etc.
Well anyway, years ago in the earlier versions of the game what you would do if you were smart is simply take advantage of the AI (the trading AI is also far more advanced now than it was), hire the very best scoout you could find, strip down whatever team you took over and ship out everybody over the age of 25 or so for the best prospects you could find, get bad, pick up more top prospects in the amateur draft, and keep piling up top quality kids in your minors. Then in about 2 or 3 years when they started ripening all of a sudden your major league team began filling up with future All Stars, all just entering their prime, and all you had to do was retain them to be a contender every year for a decade. I created a Montreal Expos dynasty that way.
Well a few years ago, OOTP pioneered a new way to play, a career mode, where instead of just taking over a major league team and playing god emperor, you actually created an alter ego manager/GM who was jsut starting out, and you had to go out and seek employment at the low minor level, try to win enough to get promoted or search out job offers with another franchsie, and work your way up from Rookie leage, to S-A, to A or AA, and finally to jump to the majors as a GM after you were a proven winner at lower levels. And the thing is, you can get fired. You have an owner to keep happy, fans to keep happy, the owner coems into each season with certain expectations, he/she has their own personality, and if you fail to meet expectations badly enough, and he/she is impatient enough, they will actually can you, and you have to go start over with another team if one will have you. So you build up this long career managing/GMing various teams at various levels, earnign success and accolades, or getting fired and moving on.
That's a lot of fun, but it makes a notable difference in how you play the game. Gone is the sell off the team for prospects and tank strategy. Your owner would never tolerate it. You would be fired before you ever had a chance to see those prospects mature into a dominant team. Instead you find yourself making a lot of shorter term moves trying to keep your head above water and save your own ***. And hey, if its not always in the best long term interests of the team, well at least you will still be around to see that long term. You still try to get top prospects, but you can't entirely sell out to do it. You have to keep everybody happy and try to develop some top guys in the minors on the side.
Obvious point being this -- what Cousins is "worth" is heavily influenced by the security of the personnel in the franchise he would be going to. In a great many cases his talent is "worth" a lot more than a real life GM with a real life career and a real life mortgage is going to be willing to risk. If I'm god emperor, I give up half the farm to get a potential franchise player. If I'm Joe Schmuck hanigng on to my job by my fingernails, I am too terrified and frankly selfish to put my career, and mortgage, in the hands of DeMarcus Cousins.
