Quote:
Originally Posted by Liquid Swords
If you sign a rookie to a 3 or 4 year contract and then renegotiate at a later date, then the player would still be subject to the rookie bonus for up to 5 years (or until they hit the max salary for their position).
However, once that player hits Free Agency (RFA, UFA), then any future rookie bonuses would be dropped. So if you signed a rookie to 3 or 4 years and drop the player (and no one claims him) or you do not renegotiate the contract and the player goes into RFA/UFA, then the rookie bonuses do not apply since he was acquired via free agency.
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This is exactly how it's supposed to work.
Now how to handle the situation at hand, I could agree with Jim's suggestion via PM that you void the renegs as if they never happened and allow the involved players to be assigned the original 5 year rookie deals. Then apply bonuses as applicable since their rookie year to bring their salaries to where they should be since drafted.
The only thing to be careful of there is whether teams had enough contract years to accommodate the max 5 years when the rookies were drafted. If not you have an even bigger problem.
If the contract years cap is not an issue then I'd side with Jim's idea. If the contract years are an issue however, then I'd suggest the rookie bonuses get applied since draft year on all rookies who were reneged and the teams involved just have to suck it up.
Unfortunately there is no easy solution here, but I think it was a pretty clear violation of the spirit and intent of the rules to assign shorter deals and then reneg to get away from the rookie bonuses.