Player accepts way below market extension in beginning of May??

[Matter2003]

Allright, something definitely is not right about this one...

Jeremy Bonderman, who is in the last year of a 4 year/$38 million contract accepted a 4 year/$7.1 million extension. What made it worse, was it was in the beginning of May. He is in the final year of his contract, paying him $12.4 million. This is completely ridiculous. There is no way in the world his agent would begin negotiating a contract paying him about $11 million/year less than his current contract. Heck, he probably wouldn't even think about negotiating an extension that didn't include a raise in there of some kind. For him to sign that deal in May, when he would have had the ability to go to free agency and likely get much more than that, even if he had a crappy year is nothing more than ludicrous. This kind of stuff has to stop. This isn't even in the upper deck area of being remotely believable...

Someone needs to take a look at something like this, and realize that no player is gonna take an $11 million per year paycut unless its as a free agent who is really tailing off and no team is willing to give him a huge deal...

[Afino]

We just had this happen in the GUBA:

Enrique Ortiz, who makes $5 million (and change) currently via arbitration, just signed a 5 year deal worth $5 million TOTAL. $1 million PER YEAR!!!

So yeah. Seconding.

[Matter2003]

At the very least, there should be some kind of limit to how much lower you could even offer a player an extension at, based on the final year of their current contract.

So, for instance, if Bonderman is making $12.4 million this year, you cannot offer an extension that is below 15% of that value, or $10.54 million. Secondly, the player should probably outright reject any extension offer that is below what he is making this current year until at least August, when his season's numbers are not going to improve by much. These 2 simple things will prevent this situation from occurring.

If the team doesn't want to give the player a raise from the previous year, the player is almost 100% going to go to free agency and at least test the market(what agent would advise his player to take a crap extension, without at least seeing what else is out there?). While this makes it more likely he will not resign with his current team, if they make him a fair offer in free agency, he could resign with them. This way, he at least will allow 29 other teams to bid on his services, rather than taking a crap offer from 1 team who is basically bidding against itself at that point of the season...

Any way you look at it, it is ridiculous for this to be happening at this point in OOTP's development...just my 2 cents...yes it was pretty strongly said, but the standard this game should be held to is pretty high...it does a lot of things tremendously well. Its simple things like this that drive player's nuts because it is so far from reality that it is just silly. What makes it worse are the fixes I suggested would pretty much completely eliminate this issue, and would only require a few simple checks.

Check 1: Is ExtensionOffer >= (CurrentContract * .85)
If yes, check date before allowing extension offer(if extension below current contract---if it is a raise, no need to check date).
If no, team cannot offer this extension to player

Check 2: Is Month >= August(or whatever month/date, etc is set)
If yes, team can offer below current contract extension
If no, team cannot offer any extension below current contract.

Simple fix...

yes you could argue its not realistic because no such limitations are in place IRL, but the limitations are implied strongly because common sense dictates that if 1 team is gonna offer you a much lower contract than you already have, regardless of if it is merited or not(and how could anyone say its merited a month and a half into the season??), the player is gonna be insulted and then want to see if he can get a better offer from the other teams in the league before accepting that offer...