2024 Free Agency: UFA Signing

[TomFlyers]

The plan is that the open market to sign unrestricted free agents will begin on Wednesday, December 4th! For this portion of free agency, please refer to the list provided on the website, NOT anything shown on the sim client.

Day 0 offers can be submitted now.

Please watch our old UFA tutorial video for instructions of how to use the UFA calculation spreadsheet. The dynamics of this calculator create more fair grounds to sign players instead of always resolving to submit a maximum 4-year term in order to sign a player. If you experience an issue where you are unable to edit the spreadsheet, please contact me immediately. You must use this spreadsheet to determine with calculated contract value to use when submitting your offer!

All UFAs require that you pay a minimum yearly amount equal to or greater than the Fair Market Value salary, though similar to Entry-Level Contracts, you may use a signing bonus to lower a player's yearly base salary to be lower than FMV. For more information regarding the maximum signing bonus you may give, please refer to the CBA.

After the end of each day (9:59 PM PDT, excluding Saturdays), the highest offers for any player will be reviewed and then posted to our website. If the same high offer is on the board for two consecutive days (excluding Saturdays), the player will be signed. Additionally, there will be a random 5% chance that a player will accept the highest offer given to them immediately at the end of that day. If you wish to submit a raise on the highest posted offer, the calculated contract value must increase at least 10% for the new offer to be valid.

PROCEDURE!!!
We will be following the same procedure as last year utilising the Google Form to complete the UFA portion of Free Agency.

Please use this new Google form to submit an offer!

You must include the calculated contract value, term, salary, signing bonus, and contract type for an offer to be valid! If any of this information is missing, your offer will be considered as voided!
[NEW for 2024] Please ensure you use the players name as per the EHE website. This will ensure that offers can be tracked and compared easily.

You will receive an email notification with the details of any offer that you submit.

Any corrections you need to make must be done on the same processing day or your offer will be considered as-is. If you need to make a correction, [NEW for 2024] please complete a new form with the same player name! Corrections can be tracked based on the time-stamp of the offer.

Once a UFA has ACCEPTED your offer, please use the sim client to sign him to the new contract.


Reminders:
*You may not trade a recently-signed unrestricted free agent until after your 20th regular season game has been completed!
*You may not submit an NHL or two-way contract offer if you have the maximum 51 total active players on your roster at any time.
*You may not submit an NHL or two-way contract offer to a UFA goaltender if you already have 6 or more goalies on your active roster, with the exception of signing one goalie to an AHL contract.



PLEASE ASK ANY QUESTIONS in this thread!

[Seattle_GM]

So the spreadsheet that’s required to send in day 0 offers is released past 6PM Eastern and the offers are due tonight? That’s not enough time.

[phoenix30]

Are Day 0 offers due today or tomorrow night.

[Kevin]

So the spreadsheet that’s required to send in day 0 offers is released past 6PM Eastern and the offers are due tonight? That’s not enough time.

Certainly not. Day 0 offers can be submitting through the end of Day 1, which is still scheduled to be tomorrow night but we'll see. Since we had delays with all the botched RFA and ELC offers, UFA started much later into today than what I wanted.

EDIT: I guess the original post says that UFA doesn't start until tomorrow, which is not true. You can submit UFA offers NOW. But since it stated this, Day 1 processing now won't take place until Thursday.

[TomFlyers]

EDIT: I guess the original post says that UFA doesn't start until tomorrow, which is not true.

Huh ... I said exactly what you said on the RFA thread ... UFA starts Wednesday

Officially doesn't start until.tomorrow and thays usually the Day 1 start. Howeverz day 0 runs anytime before until the close of day 1.
Pretty sure that's the same process as prior years.

[Kevin]

EDIT: I guess the original post says that UFA doesn't start until tomorrow, which is not true.

Huh ... I said exactly what you said on the RFA thread ... UFA starts Wednesday

I need to sleep more!

Anyway, for clarity, my preference would be to have the first UFA processing day be tomorrow but we'll do it on Thursday. That means Thursday night, Friday night, and Sunday night are the first three reports.

[Kevin]

Eric shed some light on the issues that seem to come up every year that a few GMs are unable to edit the UFA calculator spreadsheet. He pointed out to me that this seems to happen for non-MS Excel users.

I've converted the spreadsheet into the newer XLSX format (I would think the XLS format would be more universal) and it is available to download here. I'm curious to hear if this seems to work better for the affected users.

[KirkAvalanche]

That's great news! I've just come acustomed to opening a new sheet every single time I need to make an edit. Which is incredibly inefficient but, just got used to it lol.

[Kevin]

Just as it was previously regarding players rated 59 or below who are available on the open market, Jonathan Lekkerimäki has been granted exceptional status to the $1,500,000 max salary rule for this offseason, as he is a player whom numerous teams are coveting with fair intent. The intent of the rule in the CBA is to guard against GMs who offer large salaries to players who they will never ever dress in their lineup, which this player is obviously not.

[TomFlyers]

Please note that as day 0 has completed this question in the Google form has been revised to ask whether the current offer is a correction to a previous offer.

This will ensure that these can be easily filtered to exclude the original offers.

Thanks