Here's a proposal. Teams that don't use DP spots should be able to sell them to other teams for the season. Buying teams would be able to buy an extra DP spot, but they can only buy 1 extra spot. Good idea? Bad idea?
I'm not sure what the benefit to that would be. If it's money going right into the ownership pocket, I don't think it'll be popular. If it's allocation money, you're just shuffling around paper that may or may not be used, also not a terribly attractive thing. A buying team would be looking at up to four max cap hit players, though one or more could qualify as young DPs, so I can see situations where there's a great deal of risk. A team could end up with 4 star players, but end up with less depth.
Under current rules, I'm not sure how much of a market there is out there for a rule like this. The only teams that I think would even buy a 4th DP is probably LA and NY and at 300k each and a 3M cap, 4 senior DPs take a huge chunk of the salary cap. Now if you made DPs cap exempt or at least have the option for owners to pay the entire salary then the value of DPs would go way up. I think there would be a big market for those slots, and I think you would have teams like LA and NY willing to buy those slots from other teams. The slots would be almost like star players you were going to transfer to Europe. You could have some of the sale money go to the club and some go to allocation. But it would work as a de-facto luxury tax system where the bigger spenders are giving money tot he little guys in order to spend more money.
You used to be able to trade a DP slot, but I think it only happened twice: Chivas traded their's to NY for 5(?) years for Armando Guevara, who immediately left the league Colorado traded their's to DC for Christian Gomez, only to reverse the trade the following season
Yes, I think if purchased DPs were cap exempt, it could work. I forgot to put that in the first post. If the idea of the DP rule is to make it easier to bring in higher caliber players, and some teams are unable or unwilling to use their slots, perhaps somebody else should be able to use it.
But selling it defeats the point of it. The club wasn't using it (the money) to begin with ... selling it gives them money (that they weren't spending to begin with) for it. Why ? If you're mandating it be spent on "x" ... why not just mandate "x" spending ?
I suppose if it were allocation money then the cash could be used to bring in a player and keep excess salary from coming out of the owner's pocket, but there are ways to do that now without selling a DP slot.
As far as I know, right now there is exactly one team with three Designated Players on the books: Dallas. Dallas is the only team that would might be in the market for a fourth DP right now. This rule would be used so infrequently it would basically be useless. You'd have one or two teams bidding for open spots from the other seventeen, which means the value would be negligible. A DP slot would probably go for a supplemental draft pick--because what does Columbus lose by undercutting New England's bid? If you added a fourth DP, it'd make more sense to use a purchase system, like when the third DP slot was introduced, with the proceeds distributed around the league, rather than start a bidding war that would make the fourth DP slot essentially free.