While the players and owners deciding in 2011 to gut sign-and-trades by preventing free agents from using the process to sign five-year deals with new teams totally changed the system, there is another factor in play that could be important this July. Prior Collective Bargaining Agreements relied on a concept called Base Year Compensation to make it harder for teams to abuse the more open sign-and-trade system that largely got phased out in favor of the more restrictive system in place now.
However, BYC does still exist in very specific situations, some of which may happen this summer, and it makes sign-and-trades much harder by changing the way that player’s salary is counted in the trade.
Instead of simply counting at his new salary for both teams like most deals, BYC free agents only count at the larger of their previous year’s salary or half of their new salary for the team sending them out. What makes it harder is that they still count at their new wage for…
