My side, hopefully quickly. I appreciate Mike's comments. He and I obviously get along fine despite disagreements on a number HBD philosophical things. The reason we get along fine is because we can discuss things like adults. His description of Hamilton is spot on, except of course where he disagrees with my correct opinions (
). His assessment of brianp is also spot on. I have been the recipient of a number of those ridiculous offers, although not so many lately. It's a competitive world. We have a pretty good number of stable owners.
The idea that there should be precedents followed has merit. The problem, because of context, is that you can't help but have a sliding scale. Context does not make those black and white - and I'm a black and white kind of guy.
Then when this stuff gets brought into the forums for the sole purpose of helping one person's ego, it's damaging. I would guess that most of those who made a comment on trade proposals in this thread did so in a vacuum - without the context of the trades, which is important. The other major factor in this is that everyone can use their veto at their own discretion. Not only that, people ought to be able to change their mind about what meets their criteria to apply their veto.
The original trade that caused the blowup was only a borderline veto to me, and I mentioned to both parties that I may have reconsidered my position had it been posted again. The fact that trop forced himself to have to release his MVP caliber player was his risk. And it was not clear to the other owners that risk was present. As with any trade that gets vetoed, that one, had it not been subject to trop's budget issues, could very well have been explained and submitted again.
As to precedents, the reason I don't like them in cases like this are
1. It ties the hands of owners who assess things differently than they did previously, i.e. you can't change your mind about anything.
2. Because of scouting budgets, individual needs and values at the time, no two owners or going to see a trade exactly the same. And those from outside the world, who don't know how it plays or what the needs of the teams in questions are, can't see the context and therefore the potential value either. (Another reason why bringing it into the forums doesn't do anything but hurt the world).
Lastly, there have been discussions that "salary dump" trades should always be vetoed (in Hamilton). To that I would say that HBD already has a salary dump mechanism. It's called waivers - something you can't veto. If a guy wants to do nothing but relieve salary, he can always attempt to do it through waivers. Once you say salary dumps aren't allowed because of precedent, you artificially devalue a veteran that may help in a playoff run, and overvalue a prospect that may be used to obtain that veteran. You also hurt the guy who can get better value by trading veteran for something. And there is where the "sliding scale" comes into play.
To me it's a much more complicated deal than simply applying precedents - although I do understand the merit of that position. What made the the fued this time around such a damaging thing was not the merits of the positions, but the personal toxicity of the owners involved.
Anyway, as Mike points out, Hamilton has had some issues, but it is not the "tard world" that many here have made a quick ill-informed judgement of it to be.