Negotiation

Ideally, direct communication in Discord should be sought to conduct trade talks with other GMs. A trade sponsor or the league management can be consulted for consultations at any time.

Reporting a trade

After a successful agreement on a trade, a trade partner must insert the trade in the trade channel in Discord. Both trade partners then confirm the deal by adding the icon of their franchise as a "reaction". Trades confirmed by both sides are binding unless there are rule-specific objections to the trade.

Confirmation of a trade

As soon as the league management has reviewed the trade with regard to the trade guidelines, it will confirm this with a corresponding reaction in the trade channel. If the trade violates one of the trade guidelines, the league management will reject the trade.

Execution of a trade

The GMs are responsible for executing the desired trades in-game after they have been published in the Discord. In-game trades without the approval of the league management and the participating GMs are reversed.

The following trade guidelines must be observed:

1. Player rights
   When trading player rights, it should be noted that there is generally sufficient time to extend those contracts or alternatively appropriate conditions are effective. If this is the case, the trade is legitimate.
2. Salary Cap
   The trade must not create cap situations that are difficult to resolve for any of the parties involved, e.g. an expensive player is traded while 1-2 expensive players are still on LTIR at the same time. Neither party can already be expected to experience cap pressure.
3. Contract clauses
   NTC rules must be followed or there are no such clauses.
4. Tanking
   There is no acute suspicion of tanking.
5. Loan
   Players must be traded immediately and may not be part of future conditions.
6. Trading back a player
   Players cannot be returned to their old team until at least 365 days have passed in-game. The time at which the trade was officially carried out counts here. This rule applies to all players in the league, regardless of their level (NHL, AHL, prospects).
7. Trade values
   There must always be a equivalent on both sides of the deal. Trades without equivalent are not permitted.
8. Conditions
   Trade conditions must be clearly formulated, there should be no ignored constellations. Players may not be part of a conditional equivalent, but player rights may.

Protection of new members

In order to be able to adequately protect new GEHL members during trades, each new GM is promptly assigned a trade sponsor by the league management if necessary. The GM concerned should at best involve its trade sponsor in all negotiations, if possible the trade sponsor should also be directly involved in the trade talks.

Trade sponsors are not members of the league management and may not trade with the GM they are looking after. The sponsorship can be canceled at any time by both GMs, at the earliest after 3 in-game months.

CPU trading

Trading with CPU-controlled teams will be permitted in the future. In this case, the negotiations are conducted by league management. However, there is no right that the CPU also agrees to a negotiated trade ingame (this should be checked in advance if necessary, since it can be easily recognized by the wording).

Dealing with no-trade clauses (NTC) in player contracts

Each team may have a maximum of 3 players in the squad who have an NTC - with the exception of NTCs that already existed in the database at the start of the GEHL.

Players with an NTC clause may only be offered for trade between 01.01. and the start of the new season and only to teams that are (for trades during the season) or were ranked higher in the regular season or teams that advanced further in the previous playoffs.

In addition, an NTC may only be waived and the player may be offered to trade once per current season.