While I think your idea is sound I am worried that all the recent "fixes" just make the game more complex for new players.
Salary floor, minimum time in team, game shape drop on transfers, forfeits affecting draft position, individual player salary cap for next season and especially the GDP for next season are all additional complications for new players which were designed to solve real problems.
The real problems were tanking, the ridiculously low price of high salary players and the dominance of look inside/failure of the 2/3zone.
More elegant and realistic solutions would have been:
* an empty arena for tanking teams.
* higher tax for day traders
* minimum transfer listing price for all players (I will put this one in its own suggestion file)
* making 2/3 zone (or inside box + 1) actually work and shut down a LI/LP offence
Back to the main topic just about everyone agrees one big problem is the players new teams get in their start up and in their first draft. Everyone wants to be like Chicago, OKC or Boston and draft a Rose, Durant or Pierce who can take their team to greatness.
People saying that a $4k benchwarmer is fast to train is not helpful. There should be duds in starting teams and in the draft, and there shouldn't be more level 5 potential players than there are now but the median needs to change so that every new team can get some players that are not worthless. I started with an 18 year allstar. I was able to make him the star of my team for several seasons and even now he is a useful rotation player on a team ranked 209 in the world and number 5 in Australia.
Oliver Ðuričko (11263596)
Shooting Guard
Weekly salary: $ 29 336
Age: 33
Height: 6'3" / 190 cm
Potential: allstar
I think every new team should have 3 trainable players, probably they can't train them all, one may be a tall two guards, one could have a terrible mix of skills like a 7' SG with atrocious OD and ID but at least three that are max 19, minimum allstar potential and minimum $2500 starting salary. Likewise in the draft everyone should be able to draft someone useful.
It reduces the fun of the game. You can EASILY buy for $1 a random perennial allstar after the draft but even spending all your draft points worth $280,000 if you are picking late your chances are very low. How is that fun? Players expect the draft to be good but normally outside the top half dozen players it isn't.