Perhaps it should be wise to make scrimmages worth something in terms of income, let's say around $10k. To get the economy balanced, this could be compensated by dropping $10k from TV money. The economy would remain balanced, newer teams wouldn't tend to think that scrimmages are useless, and teams that don't see scrimmages are a total priority (and sometimes don't set one) would be compelled to look for scrimmages every week, since if they don't they will lose money.
That's a really good idea to encourage people to have scrimmages. Setting the scrimmage payout to something like 5-10% of the league's TV contract wouldn't cause dramatic inflation, but would be a sufficient incentive. We're talking like $2500-5000 in your typical D.V.
The only real issue is then you'd get people complaining that their giant arenas should get them more scrimmage money, or that an away scrimmage at someone else's giant arena should get them more money, etc. I would just tell them that their team has a certain number of "Hard Core" supporters, and those are the origin of the scrimmage money (they are the ones that show up at scrimmages, either home or away).