BuzzerBeater Forums

Hello,

I am aiming to transition to a homegrown team and was wondering, if there is some sort of guide or any tips I can follow.

I was pretty successful in this draft and managed to get 2 promising rookies, but I am a bit lost regarding the overall training strategy for homegrown teams.

I have 5 guys right now I would consider to stay in my team for a while. The rest need to be replaced sooner or later.
My plan is to train 1 season 1v1 F and than 1 season OD. This fits quiet well with my 5 guys. But this would mean that I have to train my rookies of the next season in OD. Which is not the best start for a training plan.

How do you do it? Do you invest in the the draft only every second or third season? Or do you ignore the ideal sequence of training (1v1 -> OD -> etc) and just train what ever you need?
And does it make sense to train OD with 2-position training (PG/SG)? I intended to do that next season, because all of my 5 guys would benefit, even thou that is not the most efficient way.

Any help is much appreciated!

I have no intentions to sell or buy anyone else.

Just to be clear here, you can sell players while homegrown, why not?

If you get draftee you don't intend to train, sell him. Or if you want to replace your older player with new draftee - sell the older guy. That's not against the rules. You simply should not buy any players, all of your guys should be drafted (or already on your team if you're new team).

Hello once again to all fellow managers who have taken this interesting, yet pretty challenging road!

I wonder if it's a good idea to throw out a thought here in the forum that I haven't yet given a thorough thought and consideration... But since I became homegrown, it became quite obvious to me that there is some additional challenge (which is what most of us are after, so of course it's not a bad thing overall) in terms of reaching the success that most of us would like to achieve in BB sooner or later. And it made me think there's supposed to be some kind of separate league for homegrown teams only. Now that I've thought of it, a scrimmage system that we nowadays have in BB would make it possible to let anyone (who qualifies) to participate in that league without paying for a supporter package. I don't have a supporter so creating/participating in a private league isn't an option - I suppose that's the case with many other homegrown teams as well.

It seems that currently we have 37 homegrown teams (at least that was situation 21.8.2024), which is surprisingly little amount as someone mentioned here in the forums.

As far as how league(s) would be formed, is another discussion/debate, but of course there are multiple options and maybe it could be formed of two quite "typical type" of BB leagues, of 16 or maybe 18 teams per league (or a lot less depending on how many would like to participate in this kind of special homegrown league, if any) and then winners of both 16/18 team leagues would play the ultimate homegrown teams final.
Or it could be more typical type of league structure, say main league and 2 divisions with 12 teams each (for example 8 per league would qualify for playoffs in each league/division), and promotions/demotions between leagues would take place each season.
Or then we could take an approach of international basketball competitions and form groups of, say 4-6 teams, with home and away matches against each opponent and maybe 1-3 best from each of those groups would qualify for playoffs.
As far as playoffs go, personally I would strongly suggest one and done-format (winning keeps you going, losing starts your summer holidays) with a neutral court setting (which is luckily available when organizing a scrimmage matches), as that would create more possible surprise results and add a welcoming drama to the playoffs.

And as it wouldn't be an official league, scrimmage matches would need to be organized by participating teams (potentially problematic if some teams wouldn't remember to do it or withdraw from the league in a midst of a season), and league tables wouldn't update themselves so I guess league tables would need to be updated manually and sent to BB forums after each weeks matches. (Who would take on this job is again another discussion - as you might be able to tell, I'd be interested in this kind of "private homegrown scrimmage league" but as of right now, I'm not sure I'd have time to be the record keeper/organizer, but I'll let you guys know if that changes).

In terms of teams qualifying to play in that league, I personally like LOPO_'s (manager who updates this list of homegrown teams) take on it - teams only qualify, if they have only players in their team that they have drafted at some point in teams' history or if they've been a part of a clubs original roster.

Please feel free to add your thoughts and ideas, maybe we are able to create something great if we plan it out together, and find many enough managers to participate... I've always felt that I want to play in an even field so to speak, as in most league matches you're faced with teams who have an edge over you that has been acquired because of money they've had, not necessarily because they've drafted and trained their players better.

(And if you have any urgent messages directly to me, please send me a private message as I don't typically check this forum out even weekly).

-Wagner

Yes, I guess that's the correct term for those matches (as I didn't mean friendly matches but the matches that you can organize more than once a week).
That's right, playing pick up games (instead of friendlies) would create an even/fair field for each match, which would enable (if so chosen) to play for instance only one game against each opponent in your group, as you wouldn't have to worry about giving home advantage to each team against each opponent.

That would of course make it more manageable for the "league commissioner" (who would have to first create fixtures, and after each round of games update league tables manually) which might make it a more desirable task to undertake. Of course it wouldn't be that much work if say, 8-12 teams would like to participate (with 4-8 best proceeding to playoffs for instance) and only 1 match would be played against each opponent (on a neutral court). But with a field of 32 teams for instance, it would be a lot more work to manage. On the other hand, as my original message has only gotten 1 response so far, we'd need to do a lot of promoting to be able to attract 32 teams to the first season... :D Well, you can count me in at least!

Of course, I think many kinds of league systems would work for this kind of league as it's not bound to a certain kind of structure, and as far as I'm concerned, it creates another layer of interest for this kind of league - even though there's not much "wrong" with how BB s' leagues are organized and how relegation system currently works (apart from leagues' 5th having to play relegation matches), it's interesting to have a freedom to alter that league system here if we so decide to do.

I do remind though, that each participating team would have to arrange the pick up matches themselves for the length of the whole season (including playoffs and possible relegation matches), but I don't think that's a huge hassle as you can easily search a team in BB based on team number or name. The thing here is rather that each team participating would need to be dedicated enough to agree to play and organize each match.

Of course similar kind of forfeit system could be created that's in use in BB already, but just as in BB leagues, it would create an uneven field for some teams if some teams forfeit at the middle of the season - but maybe the penalty system for forfeits should be harsher than what's used in BB to prevent those from happening. We could take NCAA basketball as an example, where, if my memory serves me, if teams break certain league rules, can face severe consequences for the next season(s) - for instance not being unable to take part on the league at all or not being granted a place in playoffs even if their record would be good enough to participate in it. (Sorry if I was mistaken with this practice in NCAA, and please correct me if I was wrong, but that's how my memory served me this time).

As mentioned, if amount of participating teams remain small (enough), I might consider taking the responsibilities of league commissioner (unless someone else wants to undertake that task) so that we could make the first season of BBHG league a reality. :)

So everyone interested in participating this kind of homegrown league ("BBHG"?), please send a message here in the forum or a private message to me so I can see if there's enough interest towards it!

That's a great idea, I'm all in

Why not ?
I have 46 pickup games to play ;)

This is a lot of work and takes a lot of time.
I always see this when organizing our ongoing PLs.
Perhaps (once the GE update is complete) there will be the possibility of setting up a tournament similar to BBM:
Anyone who is HG can participate, anyone who buys a non-HG player during the season will be replaced by a bot.
HG bot teams fill the tournament to have the required number of teams (as long as we remain bound by Pascal's triangle).

Thanks and welcome, Coach Faz and demars - now there's at least three of us. There's still plenty of room in this league, so all the rest, please join if you feel like it! And if you know there are some homegrown managers in your country that you're aware of who don't speak English, feel free to inform them of this possibility in their own language if you feel like doing so (by doing so you'd be helping out a big time to gather as big participating group as possible).

However, whether or not it's going to be an official league, I'd find it totally essential that homegrown league will always remain free for qualifying teams to participate - in my opinion BBHG should never be a typical private league, where you need to have purchased a supporter package in order to be able to participate in it.

If we think of pros and cons making Buzzerbeater homegrown (BBHG) an official league (which would require an acceptance from the owners of the BB?), I suppose I wrote about them in my previous two messages.
But I think pros would definitely include that
- it would take lots of work out of it for the league commissioner/record keeper,
- give this league a lot more visibility (and maybe popularity?) within BB community, and
- possibly even would encourage new teams to become totally homegrown which is obviously a huge bonus. I'm trying to do just that with these writings, but there's only so much one can do when compared to if it would become an official BB league.
-It would also ensure that all matches will be played (of course forfeits would still be possible) no matter how dedicated the team manager is (or isn't).

We would lose (probably - I don't know how much you can alter things in terms of league format and rules in BB private leagues?) a freedom with determining details of the league system, such as:
- total control on how and when league is played,
- how groups are divided and which teams play in which group,
- what determines who will play in playoffs,
- in what order tiebreaker-situation rules are enforced,
- what kind of elimination system is used in playoffs,
- how to determine penalties for teams for the ongoing and coming seasons who don't follows some essential league rules etc.) for each season, and
-I'm afraid we'd also have possibly lot more bots in the leagues.

Personally I really dislike leagues that have plenty of bots in them, and in my opinion it should be a clear goal that there are no bots in BBHG league(s) to begin with, and having a flexible league and playoffs format (that could even change from season to another if number of participating teams or peoples' opinion would support that decision) would allow that. There might not be totally suitable amount of teams willing to participate each season to accommodate all possible league systems (for instance 16 teams league), but that's why having freedom in choosing league system would come in handy. Another problem with bots is that having unequal amount of bots in different groups (of same level league) makes differences between groups unfair to some teams.

In terms of how bots would appear in a BBHG league, there could be for instance a rule that your team will become a bot if you'll fail to organize a match... but was it so that you can't organize all the pick up matches at once, so that it could be confirmed from each teams' coming matches-page before the season begins that everyone has organized a proper regular season matchups for their teams? If not, would there be a possibility that team is not able to organize a match because an opponent, for any reason, will not accept their pick up match request? If so, that would create tricky situation for a league commissioner/record keeper (especially if there would be penalties for teams who don't follow the rules, which is the kind of rule I'd vote for): who is going to prove and how, that it hasn't been their fault that this match hasn't been organized in the first place?)).