BuzzerBeater Forums

I've read the news from the BB about tanking today. and the comment saying "We understand that tanking, and loosing on purposes, decreases fun for other managers, be it the opponent in the match or other league members".

I could not agree more. But beside "tanking" my point is, in a more general way, about teams fielding less than 5 players to start a game. Dropping to less than five players during the course of the game is a different issue.

Although when the game of Basketball was created in 1891, the number of players per team wasn't specified. From 1900 on, 5 player became standard. Since, it has become a cardinal rule of Basketball to field 5 players per team, both under FIBA and NBA rules.

BB is about professional Basketball teams, as indicated by the players salaries and TV rights. IRL, In any professional leagues a team fielding less than 5 players would be severely fined. And might be banned or demoted in case of repeats.

I think that the number of games in BB where at least one team doesn't field this minimum number of players is much too high. The game is very nice for those teams and more often than not the opposing team is more penalized or frustrated. In my opinion, that is the main point.

For me Basketball is a 5 vs 5 game. Playing vs team of 4 or less players is not fun at all, whether you re the opponent or whether it skew another game in your league. It distorts the result in many ways:
- The overall game score. Possibly changing the looser into a winner,And many times the point average.
- The player minutes, either because of the walkover, or in another way in case of forfeit.
- The statistics of the game. Statistics is important in Basketball, whether for the fun and challenge to have players amongst the highest ranked in your league. But in for game purpose it may also affect MVP elections, and merchandises.

Even for non-competitive games like scrimmage it can be a pain, if you expected a complete team, an unexpected walkover could jeopardize your minutes planning. Moreover it could be abused by « group play » in favor one team or another.

Most of the times the teams have more than 5 players available. Teams having less than 5 players for long duration is also a related, but slightly different, issue.
There are several reasons why teams field less than 5 players:
- By accident or unpredictable event in real life. Obviously most managers have more important things to do IRL.
- By laziness, due to the open nature of the game, not every managers share the same level of involvement in the game.
- Deliberately, either to preserve player from playing too much minutes, or for other so called "strategic" reasons.

The game allows you to prepare your roster in advance on the schedule page, well, at least for regular season games. And you can record a default team. It might not be optimal because of Game Shape or Injuries, but in many cases it would give better results than a team of less than 5 players.
Most of the time, you can purchase cheap scrubs on the transfer list, for 1k or 2k, to complete your team to 5.You may even fire them immediately after the game to avoid paying their salaries.

Some suggestion to make the managers more concerned about this issue :

- No TV rights for the week. I hardly understand how a team can gets TV rights, if it doesn't field the minimum 5 players.
- Automatically select a number of players from the team to complete the game roster. Either staring with the lower salaries, or randomly.
- It should also affect the Season Ticket Holders the Fans surveys, or the Merchandises.

i wouldn't hang it up to much on the number of players, is it easy to replace those lucky fans with (nearly) equaly bad players, with all the mentioned negatives.

i believe there fines when you start with fewer players, but NCAA allows to continue 1 player alone to continue a game if he still have a chanche to win the game(and this rule was even used one time), FIBA contuinues to play with 2 players ... I believe the nba have a weird rule about it, who enforced to play with 5 player all game long and even allows fouled out players to play them.

I think if it comes to a WO instead of a loosed game we really had to punish harder, but starting with 3 is ok if the game is running cause i wouldn't expect much better player on court anyway if they want to play with 3 but ain't allowed too.

I think it would be better to enforce a 5 starter rule. You can finish the game with less obviously, but you should start with atleast 5. If you have less than five players it should be a walkover (walkovers should only happen when a team has less than 5 players), if team has more than 5 players on roster but do not sign them up for the game. The game should force a player(s) from team roster to complete 5 starters.

Thanks for your feedback.

I agree that lucky fans could be better than scrubs.
As I've said dropping under 5 players during the game due to foul or injury is a bit different than staring with less than 5 players.

I don't know for sure, but I think it somehow skew the game engine when there is 5 players vs less. For the first scrimmage of the season (Game Shape 7 for everybody and TS 5) (46044822) I put my 5 weaker players (2k-4k) vs 4 strong palyer averaging 35k. My PF had a night because there were no PF on the opposing team. He played Man to Man. I wonder if a Zone defense would have been more eficent in this case.

But the way it currently is, the game make things easy for managers fielding less than 5 players. As a result many times it is more painful for the opponent. On average I had one such game per season, and witness more in my leagues. A pretty high ratio.

Don't you think it's odd to give TV rights to game fielding less than 5 players?


PS:You are correct about the NBA rules fouled out players, could come back into play to ensure 5 players on court. NCAA had some weird rules in some conferences.
PS2: Congrats for your great BBB run.