The tl;dr version is we finished 3rd place. we lost 3 games in our worlds run and we won them all for the Americas tournament. 3rd place is the best finish in the last three worlds, in which we didn't make it to worlds and then subsequently finished 6th under tough's worlds season.
Thoughts on our performance overall
I had three goals when entering as the u21 manager.
1) Create more unique player paths, and allow for more managers to train their players more for themselves while still making them pace out towards a path that could align with u21 goals.
2) Go 3-0 in the first round of the worlds in games that would ultimately carry over, and ride that as far as possible to hopefully claim gold.
3) Improve upon what we looked for in initial trainees, and improve scouting for 19 year olds on our scouting database.
With regards to the first goal, I think we probably were more unique this year, and that saved the team from being out by round 2 of the worlds draw given how pedestrian our bigs were for this season. We had multiple shooters capable of shooting in a motion offense, we had plentiful OD that we could use, we had guys with JS and guys with driving. We had shooting SF's and a big with high secondaries. We had all 3 varieties of big builds at our disposal despite them usually being marginal in defense. This perimeter talent belonged to tough's scouting era.
With regards to the second goal, we did go 3-0 through round 1, but failed to get further than the semifinal game against Taiwan. Some of this was my fault as the u21 manager. I didn't go with my gut against spain as to what i though we were best off running, and tried to go inside to confuse them (for the first time all season, and the last time, we ran LI). This was the last game we had the gameshape inside also. Both games against Taiwan we had pathetic gameshape management from our primary PG and only had two bigs in good gameshape for both games, leading to a major lack of depth and having to call up more players that were inferior in their builds. Most of our bigs managers got messages from me through the first half of the campaign begging for better management of their bigs, but most were content to run their bigs into 6-7 gameshape rather than 8 or 9. I think going forward this is a huge reason why many teams in the US are not successful on the whole, the talent at times can feel like it leaps and bounds better in 9 gameshape than 7. It basically allows the player to play at a level slightly beyond what they have. To get that, teams must keep bigs in the 55-70 minute corridor as much as possible. In 3 game weeks, two starts without playing them as backup or reserve will usually put a player at between 56 and 78 minutes depending on how close those games are, and that is always acceptable management in my eyes. 48 minutes or less and 96-100 minutes hurt the gameshape, and hurt the clubs chances of winning.
With the 3rd goal, We've found two of our primary talents for Worlds S39 out of 19 year old draftees from last season. That alone makes the 3rd goal a major success. If other nations do not follow in recruiting 19 year olds into u21 development, they will surely be less successful.
I personally have developed players for the u21 team in season 39 on both of my teams (Good Intel, my US team, and Dunked by Oreo, my Utopia team) in an effort to make sure we are in better gameshape for that campaign. I look forward to running for the u21 manager again, and think that with the ability to run LI and LP that we did not have at the end of our campaign this season we should be a major threat to win gold.
FurYak
Last edited by FurY at 3/10/2017 2:29:36 PM