BuzzerBeater Forums

I'm not sure if jeremynh reads the boards or not, but I salute him on having been the better manager in the Finals; he took advantage of my lazy management and pretty predictable lineups based on my training needs and put together a strategy that took game one and HCA from me, and very nearly took game 2 despite me putting just about every bit of effort and strategy that I am capable of. Usually, the cliche is that the best team wins, but I think this is one of those exceptions.

The one free advice I will give for future reference is that if you're going against an outside shooting team, a zone defense is only as good as the weakest link; a 3-2 with two good outside defending guards and a SF with relatively poor defense will see a lot of shots taken against that guard. A 1-3-1 is even more so - you'd better have everyone be good outside defenders because four of them will defend the three point line (I think the PF usually doesn't), and the big men will also defend a lot of mid-range jumpers.

So basically, you're saying make sure your starters can defend the perimeter decently? Is it a big deal if your bench players aren't as strong in that area, except for maybe power forward?

Well, at some point you might have to make compromises - very few people are equipped to have crazy OD all over the floor, and sometimes even then that bit about the big men guarding (and constantly fouling) the guard might kick in. My textbook example is this game, where my starting lineup had crazy OD (I think this lineup was something like 16 - 14 - 17 - 14- 10 OD, with defensive switches, and 16, 11, 14 and 14 on the guys I planned on playing from the bench). (65823062) Unfortunately, his foul drawing PG and my extremely fouly C played slapass all game, or at least until the C fouled out and then someone else got to continue fouling.

But, yeah I've run enough outside offense at high enough levels to actually be excited to face zones in most cases. If you have a SF that doesn't have great OD, you can be sure that he'll be the guy reported to be defending the most threes, because the guy he's guarding on a particular play is closer to "open".