BuzzerBeater Forums

The answer logically should be that:
a) you need to know what your target is, and for this you can use the coach parrot 'scout' sheet, at least to know whether the result is achievable or close to achievable. Don't forget to assume the skills have some sublevels, so a strong SB trainee can be anything between 8.00-8.99
b) Make sure you won't go over the 'budget' for each skill. Overbudgeting often happens with HA and DR because they do boost all other skills, but they also get trained when you train the other skills. In my NT player I had at 6 or 7 pops in HA/DR from secondary training and he started as a 19yo, so he was always a bit slow on training. Even if you assume they were quite close to the first pop then it is at least 4 or 5 and I would have gladly done without a few of them to be honest. You don't want skills like DR or HA taking eating into your cap when you could have more useful skills instead (for example my NT player is a Superstar potential so I had to be careful and I'm still training him even after he capped because of it). If you fail to account for secondary training you may have a player with a hole somewhere or a different skillset than you planned for
c) If you know what your final target is, the best idea is to train the fastest training skill provided that you make sure you won't go over budget after you train other skills.

So for example if you plan to have SB=ID, train SB before ID (because it trains a lot faster) BUT:
• stop training SB and switch to ID if the elastic effect is enough to make ID faster instead
• keep in mind you will have to train ID at some point and that will train SB too. So you will need to stop SB training shorter of your target
• keep in mind that IS or RB also train ID so if your goal is a low IS - high ID/RB/SB or a low RB - high IS/ID/SB build you will have to factor in the third skillas well
In practice this means: train SB first as it's the fastest (and it will set up the elastic effect for ID). Check that you won't overtrain SB after you switch to ID. If ID becomes faster than SB, then alternate the 2, but always making sure you won't over train a skill compared to your goal


Last edited by Lemonshine at 7/21/2017 11:21:38 AM

Another piece of advice. You may want to get comfortable with Coach Parrot or the Training simulator to track the sublevels (i.e. the fraction of next level that your player has, so when you see a 'strong' skill level you should know with some approximation whether that is a 8.0, a 8.4 or a 8.9). This is your best bet to make sure you get as close as possible to your target without overtraining or capping a player by accident.

Oh and one final thing (for real!) to consider is Cross-training: a small portion of training is allocated to a random skill. You have no control over this, you'll have to hope that the amount of crosstraining goes into relevant skills at least at the beginning.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 7/21/2017 5:12:40 AM

I'm trying to improve my knowledge about elastics (especially for the inside skills) as well. I'm training my trainees in inside skills and initially based the schedule on this post from Nachtmahr: (78242.838)

Your advice is to train SB before ID because of elastics. I had some contact with Joemaverick from Belgium about elastics as well. Joemaverick, and I've read this from a Dutch manager as well, says that it's best for elastic effect to train IS/ID>REB>SB. Which is not in line with your advice and Nachtmahr's post.

I will quote from the mail I received from Joe (thanks again Joe!) where he explains why. For me it's not about who's right, I just want to know what the optimal training schedule would be for my trainees and other potential Dutch NT trainees.

The training of a skill is linked to the other skills trained. So if you train ID, you also train IS and SB, so higher are IS and SB, faster ID will increase.

SB training improves SB, ID and RB. So it's better to have higher ID and RB than SB. RB training improves RB and ID but not SB. So RB won't improve faster if SB is higher. Conclusion: better to train RB before SB.

And you can make the same reasoning with ID: ID doesn't improve RB but RB improves ID => better to have a high level in ID when training RB but the level of RB has no impact on ID improvement => better to train ID before RB.

There are a lot of reasons why 1on1 (SF/PF) is the best training to start, one of them is that 1on1 improves IS but not ID, so IS is not impacted by ID level. So you increase IS without being penalized by ID level, and when you will train ID, since IS will be already high, ID will be faster to improve.

So the best way to use elastic effect for SF (or PF) is :

1) 1on1 (SF/PF)
2) ID
3) RB
4) SB

Now Nachtmahr said the opposite, why? What he says is that, if your goal in RB is 14 and 12 in SB, and if you train RB before SB (what I suggest), when you will train SB your player will become 15 or 14.x, and you will have trained RB too many weeks. So he suggests to train SB before RB, to not lose these weeks.

He's right and wrong at the same time. Wrong because he doesn't use elasticity, and on 10 seasons of training you lose a lot of weeks! He's right because at the end of training, you have to act as he said.

What's your opinion about this?

I think it's wrong and I would not recommend it. Even if you train 1v1 the elastics on ID from IS will be normally quite low (unless ID<<<SB) and SB will be the fastest training skill anyway.

At the most basic level Elastics and Secondary training are obviously connected: the skills which influence others through elastics are also trained by those skills as secondary training. Therefore you have a trade-off, do you train JS and get HA/DR as secondary training (and boost HA/DR elastic) or train HA/DR and JS as secondary (and boost JS elastic)? You do the second because the overall training is faster AND because HA/DR are connected to more skills (elastic/secondary training) than any other skill.

The answer is: forgetting about training targets, it's best to train the skills which train faster or that set up the elastic effect for other skills.

Now the situation for inside skills is as follows:
Main training // Secondary training // Elastic boost from // Elastic boost to (from primary training)
IS // ID (10%) + JS (20%) // ID+JS // ID + RB
ID // SB (20%) + IS (10%) // SB+IS // IS+RB+SB (full) + OD (60%)
SB // ID (40%) + RB (20%) // ID+RB // ID+RB
RB // ID (10%) + IS (10%) // ID+IS // SB

So in practice:
a) SB baseline is faster than any other inside training by quite some margin and RB is the slowest (all of this is due to secondary training being lower)
b) only a very high positive gap in IS (IS-ID) and/or high negative gap in SB (ID-SB) will change this due to the elastics on ID, making ID faster than SB. Without no gap in SB, you'd need like +12 IS over ID for ID to train faster than SB
c) in terms of the elastic effect on other skills both ID and SB boost the other 2 you want to train
d) my advice would be to train faster towards the skills that matter to your goal. In your example it's ID/RB/SB. SB trains both RB and ID why would you train ID first? It has a little elastic boost from IS, but not enough AND it trains IS as secondary instead of RB which matters to you.

Bottom line, train SB first as a priority over ID and ID over RB. If you don't care about training any more of IS then you'd have to remove that from the secondary training equation and it would make SB even better to train first. All of this up to the point where elastics affect skills enough to change the fastest training skill. At that time, in terms of pure overall speed it does not matter anymore, they become almost identical and you may as well rotate between different skills.


Edited: changed a mistake in the table and made it more comprehensive.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 7/21/2017 11:30:39 AM

The other thing is that, at the end, we're talking maybe the difference of a couple of weeks of training over the course of many seasons. If you're looking to completely maximize a player's ability, of course, going to that level of detail may be necessary, but if you're building to a specific target or even just a general profile, it might just be best to go ahead and train the player to get to the skills you need in a manner that makes him most helpful (i.e., instead of trying to min/max elastic effect, maybe train him in an out of position skill in a week where you have easy or unwinnable league games, and in his most natural position if that week it may mean the difference between a win and a loss).

I can't agree more, though, with you and Lemon that you don't want to end up not being able to reach the levels you want in the skills you find important because you were too focused on 'efficiency' and the skills you got to speed up his training ate a bit too much potential. That shouldn't be an issue for a well-managed, intelligent training plan, but for dopes like me who trained three seasons of JR, then a ton of SB, and are now bumping into cap range trying to get some OD, it may present an issue. (Of course, in my case it's just the slowness of training at their age now, not cap issues yet, but I've already had to scale my target OD down even if speed weren't an issue).

So one of players I'm training have 11 HA, 12 DR. Should I stop training him in 1on1 guards because you said it will slow down training of HA/DR since his OD is 3?

What is his potential? What is your plan for him?

As a rule of thumb, 1v1 is so fast that for it to be slower than other skills (say JR), most of the times and the real benefit is that, of course, it does set up the elastic on every other outside skill and you can train 6 players instead of 3.

In any case even with very low ID your player should train faster in OD than in 1v1 now, so if you have only 3 trainees I'd give them some OD too.


There is another insidious thing to account for when looking at 1v1 training, especially for guards.
1) HA elastics are not the same as DR elastics. HA depends on OD and DR, DR depends on JS and HA
2) 1v1 trains JS but not OD (HA trains OD as secondary but it's a one-position training)
3) This means that training 1v1 always results in more DR than HA training in the long run, both due to the baseline speed and the fact that DR benefits from the elastic effect from JS growing, while HA does not and the lower OD is to begin with the more the difference due to training will be

Last edited by Lemonshine at 7/21/2017 11:46:42 AM

His potential is 7 (PAS) and I want to make him balanced. But the only problem is, I have a 18 MVP USA trainee who is far behind on HA/DR

Personally I'd stop training 1v1 or do some sessions only when you need to have the flexibility or when there are only 2 games in a week (ASG and last week) and go for OD now. Even without doing any extra training HA and DR will both reach 14 from secondary training probably.

However because that MVP 19yo is your own draftee, I'd prioritise him unless his skills are quite bad. In this case you may want to train 1v1F for the rest of the season. This would mean that you'll have to be careful with the PAS in the future because his HA/DR are too high and count towards the cap. The alternative would be to sell the PAS and get an equivalent trainee who fits better with your main trainee (if you decide that the American MVP is your main guy)

Last edited by Lemonshine at 7/21/2017 12:27:34 PM