BuzzerBeater Forums

@ Aradad's-Honestly, the biggest problem I see with our National Team is consistency. We struggle a lot due to things like Gameshape, fouling, and missed free throws (although we have been improving on the fouling problem). However, when you look at it, there is a lot of luck involved with it as well. So consistency might be a hard thing to have when everything seems to be out of our hands, and up to the game engine to decide. To answer the question though, I see the biggest problem to be a mix of the three things I said as well as involvement of more USA managers. How do we fix this though? Well, gameshape is something that can only be helped so much. As much as you can BB-mail someone about a players gameshape, doesnt mean that it will improve. I came across this problem as the Luxembourg NT manager. I would email managers and they said they understood how to make it better, but they continued to do the same things and the players on the NT continued to have bad gameshape. Thats where it becomes important that the top guys on the team gets into the hands of capable managers.

@ Tough-

1st-I think in order to win you will always need some guys like Bronson and Jairo. Secondaries are only good to a certain point, but its the primaries that get you the wins. If elected, I will continue what we have been doing recently, with splitting up a few players in each age groups to create certain types of players. As for the guys outside of those groups, you continue telling them to pump away at primaries while getting in a little secondaries as well. Also, in a perfect world, we would have all of our NT players in the NBBA playing against each other. The problem comes when the teams in the NBBA dont see the importance in having the USA NT players on their team, or dont have the money to buy these players. We have to continue messaging the top managers about potential NT players on the market, but I also think we may even need to be able to identify certain foreign teams that want to take on a USA player and train them to be great. From experience, I have twice had young, great potential, american player be bought by foreign teams. These teams continue to train these players and I talked to them before they bought these players to make sure they would continue to train. We will need to have communication with these foreign managers that are willing to make great players.

2nd- This cant be answered till the news comes out, however havent I been saying forever how I thought shotblocking should be trained more??? Just saying ;)

3rd-Honestly, my goal is to promote a fun, freedom, and friendships. I do not feel the NT manager should be telling managers what to do in the game. This game was made to be fun, and that is what I intend to do when I am manager. We can be competitive while promoting teams to have fun with the game. I understand that certain builds will be crucial to the NT winning. But see, we can advise people to create these builds while still promoting fun. Tell managers to have fun creating personalities with their players. One thing I want to start by is asking managers what their goal is for their players and then how they will reach that goal. I know these questions are asked already, but I also dont want to force anyone to do something they dont want. Thats where freedom comes in. There is only so much advise that can be given to a manager. If they ultimately believe they will have more fun training a player that doesnt fit into the system, despite being a great potential, then so be it. We are a nation of several users. We will always have great players to choose from. Lastly, I want to promote friendships on buzzerbeater. I feel people dont utilize the forums enough. Whether its on Buzzerbeater or on the offsite, they dont build relationships that can help them in the future, as well as make this game even more fun.

@ Ballin lights out- The first thing I would do is send a message to all of the owners of potential NT players and introduce myself as the new NT manager. I did this same exact thing when I became the Luxembourg NT manager, and let me tell you, people really do appreciate it more than you would think.

"Is the lack of success from lack of great players or tactics?" This question is hard to answer for the fact that neither of these is the reason for the lack of success. Coco said it himself when he was the NT manager. Luck has a lot to do with winning. The NT teams are so close in talent that just one mess up can lead to a loss. That could simply mean a player having an off game, or a player gets injured, or maybe one of the best players doesnt have good gameshape. Obviously before games, tactics will be debated, but at the end of the day I dont think either of those reasons is why we havent had success.

Last edited by Isaiah at 3/6/2013 1:14:05 AM

To all:

Is the diversity of player skill sets, or lack thereof, holding us back?

The argument about secondaries are good but primaries.... Do we not have say a guy of each for each position? Balanced guy, donkey, mixed and matched for starting and off the bench and situational etc.?

Is using LI and m2m like everyone else in our best interest or could we be more suited to another tactic with our current players

I have some ideas that I want to share with candidates and see them discuss:

1) Creating a USA NT "Bank." We find a way to have people update their finances on the offsite and/or make a pledge to reserve X amount of money... And then when a player comes on the market the NT manager can try to put together enough money to get/keep the player in American hands.

2) Completely dividing our scouting apparatus into a NT track and a U21 track, so that managers with prospects get an initial contact that asks them if they would like to have their player be a part of the U21 (short-term gain) or the NT (long-term strategy) track. Then instead of depending on rounding out U21s (or near-misses) we have a whole crop of players designed for the NT stage.

1) I'm not sure if enough people will have the ability to save up the amount of money needed. A future national team player can sell for over a million. (18 yo, hall of fame+, good stats) The idea is nice, but I am not sure that it is practical. I don't think anyone would want to spend their money JUST to keep a player in the US. If they intend to train a national team player, they will do so without any sort of prior agreement.

2) The only issue I see with this is that the Junior NT may become worse as a result of this. We would be taking potential JNT players out of the rotation if we had two different groups. While a player is less than 21, they should be able to play on U21. Few players that make the national team wouldn't have been able to make the JNT when they were younger anyways.

The second part isnt true, i think.

If we set aside a few high-level prospects to start on secondaries off the bat, they would never play for the U21 team, but they could be incredibly good on the NT stage. Training for NT and training for U21 take two different mindsets, and I like the idea of separating these two groups. If something like this yielded even as little as one NT project every two years, it would be worth it. and the U21 team would hardly feel it. Our current U21 team is mostly made up of guys that dont have the potential to be NT prospects anyways.

I agree with you, but he said "Completely dividing our scouting" so I assumed he was referring to having a pool of NT and JNT players. If it just a couple of players being trained separately like you proposed, then there is no problem, but I just wouldn't want to make two large groups.

The pool of players with NT potential is small. The pool of players with NT potential and the starting skills worthy of training is even smaller. What we are talking about here, is pretty much 5-10 players being approached with this per season. And out of those, most owners are probably going to choose U21 training regardless. So maybe 2-5 players per season gets put into this project. Leaving the rest for possible u21 training and such.

To answere ShadowSlam's question

I dont think its necessarily the lack of diversity in skill sets that is holding us back. The fact of the matter is we have some of the top players on Buzzerbeater, but its the little problems inside each of the player's "hidden skills" that leads to some negative effects in the NT. We have seen time and time again that fouling and free throws have made impacts on games. Free throws maybe not as much, but the fouling has shown up quite a bit. There has been games where we give up 35+ free throws to other teams. That could be the difference between a win or a loss right there. We have made improvements to this though. We have gone in and have identified those players that foul a lot and have even made changes to the roster because of it. However, to get back to the question, we have players that could potentially be used in different tactics, but these such players do not make the team because it is not in the best interest of the team. Our best chance at winning has been LI and will be until changes happen to the Game engine( which could be potentially soon.

To answer the second question, we do have a variety of players in our database who could potentially be on the team to suit all areas like you are talking about. Balance, donkey, mix of skills, and etc. The problem comes in where we need to decide what players we can be comfortable in knowing that their manager's will make the effort to keep game shape up. It does no good having a balanced player on the team if his manager keeps him at average game shape. Same goes for those high primary players. But yes, we have the players to fit all skillsets but if im elected as NT manager, the goal is to put together a team that i know will be in good gameshape all season long.

Pertaining to the 3rd question, LI and m2m continues to be in the best interest of our team because we have built several players for this so far. We have some players who can fit into other tactics, but the fact is that we have put so much time and effort into making a LI team, that we are best off sticking with it FOR NOW. It is my belief though that it is important to have players that can play everything though. I am a fan of PTB myself, as it seems to allow players to take their most natural shot, but do we have the players for it right now? Maybe not. I believe we need to put together groups from each age group, to train for specific tactics. This will then allow us to, if game engine changes are drastic, have players already being trained for the next best tactic.

Currently on the offsite, we have discussed setting aside certain players to train differently than the "whole group" per say. These players will be ideal in our advancement of the NT. What I propose though, is that we group every potential NT player into categories for certain tactics. This can be beneficial to the USA managers as well because I will personally contact the managers of these players and ask them where they see their players in 5-7 years as far as the tactic they want them to fit into. From there, we group players into each tactic that their managers are training them to fit into and they can then be potentially used in the same tactic for the NT.