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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.

Do we have people who don't build specifically for LI?

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.

specifically I want to comment on "built players for this so far"

So lets say the changes happen, bam, are pants are caught dropped now. How do we recover since apparently nobody is building players for builds not of LI? Cause if we don't have people building for a different way than LI ever.... that kinda makes the USA as a whole a "donkey'

why be a 1-trick pony. Say we know another nation has great inside defense but somewhat suspect outside D on their bigs... be nice if we had a motion offense that could defend still to run against it...

This is where us splitting up players into groups like im saying comes in handy. Currently where we sit, we are better off as a LI team, and may even be for a few seasons. The goal is to continue building our line of prospects so we can say in the future that we have the potential to run many tactics.

This is why, if im elected, I will be focusing on contacting managers of future NT players and setting them up into groups for future tactics. I want to be able to help current teams build players the way they want, while continuing to build for the future of the NT. I think this is the best way as well because we wont have to say " you need to train this guy in X skills because that fits the team best. And if you dont, he probably wont be on the team."

I want to promote managers to build these players that can potentially play other tactics. There will always be players out there that will fit into the LI system. That might be because we have pushed it so hard in the last several years that it just seems natural to make these players. But if we ask, in an ideal world, what tactic would you like to have your team run in the future, and then build a player specific for this tactic, it might improve our chances of keeping players on USA teams.

And to add what I've already said, I dont want to make a drastic change to the NT program in the hopes that what I plan on doing will become the best thing. It may or may not work out. But my feeling is, we need the variety of players to have more options for the team, and I believe what I am suggesting will help not only the NT program but also the managers as well. This program i am suggesting will be implemented slowly into what we have now so that later on it can be an option us.

Last edited by Isaiah at 3/6/2013 5:55:38 PM

Hey guys, I posted a thread for choosing who you will vote for in the election. I just wanted to see who is voting for whom at this point. I also don't know if this is accepted or not... but I will give it a shot.

http://www.buzzerbeater.com/community/forum/read.aspx?thread=237993&m=1