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It is time: http://gifsforum.com/images/gif/pop%20corn/grand/jackson_...

dear coco,

i think you misunderstand the word troll.

we could go back and forth substantively for eons. i'm glad you picked up a 300k a week bigman, very noble to disband your aging team. let's put it like this though. when i went inactive about 2 years ago, i had 4-5 mil in the bank. if i didn't think the process that somehow had us fall to a level well beneath where our userbase should have been, i mighta happily helped out on the farming front.

in fact, if it were say... ice storm as manager, i certainly would have done my part. instead, more of the same dross and excuses.

so i bled about 50-60k a week for the most part, i think selling a player here or there when i logged in. i'm basically an expansion point with a history at this point.

the u21 victories are nice, but not yours. again, we at one point had the 3rd or 4th biggest userbase. it mustve taken several seasons of epic mismanagement to lower expectations to the point that advancing out of the americas wasn't a given.

incidentally, i don't even fully blame you (though you deserve your share for sure). i blame the guy who (well i should leave this part blank... because it would be personal, over the line, and pretty blatant trolling).

LI on guards and a combination of driving and FT on big guys. Scrap JR from training. Period.

On an unralated topic to the other guy... I'm Hopson everybody and I am happy too. I like donuts and all that crap. I think I have the right talents for coaching U21 and m very active. If you think about voting for someone else, don't do it!

Are we supposed to remember this for next season?

Because this season is the NT elections...

This was my last response to these people.

I have a question to throw back to the community. At this point there is incredible balance at the NT level. Almost everyone plays LI with high-passing, high-OD guards, great inside-looking SFs, a well-rounded big man at PF and a less well-rounded big man at C.

Where in your view can we get an edge?

I would hope that as the incumbent and likely re-elected NT manager, you would still deign to respond to critics (even if you consider them trolls because they have consistently not agreed with you).

Where can we get an edge? It's been the minority's position for a long time that we are going to remain behind the curve if we continue to act like LI/M2M is the only viable option.

Implementing unproven or unfashionable ideas (2-3 zone, SB, JR) at the NT level is always going to be contentious, but if you believe the BB's (and I think we should) when they say that certain tactics or skills are functioning properly, then at some point we have to have:

1- Faith that we have collectively developed a solid theory of how something works
2- The balls to go out on a limb and actively commit our country to implementing something that has not already been proven by other NT's or top level D.I teams for multiple seasons.

Otherwise we will continue to be either playing catch-up, or trying to scrape out tiny incremental advantages within the narrow window of LI/M2M. Our historical trouble winning it all is starting to suggest this may not be enough.

edit: Wozzt's and mforks tools give us an advantage in mining the data that I think most countries don't have, but I'm not sure we are taking full advantage until we commit to saying "we know something other teams don't, and we believe it enough that we're going to build a team around what we've found." That the data confirmed the theories some of our community posters have come up with of how these tactics work (I'm mostly talking 2-3/SB) should only make us more confident.

Last edited by J-Slo at 8/23/2012 8:05:57 AM

There's two problems jfriske (and I say this as a fairly ardent supporter of the 2-3):

(1) I think the BB's are wrong re: 2-3. Or rather, their explanations were incomplete. Yes, it's true that with good SB, you can build a team that does a good job when they contend inside shots. The problem is that it also reduces the number of inside shots you're able to defend. (Imagine that out of 100 inside shots, 50 are "open", and 50 you defend. With the 2-3, your success in the ones you defend does go up, but instead of there being 50 of them, there might only be 40, with now 60 "open" shots). So you do better on contested inside shots, while simultaneously increasing the proportion of open shots, with the net effect somewhat of a wash. Since you are unequivocally worse vs jump shots/3's, the overall effect is a strong negative. Unfortunately, I think the solution is pretty simple (inside offenses should incur a penalty to flow-- this would both solve the problem, by countering the change in % of open shots, and makes sense, since the more your bigs handle the ball, the worse your flow should be). This is unfortunate, because I don't think we're likely to see any changes here (or even have the discussion).

(2) Even if we assume that a 2-3 can work, we don't have the personnel for it. We did a lot of testing of variations of it in scrimmages this season, and in all the metrics we checked (not just final score), it was miserable. Maybe that means it can't work, or maybe it means we don't have the players for it. But in either case, it doesn't seem to work for us. And with so few people on BB believing it could work, there's very little movement towards training the "right" sort of players.