BuzzerBeater Forums

What is your vision for the make-up of the team? Do you feel comfortable with the current roster? In which positions/skill areas would you like to see the most improvement from the current team?

beavers, swafford, simons, underwood, mcallister, gresham, rollins, lovelace… you're fired!

Some of those players are now cut, but you'd get rid of who is by far our best PG? That's, uh, an interesting concept.

In fact, half of those players will definitely not be part of the next qualifying campaign (provided I'm elected, of course).

grubbs in only if he multiskills to the forward position, same for trujillo.
harrell sounds promising, I guess he's in. I've got my eyes on three big men (faust, marcum and truong), who're the most promising ones I saw so far — but it was just a cursory glance, as I don't have access to any kind of skills database yet.

Grubbs is one of the most complete players we have, but Trujillo probably doesn't get added right away, since his training is being transitioned to outside skills.

Faust and Marcum? Good choices. Truong is a monoskilled behemoth.

I mean, our database of tracked players numbers almost 150 (may even top that now, I don't have the sheet open). Knowing what we do now, we're going to formulate the roster differently than last time - we now know what we need to do.

as far as the world cup roster goes, some of these selections were questionable, like (for instance) grubbs. some other selections are just… wrong. underwood is not a NT level player, and the same goes for lovelace, rollins… this team has not made it out of the first round, let's not forget that — and deservedly so. they got routinely kicked on the boards, they weren't able to get it going on defense, and roster selection does have something to do with it, no?

Grubbs was definitely one of our top inside choices for the Worlds - he wasn't #1, but he was a clear choice. We were really week as a nation at PG when Season 4 started, and Underwood was the 2nd best that we had. Lovelace should have been a premier small forward, but his trainer inexplicably stopped training him after stating he was going to do so, with no explanation. Rollins is STILL one of our best, including one of our best outside defenders. You know that salary isn't THE determining factor, right?

We lost to Nigeria by 8 points while making poor tactical choices. In fact, had we played 2-3 Zone, I bet we could have won while still playing Normal.

you see, collecting data is nice and all, but what's it good for if in a "win or go home" game you hand the starting job to the likes of beavers, swafford and simons — and then blame your loss to the choice of playing normal?

You hand the starting job to the best players - and those were the best players at that time. It's been almost 7 weeks since that game - half a season. You don't think things may have changed just a bit since then?

now, let me point you to this fun fact. five days after the us nt was kicked out of the world cup by nigeria (1081), my club team (normal, man to man) posted these ratings: (3975703). my frontcourt? george edmonds and stacey cash. americans.

What was your enthusiasm? Did you Normal? If we had high enthusiasm, we certainly could have touched that kind of rating. As far as Edmonds and Cash go, they weren't as good as the players we had - this is just a fact.

[ have fun, elections are made for this. no cheap shots, but criticism and debate are at the core of the democratic process — that is, when your prime minister doesn't own all the private tv networks. ]

I want to know where the rest of the guys who registered are - last I saw, there were 11 candidates, and we're the only two that apparently care.

as for the point guard — it's not mandatory to field one: two off-guards with respectable/strong passing can yield a decent offensive flow, and be way more dangerous on the offensive end.

Just to clarify, Simons is also our 2nd best SG after Harrell, so in this case the skills are important.

I do agree with your point regarding PG's though.

edit - w/o seeing the players skillset, it'd be somewhat difficult to rate players other than salary though.

Last edited by brian at 5/10/2008 10:51:29 PM

thank you for the hint, I guess I didn't figure it out yet. [ yes, this is sarcasm. ]

as for the point guard — it's not mandatory to field one: two off-guards with respectable/strong passing can yield a decent offensive flow, and be way more dangerous on the offensive end.

as for my game, you missed the point. (enthusiasm about 8, IIRC, and as I wrote I did normal — it was a PL game actually) cash and edmonds have never been nt-worthy, but you fielded two big men who average a grand total of 14rpg… not having access to the skills makes my analysis a bit less deep than I'd like, but these guys do not seem to be great rebounders. you topped it up with a m2m defense against a big men trainer who's gonna crunchtime in your teeth… you're gonna get slaughtered on the boards, no?

I didn't think so, clearly I was wrong. I've been wrong about Nigeria for 7 weeks and will continue to be wrong for the rest of my life.

But, I wont be wrong moving forward.

back then, italy had 24k/week guards. now, the choices are two:
1) shaky roster selection
2) shaky training coordination
in both cases, I've shown time and again that I can deliver.

proof? there are posts from early on where I underline the future lineup of Italy NT, and guess who was in that roster — malfitano, lipparini, repetti, giulietti, ciglione, ardolo, mazzurana, zangari. look at where they are now. did I train all of them? no. did I do my best to encourage them in the early stages of the training, and follow their growth (until I became a BB and passed the ball to the world champion coach)? hell yeah.

by the way — do you know who "scouted" the world champion coach in an external message board? [so much for community organization, which so far has been a major selling point of your candidacy.]

nice to see some sparks at last.

With the intense scouting we did, our scouting needs are pretty minimal now. We can spend a good amount of time working on getting the community in line with what we need, while still making their teams successful. Winning NT games is not completely 100% of the goal. Some of what we want to accomplish is making the USA a strong league overall, and we've provided solid advice to those who have joined the USA NT board, and those who haven't, for that matter.

Do we want our users to train to the NT's benefit? Of course. But in a given season, only a tiny percentage of users will benefit from that guidance. The rest of the users should benefit also. Are you prepared to help the 800+ USA users? I've proven that I have, and that will continue.

About the roster makeup - we take the best players possible and win with them. We had the best players possible for qualifying and the Worlds, but some tactical choices hurt us.

It wont happen again.

w/o seeing the players skillset, it'd be somewhat difficult to rate players other than salary though.

Right, so it's dangerous to proclaim you'd cut players from the team based on salary (or even game stats).

last time I could check, I ranked 4th in sent and received BB-mails

I would hope a BB would rank high there.

I'm pretty high on the list myself, IIRC.

we don't trust you politicians… we want something new! we want dr. jàn ïtor!

If I am a politician, where's my campaign war chest to loot?