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Or I said "used" to because you said it in your post Einstein.

And its completely true. My argument that greater IS on guards could generate 6-10 pts per game was not debated.... It was shot down. Also my point that our PF's weren't great was shot down as well.

I could continue.... But this is stuff for the offsite and I'm banned from there. I'll reengage when I'm let out of the corner.

I disagree that it was not debated, the debate ended when you told Coco to go f himself. Trying to get IS on guards is a subject of a lot of discussion on the offsite at this very moment, but as you know its a complex issue.

I hope you choose to reengage civilly, if you do I look forward to the discussion.

You guys make the "punishment". imo its an online forum... If you don't like someone coming after you quit logging on. Coco called me an "idiot" which to me is more offensive than calling someone a tool. Or having some type go f yourself. But hey... Even games have politics.

It's not complex. If you tell a user its required for your guy to make the NT they'll do it. Sacrifice JR training... Boom. Problem solved.

Not sure if you read my post on the offsite concerning training IS on guards, which I am for btw, but I disagree with the idea that you can simply tell someone its required and that will work.

I'll repeat some of what I said on the offsite. Most managers are unresponsive, or simply unable or unwilling to follow training suggestions for a variety of reasons, and they could care less whether the player makes the NT roster.

Training IS on guards is difficult for managers because you have to train the player out of position at C. If that player is a key player on your team, then training the player for several weeks out of position will sacrifice your team's competitiveness. You may find a few volunteers, and luckily now we have a few top managers who are willing to sacrifice for the NT community, but on a large scale it will be very difficult to convince managers to do whats best for the NT instead of doing whats best for their personal team.

Before the offsite debate got derailed, the idea that wozz proposed (and others have proposed this is different forms over time , I know Rambo and smallfrie have mentioned this idea before) about separating some of the u21 talent from the typical u21 arms race so they can get secondary training before they become too important to the team's success to train out of position when they are older. I think that is one possible solution.

Sacrificing JR training I think is happening all over BB as the majority of top teams play LI/m2m.

Pretty sure my position the entire time has been to get to prospects when they are young... Play them out of position at first then do secondarily training.

I only say that because i myself am doing it... But yet its still not happening because our NT manager isn't asking for it.... The job shouldn't be tactics... It's a community thing.

man what going on?

I'm willing to change to guards once I finish training Delong and Fritz and Coleman.....................I can help by buying a SS high skilled guard.......just that I probably need 800k -_- anyways whats all the heated discussion in the morning?

I agree that the NT job isn't just tactics, and is about having the community buy into your ideas. What I am saying is that this issue, which we are now discussing productively, is not simple. You may be able to put together a large group of volunteers, but often that group of volunteers does not have the right players, or the resources to attain the right players, or the right players are not for sale.

I think its a reasonable guess to say that 80% or more of our top rookies go to Division V teams. Our domestic scouting team reaches out to hundreds of managers of our top rookies. The reality is that the majority of them do not respond. The ones that do sometimes have their own training plans because in the end its their team. The few that are willing to take suggestions, again some of them may not have the starting build that we are looking for.

This whole thing is going to take a lot of work from the entire staff and community as well as our NT manager.

Last edited by jfarb at 8/24/2012 4:24:28 AM

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

(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.

I guess this is my whole point though. We think we know how it works, we look at our roster and suspect we don't have the right sort of personnel based on our interpretation of how 2-3 works, and when we run some tests scrimmages we get poor results. Why is that at all discouraging? It would be more confusing if it DID work for us somehow.

I'm not trying to say we should be running a 2-3 in meaningful games right now, I'm saying we should be making a concerted effort from the top down to encourage training of skill sets we think would play well in a 2-3, so that we do have that weapon in our arsenal several seasons from now.

As far as the balance between open vs. contested shots, that's a great point and always a huge consideration, and I understand that in general giving up flow to your opponent usually results in giving up more uncontested shots. Intuitively though shouldn't a 2-3 zone that packs everybody inside the arc contest more of everything except 3pter's? With somebody always around the ball, and the OD and SB nuances suggested by your data, wouldn't we actually expect more contested shots (including jumpers)?

That may not have been born out in the data (I didn't see anything in any of the blog posts re: contested vs. assisted based on defense) or our scrimmages, but it's easy to argue that is because those examples involve guys without the skills to succeed at what we're asking of them. I guess my point is that less pressure on the PG/entry pass may not necessarily mean more assisted/uncontested shots, even if that has historically been the case.

If we think we know something important about how to use a tactic that seems custom made to neutralize the game's most popular current tactic (LI), I think we should embrace that and commit our NT to the long term development of players who can help us take advantage of our information. It's not information that should change our in-game tactics this season, it's information that provides an opportunity to redirect our NT training for multiple future seasons.

I think the risk side of the risk/reward equation is why people are gun-shy about committing to training something that hasn't been proven yet (since it could embarrassingly fail), but really what is the risk: that we don't win worlds? I think we're already starting to understand that we even with good coaching, GS, community involvement, and training we still aren't a big enough community to use traditional approaches to just steamroll through some of our larger, better organized foreign competition, so I'm not sure we would really be risking all that much by taking some calculated risks based on good data and analysis.

We have some valuable insights from the mountains of data you guys have been able to acquire. My position is that the best way for the NT to make use of it is a BB version of the Manhattan-project :) Otherwise we will just be using the data to explain why some other country's 2-3 works so well a half dozen seasons from now.

Last edited by J-Slo at 8/24/2012 8:34:11 AM

I'd like the last 5 minutes of life back after having to read all of this 3 am drivel from last night.

Can we please focus on the election?

Yeah......good luck with that. Hahaha