Ok, you have your team, you've probably weeded out your terrible players you started with and have one or two decent trainees you got deals on because the game is still new to you and you log in every 5 minutes to watch the TL.
Uh Oh your first draft is coming up and you have a ton of questions, hopefully a lot of them can be answered in this quick little post about the mistakes I made and how you can avoid them.
Things to know:
-The grey balls mean nothing all prospects are random
-Bots pick randomly
Now you need a plan, this plan may be different depending on how early in the season you started.
If you joined early this season and your team is doing poorly or are in a bot league (8 or more bots) in your league you've hopefully been investing in the draft quite a bit, if not that's OK I'll have a section for you too.
First step:
Do the draft combine, this will give you all of the ages which are the most important thing to find at this point for you.
Second Step:
Now move all of your age 18 players up above the 19 y/o's on the list. You may sort them by preferred height of the players if you wish.
Third Step:
Count all of the 1 and 2 grey ball prospects, if there are at least 10, 1 or 2 grey ball 18 year old's do the group demonstration. This helps in 2 ways, you get 10 prospects out of the way immediately if you are lucky you'll have some 5 ball prospects.
Fourth Step:
Take any orange 1-2 ball prospects and send them right to the bottom of the pile.
Fifth Step:
The second way the group demonstration helps is that it also scouts the 19 y/o's, now as we stated before the 18 year old's are your target but a 5 ball 19 year old is still going to be more valuable than a 1 ball 18 y/o. So take your highest rated 19 year olds and put them after your last 18 y/o on your list.
Now take stock of what you have discovered in your combine and group demonstration, do you have any 5 ball prospects? Lucky you, a good idea is to interview your 5 ball prospects and find out what their potential and grade are.
Sort your potential draftees accordingly. You now have 10 scouted 18 y/o players, rank these by how many balls they have (eww).
Now I think it's important to point out that if you are in a division 4 or 5 in a larger country chances are you aren't going to be able to support training an MVP, HOF or GOAT potential player all the way up into your national league and on to your respective BBA, as the salary will get to be too high for a lower division to support. So if do end up getting a player like this you may wish to consider selling him on the TL as they can fetch a pretty virtual penny.
You can now choose to do whatever you wish with your remaining draft points. You can scout out potential in some 4 ball prospects your demonstration uncovered or you can continue down your list trying to find other 5 ball prospects and interview them.
BUT JAHILL THERE WERE ONLY 4, 1-2 grey ball 18 y/o's !!!!
Well friend you are not at a loss as you can organize your 18 y/o's by your preferred height if you want bigs or guards or SF sized guys.
Then just scout down the list looking for 5 ball guys and interviewing them.
Mistakes to avoid:
If you started late have less than 20 scouting points it may be best to just do the scouting combine, organize by age and height and leave it up to luck and save the points for next year's draft. I would be able to scout my draft fully if I had done this when I joined with only a few weeks left in last season.
I am in an all bot league and as of right now I'm gambling a lot of money to get a good player even as the 1st place team. This is not something everyone has to do or wants to do, but the chance of drafting a 5x5ball A+ player for me to sell/keep from bot prison is just too good for me to pass up, plus the draft is my favorite thing in almost all sports games.
I hope this little guide helped you in some way.