BuzzerBeater Forums

On another note, Kouzo Yasujiro made his first National Team appearance with 2 minutes of mop up time. He went 1 for 1 for 2 points, and grabbed an offensive rebound.

Not bad for just 2 minutes. I'm looking forward to much more of that in the future.

We've now been assigned our next 6 games..........

Could we have possibly recieved a worse draw? Anyway, here's the details:

6/12 @ #14 Argentina - Likely Loss
6/18 Vs #76 Scotland - Probable Win
6/25 Vs #20 Hong Kong - Likely Loss
7/3 @ #29 Schweiz - Likely Loss
7/9 @ #24 Eesti - Likely Loss
7/16 Vs #48 Deutschland - Maybe....... 1000 user country that is poorly managed


I wanted to compare to a similar rival so I check Singapore....... Check this out
(http://www.buzzerbeater.com/country/65/nt/schedule.aspx)

If we had their schedule I would expect to advance. I haven't bothered to look at others yet. Doesn't seem fair but I guess its done randomly. Just a bad draw for us this year.

That is a very cruel draw. Is there anything we can do strategically that can help us in the long term?

Week 3

Tomorrow morning at 7AM Japan time we will play our third game of the season. We face the #14 Argentina team in Argentina. They are just coming out of the World Championship Repechage (2nd chance qualifier) where they were 2-1. Their roster is fiercly stong and they will probably make short work of us. We'll give it our best effort and hope to keep it close. You will also get a chance to see some more action from Yasujiro as he is listed as a back up this week.


Final 2 Call Ups

After some deliberation I have decided on who I will call up to fill the last two spots on the roster.

Criteria: I focussed on our areas of need, Bigs, and Small forward and then selected the prospect in each category that has the best overall skills and is the most likely to become a strong contributor to the National team in the future. The results of that selection process are no surprise.

Please welcome SF Yuusuke Tsunami from Fire Country Trail Blazers (Japan) and PF Tohru Asano from Kitakyushu (Japan). Both these players are still early in their development but are also highly probable of being strong contributors in the near future. I'm not sure they will see significant playing time initially but we may get them in for some action during scrimmages or once we are officially eliminated.

I would say Asano is very early in his development but he is getting better every week. But I do like seeing the flag next to his name so it will make me train him even harder.

Yes, It's probably a little early for both of them. But last season I held on to 3 spots and never ended up using them. I'd rather use the spots rather than waste them and I can try to find some opportunties to get them a little experience.

And I guess a little extra motivation helps.

In case you missed it (I assume you did since it was at 7AM), we played a great game against Argentina and just came up short at the end. In fact, the game was tied with just 54 seconds to go before Argentina took the lead and we started fouling like crazy. Once again this shows that if we have good game shape we usually compete pretty well, especially if our opponent tries going outside.

I should point out some great stats. 44 Points for Furusawa, 35 points for Sonoda, and 8 assists for Tagawa.

Next up we play Scottland and should have good success against them.

Great game! I know in such a short season each loss hurts but we should have had no chance and instead being so close is amazing. Excellent coaching again by both out NT coaches. Obviously I was happy to see Sonoda 35 points on 14/20 shooting was like Wade to Furusawa's LeBron and it did take Furusawa 12 more shots to get his extra 9 points. Besides them and Tagawa we didn't get that much from anyone.

Hong Kong vs. Nippon 110 - 86 (20152)

It was a loss but a well fought game and I thought the game ratings were interesting.

Offensive Flow both proficient.
Rebounding both proficient.
Inside Defense both prominent.
Inside Scoring was sensational (high) to tremendous (low) so also a trivial difference.
Even outside scoring wasn't that big a gap espectable to strong.
But it was Perimeter Defense where we are really bad with our prominent far behind their sensational meaning their outside players could have numbers like 9/15, 4/7 and 3/6 while we get 3/8 or 3/14.

As usual Furusawa was our star but again Kouzuki supported well. However rebounding was a problem with our SF Oishi geting 0 in 35 minutes.