BuzzerBeater Forums

i think we are alright with guard trainees for the future. I am training two and my ex colleague Astragoth is training one and now selling him to give Osman priority. I would love to take sidaway on board, but since we both used to log on both from work and our IP adresses are linked, I prefer not to do that to avoid a possible ban... I asked our NT coach for feedback on my 2 guards so that I can shape them as best as possible to become great NT players.

I don't want this to come across wrongly as it seems like lots of passionate people here.

I would go as far as to say Sidaway is unlikely to make the NT he has only gone up 15 stat points in the last 4 seasons since he played for U21 and his inside needs lots of work. I would encourage you to keep going on your players Johannes. I'm happy to be proved wrong on Sidaway by the way, just in reality and not in "oh yes I can" statements as frankly we can talk and throw mud all we like here. All we will achieve is lost ground and dirty hands.

Sidaway looks like a nice affordable player, but he's very similar to my backup PG (also 26), much more so than my (weaker) starting guard. I very much doubt that his OD can be trained to a sufficient level for the NT, considering he won't get enough elastic effect from past 1v1 training.

It might help if we had the "must have" and "nice to have" by position from the managers. While players can be trained to play in a certain system some minimum skills are required no matter what. Giving an indication may help people focus on what is more important. At least if the first string players are not there because none is good enough, the second string (say superstar potential) might be not too far off. You know, guys like this: (25004135) 16/8/18 18/19/9 16/13/8/2 or (23064217) 16/8/17 19/18/14 12/11/5/4. Feldman, also a superstar potential, was 16/8/18 20/20/7 14/12/7/7.

These are all inferior picks compared to what the NT has had in recent times probably, but if we don't have better players we will have to settle for the second tier and it's in our best interest that second tier is also looked after, precisely because there might not be a first tier of <32yo players who are better than that in the future. Only training the relatively few MVP, HoF and ATG from a reduced pool of managers, is probably not a very safe idea in the long term.

Edit: I paid $331k for Gotz (who has no deficit to Sidaway in OD/PA/JS and has a total of 4-5 less outside skills) and Sidaway is going to go for $750k. More than double.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 12/5/2014 11:59:40 AM

Hi guys just thought i'd bring my two cents to the table. As the U21 coach for the past two seasons i have realised how England seem to have very little understanding of training. Its quite worrying seeing teams waste away these MVP+ potential players that Muse claims we should only focus on. If you took the time to scout and help the NT you'd see that there is very little MVP+ players drafted every season, if we just focused on them we'd have 5 players for the U21 team every season if we were lucky. Most of these players go to the new div 3 teams who don't know what to do with them.

The main problem i feel in England is the lack of training community. I messaged close to 100 managers over the past two seasons in regards to training and i have had several coaches as part of my team reach out and get a quite frankly pathetic return. I probably was ignored by 75% of coaches and those that did reply seemed defensive, thinking i'm messaging them for the sake of the U21 team. When in fact i'm offering training advice which would make the players good for their team and U21 players in the process. A lot of players in England seem to think training for the NT is forced etc, which it isn't. New managers don't understand how much they damage our draftees by wasting them and there is not an active enough forum to attract these new guys to come check it out. If you look at countries like Bosnia they have around the same players as us, and a close number of threads but over 8x more replies per post than we do.

Granted many people won't have the time to help scout/train etc but it doesn't take much to offer to help a new guy and send him a message every now and again to see how he's doing. We need to become a united community if we expect England to do anything at U21/NT level. I think it starts at the top down, i will not name any names but i do see a sense of arrogance from some EBBL users, as if for some bizarre reason they are above us all. I was ignored by one player when all i wanted was his players stats. As well as this since i took the U21 role, 95% of messages i have to send, not many people make the effort to contact me.

I'm very happy to see praise for my work at the U21 level on this thread, but i have over 30 votes and a 67% approval meaning at least 10 people have voted me down so far, I would like for these people if they are active to tell me why they have voted me down. I would much rather have someone critise me than keep quiet or we'll never grow as a community. I feel like we can speak our mind here, this is not a hate message by any chance just what i think.

Zeus.

Last edited by Mod-Zeus at 12/5/2014 7:40:51 PM

Well said Zeus and I totally agree with all of it.

I have helped Zeus in the last few weeks scouting players and messaged every (or at least 99%) of managers who had a Season 29 draftee with allstar potential or higher, both 18 and 19 year olds and got close to 50 managers messaging me back, now this is a good amount of managers replying however some of them had no clue of training and that's where I support what Zeus says about training and helping out Division III managers as a community. Now I'm not saying everyone has to take on a role like I did and help out as they may not have the time, but its also a struggle for me sometimes to message 40 odd managers and reply to every single one suggesting a training routine and ask basic questions involved in training, I think there's too much of the Division III teams who play the game and train their players but in the wrong and that's where we more experienced players must intervene and progress the U21 and senior side as a country.

as one off the coaches that (half) waisted a MVP player, I have to say that the english NT has one off two problems. Or we have not enough MVP or better players as a community to ever be competing for anything or there are too high expectations from some how players should be trained and that they should have loads off secondaries in order to be even considered playing for the NT. in combination with having to be MVP or better.

Trying to train players and give them some secondaries and to keep them in a certain wage range and to stay atleast half competitive seems to me an impossible task. Take for example Osman. He is coming along very nicely. But ideally he would need 2 more PS and 1 or 2 more OD. It is (please spare me the 1 or 2 possible exception stories) near to impossible to give him that kind off training. With his salary, it is very difficult to give him off position training and still stay half competitive, which is necessary to get enough gate revenue. I will do it, but to expect or hope other trainers do the same thing is just not realistic.

If Sidaway with 3 more seasons training has no chance to make it into the NT because off his weak secondaries, than I would like to know what kind off secondaries are being expected for en english NT guard to have...

Last edited by Astragoth at 12/5/2014 4:03:27 PM

Several pages of comments now. I've just been skimming through it, not skimming through laziness, but because I've already read it and wanted to refresh my memory, and I think we've identified two main problems, that I think may have been obvious to us all all along.

One, there aren't enough people offering advice, and two, there's no one reading what advice is given, or reading it and ignoring it.

Zeus is right. People don't seem to understand that we're (mostly him) trying to help. That's been the aim of the forum posts I put out at draft time. (Possibly too late to have the effect I want.)

This isn't a new thing. Almost every U21 coach I've known has had the same problem.

When it comes to training, I've made clear all along that I don't feel its my place to tell people how to train. Even if I did, and then someone asked to see my current or former NT players, I'd be slightly embarrassed. Though that's not the reason I don't do it. I feel people's players are their own. The NT just borrow them.

I feel I could do more though.

I can see a number of people obviously want England to do well. Even people who aren't actually English but are in our league. We need to find a way to use the passion in the last few pages of this thread to push England forward and perhaps sort out the future.

I don't think its going to be easy. If any lower division managers have thoughts about this thread and the NT in general I'd love to hear from them. I know the forums can be a fairly bewildering place but everyone is entitled to a view and to post it here.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has posted, and hopefully will continue to post.

There used to be the thread with minimum initial skills and a guide that Morwood put together. I think adding something like "desirables" going forward for the NT would not hurt (Tuck did do something like that on the offsite).

It would be a great starting point if people realised what they have and where they need to get to, with or without any direct human interaction. Of course, I think the forums are not really used that much and that people see posts in their league forums with weeks or month's delay, but we have to live with this.

Reaching people in this game is really quite difficult, but it's kind of vital for this community: we stand a much better chance to retain new D3 managers if they are engaged with U21/NT and with training than otherwise. And this with all the caveats which some people pointed out before (can't ask new guys to spend all their money on trainees over building arena, demoting and whatnot).

I would like to see someone with more experience than me talk about the order in which skills should be trained since that has more impact on training than both the coach level and missing some seconds/minutes of training every now and then.

Finally I think it wouldn't be bad we start realising that unconventional builds can be used for superstar and perennial allstar potentials. This usually requires punting something in order achieve the best possible results with that potential level. In a shrinking user base the number of quality MVPs and HoFs available will naturally decrease at some point (and we might be not that far off). Disregarding superstar potentials given the situation is risky at best.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 12/5/2014 7:28:17 PM

Definitely agree about retaining more D3 managers if they are engaged with the NT/U21 and even just on the forums or the match chat..


Gives more incentives to login and enjoy the game and also understand the importance of English draft prospects= hopefully better English players down the line.

Finally I think it wouldn't be bad we start realising that unconventional builds can be used for superstar and perennial allstar potentials. This usually requires punting something in order achieve the best possible results with that potential level. In a shrinking user base the number of quality MVPs and HoFs available will naturally decrease at some point (and we might be not that far off). Disregarding superstar potentials given the situation is risky at best.

this is what I was trying to say before, but english is not my mother tongue so it is hard to write messages in the correct way. Glad lemon did.

coming back to the "desireable" bit for skill sets etc for future NT players, I feel that there is an unrealistic expectation, especially from some EBBL coaches, please give us (the players that still can and are in a position to train out off position and would like to help out the NT) a "desireable" skill set that is realistic. I think we all can agree that EBBL teams more or less cant train out off position and that div II or lower can, but only to a certain extent. I think bigs with 8 or higher in JR, OD, PS and guards with higher than 8 in ID, IS, SB and RB is unrealistic. I am not saying it is impossible, but I do not think we as a small nation are in the position to aim for such skill levels.

Would like to have other peoples thoughts on this please and I would also like to know what the current skillset is that we people (who would like to train for the NT) should aim at...