charles, thank you for your patience. to get to the rest of these questions...
b) Much of club level management involves building a roster, while at the national team level it's primarily about setting the correct game-day tactics. What do you think were your best couple of "tactical" wins at the club level, beating teams you shouldn't have been able to beat in games where everybody was trying their hardest? [This hopefully will get a good discussion going for less experienced users too, since it means you can explain what you were thinking and why it worked. The most common post we get in the help forums is seeking advice on how to beat a strong team with a weaker lineup.]
charles, to get to the rest of these questions.. my best win was here:
(10538484)i went 1-3-1, something i hadnt shown all year. i further started a pf at half of the salary of my typical starter at PF, because the player profile fit the defense better, and because i wanted the more diversified offensive skills. i was also up against US NT SG thad whittington, who was playing mostly pg (but playing it well), and knew that my own combo guard could not go at pg where he usually went. i also got slightly lucky, which you always need as well. If UHRojos win that game, they are a more favorable matchup for the great ThatsWhatSheSaid, and maybe Rojos stays inthe NBBA the last 3 seasons...
5) JuicePats in particular used a very different style of enthusiasm management than almost everybody else at Worlds. Was he doing something better or worse than the rest of BuzzerBeater? How would you have handled the tough group we were dealt?
I want to comment on what someone else said, that we were one result away. Technically yes, but beating spain by 46 on the road is no way to get there. If you need to win all of your games, your best approach is to try to keep the odds of winning each game similar to eachother if it's a linear relationship. So better to have a 50-50 chance in each game than 10-90 in one and 90-10 in the other (the odds of winning both games in the first scenario is 25%, the 2nd scenario it's only 9%). I feel Juice violated this rule, among countless other mistakes.
6) Part of the reason we seem to be in tough groups might be that we have a tendency to focus on minimally getting to the next stage and then conserving enthusiasm. At the U21 level, Brasil played crunch time against us and avoided Argentina, while we saved enthusiasm but lost in the semis anyway (so did Brasil). The situation was set up because we didn't put effort into a game against Argentina that decided which group we would be in for the second round. Should we have been willing to give up enthusiasm to end up with different opponents? Similarly, our tough group draws at Worlds have been in part because we tend to CT the semifinals (and qualify for Worlds) at the expense of trying to win the continental trophy. Is this a good policy? Should we care about winning the Americas?
Again this is relative. How much of a gain would it have been to play Peru vs Brasil in odds of winning? you can set up a fairly simple decision tree, and usually it will yield the best answer. In coco's partial defense, counting on the irrationality and complete misunderstanding of the rules by the brazilian coach would have been tough to predict.
THe continental trophy is a minimum requirement for our userbase. We should care about winning it.