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What you are talking about?
I hat the eleventh pick in the draf,but also if I had the first pick,surely I will not spend 40k/week for the draft,because if I'm sure to pick every player I want in the list,spending less for week(10-20K) is quite enough to see good players and to pick them
And the reasoning is more general than a mere question_first-second pick
I have no interest to train him in the future,because he will have few value for his skills because of his potential and his age...and I'm talking about a 5 ball skill rating,if you think that the other players of the draft should be worse than him,you had to think about the fact that the main part of the players of the draft are useless

Have you read my previous posts?I picked up a sixth man potential,a 19 years old sixth man potential it's completely useless nowadays...but if i pick up a 5 ball star rating,i expected to have at least a useful player,also if he is old and has low potential,your example shows thatthe draft has to be less randomatic to be an enjoyable part of this game

It's out of any sense that a five ball rating can go from "the future best player in the BB world" to "a player that you have to fire one minute after the draft"

Last edited by Steve Karenn at 3/27/2010 9:32:35 AM

I did some research on the draft. From what I found out was that
5* Rating grantees salary of 3,7k+
which for me is pretty much the lowest trainable salary. Below that, in most of the cases you can just fire the guy (unless he has 9, 10 potential and the right hight).

With the potential balls it seems it more or less like this:
5* 10, 9,
4* 8, 7
3* 6, 5
2* 4, 3
1* 2, 1, 0

Player with a 3* potential is a decent choice for guards unless u are in the top 2 divisions of your country. 4* is sufficient for inside players. I've trained guards with star potential. I used most of the time 2 position training and in most cases by the time the guy reaches his potential he is already 23 years old and not worth training. The rush for potential is a little bit exaggerated and overpriced. Players with 9-10 potential are in most cases needed only in the top 2 divisions or for those people that want to have a player on the NT or U21 team. All of my trainees came from the draft. Some drafts were awful but I can blame the system itself as I've never had a pick better than 12th. In season 10 draft in my league there where 5 guys with salary 4k+ of who only one was 18 with a decent potential. In this draft we had 11 guys with 4k+ salary of who 4 had salary of 5,5k+. I'm not gonna complain about that distribution. After all not every draft in NBA has brought superstars into the game.

The thing I would change in draft is that we receive as many points as we have paid for and we "discover" each player and decide if we want to waste second point to get his potential or not. In that manner we could only blame our luck in case we wasted all of our points on trainable guys. Also I agree that the 19 year olds should be given a bit higher skill sets since thats why they stayed in college one year longer.

I think that with that 2 modifications the draft system would be much better.

5 stars for match rating...sigh

Well, to get this back to my initial issue on the math, I think the issue I'm starting to have with the draft is that at this point, I have so far had significantly more success grabbing draft crumbs off of the TL than I have from the actual draft, both in terms of cost and player skills. Since my first draft at the end of Season 4, I think I've drafted 3 really good players, and only 2 of them that fit my team's training plan/needs. Even this year, I think the worst of my draftees was my first-rounder. The problem is that it seems that the odds of me actually drafting a player who's better than what I've can find on the TL for less than I spent on scouting seems significantly lower than what I think is worth while risking, and in the long run I can save enough money by not scouting (or at least scouting minimally) that I the money I save can either be spent on a decent rookie on the TL every season or on a really special rookie once every two/three seasons.

So this is the matter that I think needs to be really looked at by the astute BBs (who I personally think make a great call with the salaries this offseason, which is why I'm confident they'll eventually be able to improve the draft system so that most of us will really like it). Make the math work to get us interested in the draft, maybe by tying the evaluations to a scouting staff position, adding more players to the draft pool, changing the scouting cost amounts, etc., and I think we'll all be happier.

i can't let the chunks have the last word on a thread he started -- but, la fou, i've been thinking . . .

what if we had something like what i understand the nfl has -- a collective scouting of a group of rookies. the way i envision this working is teams would pay to look -- say $50,000 -- and then get all the available information about all the rookies. (this could be subject to further development -- maybe the same balls system, ranking, box scores, or maybe some specific skills, height --)

then -- and this is the idea -- we would have a league-wide Dutch auction -- each team would offer silent, secret bids on the player(s) of their dreams -- i could see each team bidding on up to three players, say -- they could offer bids on each of the players, but rank their priority. this draft would accomplish much:

1) teams could opt in or out of the draft -- increasing the range of management tactics
2) teams could look for specific players to fit their needs
3) giving sufficient clues for a reasonable idea of the player's abilities and potential would remove or certainly reduce the random / gambling factor
4) strong rookies would no longer be free money for the undeserving, but would be fairly valued from the beginning. or, to put it another way, rookies would be more accurately valued before they hit the TL
5) it would be challenging to come up with a bid that both wins a player and does not overpay
6) it would further complicate finances, as teams would have to plan for the bids

downside, or adverse changes:
1) teams lose their draft advantage currently gained now by losing. i don't see this as deal breaker, because they could plan for spending big bucks on a draft choice.
2) multiple bids could be a hassle -- maybe teams could have a top bid, next bid, third bid, using the same money, but once that money is used, further bids would have to be covered with cash

this would add a bit of active excitement to the weeks between seasons, as we would be looking at other teams and determining what their needs might be, their bids, etc.

Not only would this take away the advantage to the teams that lost the most games (as the draft is suppose to help those teams improve before it helps the better teams), but this would actually make the best teams better since, presumably, they would have made more money during the course of the season due to better attendance, merchandise, etc., and they probably already have better players (hence a better team) they could sell and add more to their bank account, so they'd now be able to get a leg up on the draft buy outspending the weaker teams on scouting without the disadvantage of having to pick after them.

would more successful teams not have more money during the season as well, and be able to afford to spend the extra on the scouting? right now, more successful teams have more money and can buy better players on the TL than weaker teams -- i don't see the difference. i think it is safe to say in bb it is always better to be a strong than weak team.

and as far as improving weaker teams, as it now stands, the weaker team(s) may or may not get the best player(s) available, thanks to random chance. as it now stands, my experience has shown me that weak teams and strong teams alike kiss off the draft more or less (i am basing this on the league averages on the team finances page). and after division v, a draft choice is not going to salvage a team headed for relegation anyway -- drafts are all about the future two or three seasons down the line.

i suppose i am saying the draft as now constituted does not accomplish the purpose of re-balancing league competition. my suggestion does make the process a bit more rational and predictably useful. and rich teams have as much chance at that rare 18-year old HOF player during the draft as on the TL.

I think we all generally agree that the draft doesn't help a whole lot. Here are a few thought, all of them perhaps flawed to some or large degree, but may have the potential to be better than the current system:

- The average fan knew who Kobe Bryant was before he went pro. LeBron James, we knew about him, too. In fact, the Steve Nashes (i.e. superstar players who were underrated in a draft) are more likely to be the exception and not the rule since the best of the best already have a reputation and every Joe Fan has watched them play on TV, so you know that any scout worth anything knows about them, too. Anyone think John Wall won't be a top 3 pick in the next draft? The point is, it shouldn't take a tone of scouting resources to figure which superstars are the most scoutable. Even high school players (LeBron, Kobe, etc.) are heavily scouted and known about, just subscribe to some place like Rivals.com and anyone can read about who's who. Therefore, if we continue to use the current draft system, I think it makes sense that the probability of scouting the best players in the draft gets much much higher, instead of it all being really random. Maybe there could be some sort of "obscurity factor (OF)" assigned to the draftees that affects things and takes additional scouting to discover a player with a low OF. So the probability of scouting the best players would be a product of reputation (directly related to skills) and obscurity (how likely will any team find this player), weighted more on the reputation side. That would add both realism (don't tell me the NJ Nets don't know who John Wall is and haven't scouted him yet) and would actually help the worst teams before helping the better teams.

- Let's increase the ability of some rookies. Yes, LeBron James is a very rare player who came into the draft at a very young age and already had skills that, if he were a BB player, would be well above "respectable". So these sorts of players shouldn't show up in every draft, maybe only one out of every, say, three. But there is a range, something between "respectable" rookies and "uberRookie". I think drafting an impact player would be one way to help a bad team, and within one season or two, as we see can actually happen in the real game. I'm not talking instant all-star, but I'm talking all-star pretty darn quick. Look at how quickly Derick Rose became the best player on the Chicago Bulls. That sort of thing should be possible in a draft.

- Or, let's just dump the draft altogether and find a different way of pumping new players into the game. Yeah, the NBA, on which this game is primarily modeled, has a draft designed to help the the worst teams (but with a lottery to discourage deliberate tanking of games), but in BB, the last place teams relegate! It's not a matter of trying to help them get competitive in their league since these teams will suddenly (typically) be the one of the strongest, if not THE strongest team in their new league. Maybe they need these top draft picks since they could likely promote back up again in a couple of seasons or less, and the new player will help them compete then, but the whole relegating/promoting thing is not really all that compatible with a draft concept. But, what we replace this with... I really can't say right now. Maybe it's about scouting a nation-wide pool of players and bidding (I don't like that since it only helps wealthy teams), or maybe there's a total randomness to new player recruits...

It's complicated since I can't really think of something better than the draft, but at least with some alterations maybe I'll start to treat the draft the way I think the creators want us to.