BuzzerBeater Forums

The listed position means nothing,it is just what the Game Engine thinks he will play best.

To add to what A1R said, the "best position" is the position where his skills result in a higher salary. As you train inside skills, he will eventually be labelled PF or C. The only things that matter for training speed are height and age (to first order, without taking into account elastic effects and that kind of stuff).

My top player I bought as an 18 6'10" SG with the express purpose of turning him into a PF. I gave him a year of extra guard training to give him some solid outside skills, then pumped the inside skills. No delay in training the big skills thanks to the height.

To be honest, I am hoping to find another player of this type to train in the coming seasons.

I think this is one of the most underutilized sectors of the transfer list. Many people that are new sort of use those projections to determine what sort of player they want to buy. I can tell you quite simply that the last two seasons i have not used the best position box on the TL for anything other than making examples for other people who ask me.

I find that some of the most undervalued players are centers or power forwards with 6'4" height or less and superstar potential. These types tend to have good ID and IS built up, sometimes it's unfortunate and they get the rebounding and SB instead. If you can find one at the begining of the year with good ID/IS and marginal outside skills, then you can probably find yourself a player thats perhaps 200-300k cheaper to develop, and by age 19 that player might not have U21 aspirations but they could very well generate a higher division type of two-way player.

My name is Paul Ogle (23475388), and I approve this message. Ogle was drafted as a 6'2" PF with starting skills 6/5/4/6/5/7 6/6/7/7 (59 total skill points), now 11/7/13/10/10/10 7/8/7/7 with decently high sublevels in literally every skill. Throw in MVP potential and he's definitely got the chance to be something special.

Honestly having rebounding and shot-blocking in particular is a very good thing. Shot-blocking on guards/SFs is an undervalued skill (there is some evidence that it can be useful defending drives, which is useful given the commonness of 1v1 monsters with ridiculous handling/driving). But it's not really a skill that you'll ever get a chance to train much on most guards, so if they start out with 6 or 7 SB it's a huge bonus in my view. Other than that I completely agree with your post.

Another thing to consider, having a player like that (shorter PF) can be perfect to train as a guard for a while in lower divisions when training big men is harder, and then as you promote you can transition to training big men, while giving this guy more inside training to make him a more versatile well-rounded player. So if you're like me and you're currently training guards but would eventually like to train bigs, then these sort of players are perfect trainees.

Last edited by Jon Laurent at 11/1/2012 12:49:15 AM

the problem with SB and REB has less to do with it being unfortunate that a guard gets some added skills, and more to do with the valuation that the market might have for a shorter center. probably should've specified, but when i wrote this my internet was cutting out about every 4th or 5th minute, and wanted to get it in there as something.

You got really lucky in the sense that you drafted yours. You dont have that initial up front cost.

I get what you're saying. However, one of the points that I also didn't really make well was that IS/ID can get some secondary training from things like OD or 1v1 forwards, but rebounding/SB can't really get secondary training from any guard skills. So for example: if I want 9-10 REB or 9-10 SB on Ogle, which I do, then I'll have to train those skills up and play Ogle extensively at C to do it. Whereas for a skill like ID, I'll probably never have to train it since in the process of getting 18-19 OD on Ogle, I'll also get 9-10 ID, which should be more than enough, and for IS, I can get a couple of the pops from 1v1 forwards, reducing the amount of time I have to play him at C.

And I'm definitely aware how lucky I got in drafting Ogle. Especially since he turned out to have really nice guard skills with only one minor hole in OD, it could have been much worse. PFs can either have really nice well-balanced skills, or they can basically be centers with 6 or 7 JS and all 1's and 2's for the rest of their guard skills. Ogle turned out to be the former, and that was a huge stroke of luck for me.

Depending what defense you play, SB on guards can definitely be useful.

Because of the fact that most of BB plays look inside, I think many people have been experimenting with the best way to defend it.

In a look inside offense, guards take a lot of the driving shots. If you play a 2-3 then SF, PF but mostly C shotblocking will defend those shots. If you play a 3-2, PF and C shotblocking will mostly defend. However, if you play man2man like I do, the PG and SG will defend most of those drives. In my experience, a center with 12 SB won't help much against driving guards in man2man.

I have a guard with 7 shotblocking and I notice that he defends LI rather well and can accumulate some blocks from time to time.

Good luck training Ogle. He should prove to be a beast when you are done with him.

Absolutely agree...finally someone, who understand the SB in 2-3 and 3-2 zone effect against driveing

perfectly logical at a higher level when looking for trainees. But these guys tend to push 1M, which isn't going to be worth it to most D.IV D.V who are looking for cheaper, less talented alternatives so that they can spend on arena otherwise.