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One question for each candidate:

Juice: how do you explain the loss against Australia (which arguably made everything more complicated)? none of our peer countries (Spain, Italy, the Netherlands) lost against them.

In particular, how would you put us in a position where our success does not depend on an (exciting, but costly) streak of risky gambles?

Gunner: you seem to have gone from one of the coolest managers in Div. II (making the playoff your first season there) to not even making the playoffs and playing crucial games with questionable tactics (Patient offense in a crucial game?). How do we know which of these two managers would show up at the helm of the NT?

coco i think my earlier answer will address alot of your questions, but i got married may 9th. i promise you i won't have a bigger event in my life anytime soon, if ever, so the crap performance this season can be easily explained.

i also made the finals season 2 in d2. season one with an identical record to this year i came in 4th, and bowed out without making the game super interesting.

while i could do some limited player checking and mild limited banter on the forums via iphone, the iphone doesnt really do a good job of setting lineups (not horrible actually but often getting in the right players is a challenge)

i did all of my lineup setting remotely the week before. i was hoping for a certain # of losses from the 4th place team, and if i made the playoffs great, if not no big deal. i had punted on trying to win the season after selling my starting PF and my 3rd best guard (who saw a ton of minutes since i was playing my best player at SF frequently for obscure training reasons)

i dislike the patient tactic immensely in general, but with 4 games left i had 2 sure wins (a bot and a crappy team that lost their relegation playoff), and 2 games i wasn't expecting anything out of. i thought that if i won big and lost small point differential alone might carry the day. (as you know everyone at d1 and d2 can brutalize a bot, its just a question of how badly)

with the nt, there is no training really to worry about, and while there is a long range vision, a country of our size and resources must be trying to win NOW first and foremost. so you will see me full guns blazing, opening up to ideas from everywhere, and taking it to teams, running up the score when approrpriate and playing to maximize our win chances other times. While intuitively you'd think slowing the pace does that, experience shows the decrease in offensive efficiency just merely ensures a close loss, instead of a close game, so you'd be unlikely to watch me whip out princeton or patient etc etc.

Last edited by TheUnrepentantGunner at 6/2/2009 7:15:29 PM

I also have a good RL reason of course. I got married. In a related story, i punted on the season about a week before my wedding. I am now married, and have no major RL events on the horizon, barring some catastrophe that may or may not be 9 months away (kidding, sort of)

i don't like this. As a person, I totally understand and can sympathize. But, as anyone who as played Hattrick can understand, I don't want our NT manager to "punt" on a season, because he had a baby or other such thing.

You SHOULD take care of your RL before BB, but that isn't a great quality in a NT manager.

Just my two cents, for both of you.

Daniel

fair enough. i would always put something that big before BB, but again i promise that i have no such items on the horizon :)

i can also say i would take the national team much more seriously than my own, as i'd have the hopes of thousands riding on my shoulders.

We have 7 people registered, only three speeches, and only two candidates in the debate thread.

Let's go!

2) flatout better tactics. this partially surprises me since i thought you almost helped build the engine. i mean you live near harvard where charles et al created the game engine. I have had to try my best to reverse engineer it, and i havent gotten it 100% right. i will have to watch my games and not just the box scores to track the statistics i truly want to track this year as well. that is a huge disadvantage yet i still feel with equal teams and on a neutral court i could win 55 out of 100 against you. that seems minor but its really huge.

While the BBs do not typically intervene in elections or speeches, I want make sure that everyone understands that none of the GMs (except those who were BBs in the past, and GM-JuicePats was not one of these) has ever seen the code that goes into the site or the game engine, nor do they have an increased understanding of it through their interaction with the BBs.

Hey I am a new candidate and if you have any questions you want to ask me, fire away.

What do you bring that makes youo the best option. From what i can see you have niot had success in the cup and last season you were middle of the road in D III

I didn't do well in the cup because my first game was against a D2 team and I played my scrubs to get them their training and keep my star players with good game shape. last year was my first year in D3 and I didn't have the talent needed to be a dominant force. I also suffered a few injury setbacks during the middle of the season which caused a few losses.
I think I am the best option because I am new fresh, blood who is good at using tactics, seeing the best talent among players, and helping set training plans to maximize player strength. I am fun and creative and you will never be bored with me being the coach.

Coco, we can't be too sure on this.

but one center with real shot blocking ability for sure. i really hope each team doesnt have like 15x blocks a game, but if they f'd up thats what the game engine might yield

one very defensively minded center for a 1-3-1 to pair with one extremely defensively minded point guard.

I am suspecting that point guards with high passing in general will increase as well as both assists and turnovers may become more prevalent.

i think it will take alot of watching the actual games (not the box scores) and charting stuff to get enough of a sample size to try and get the changes near right.

i am open to ideas on what other people see.

A question for all the candidates:

are there any types of players that you would not have normally sought given the old GE and that you now think you should probably seek (in light of the new, modified, engine)?

To this I'm going to say not really, since the guys that project to be on team as far as I can tell are already the top guys, and actually have shotblocking skills.

The players that project to be on the team are the best under both the old and new GE, so it will probably be of minimal impact.

That said, with this season being Americas qualifying, we're fortunate to get a full season under the new GE before the next Worlds, so we can see what the true impact is and adjust accordingly if the situation requires it.