To the other candidates,
A few questions for you:
1) How will you increase interest in the Canadian U21 team?
2) Did you learn anything from the mistakes that Sparky made in his term? If so what?
3) Obviously you cannot see the builds of the players but how will you change the training strategies? Sparky mentioned that very few people responded to his messages, so I am curious how your approach will be different.
In response to some of the topics in the debate:
1) How will you increase interest in the Canadian U21 team? This is a tricky question. Of course, globally BB numbers are down and Canada is just a part of this trend. I think for me, my interest in the game really started to take off when I had a player make the U-21 team and I think being honest with players about the chances of their player making the U21 is a good start. I'm definitely not going to be committal on this, but possibly having the team restricted to players restricted to those trained by Canadian managers would mean more people from Canada have a reason to get interested in U21. Of course, personal emails and public recognition of dedicated trainers would also be in the cards. In all honesty, I think including others is way more realistic a way forward with the U21
2) Sparky did a great job and though there were mistakes made, I'm not about to say that I won't make any mistakes. Every manager is limited by the players they have and my opinion is Sparky did about as good as he could have with the players. If there is one thing I would like to see changed is the relationship with the community. For instance, rather than calling out managers who can't seem to get their players into good GS, I would single out the quality managers who both manage to train and keep the players in good GS. Given the number of players in Canada at the moment it will be hard to put together a squad that can compete with the rest of the world, but possibly if we make the right moves now we can set ourselves up for a brighter future.
3) I feel for Sparky here as it does sometimes seem like there is no love for winning, but lots of pain for losing, but I think like I mentioned above, if we take the pressure off of having to absolutely have the best win/loss record and make it more about the 'fun' players would be more inclined to participate. This is not to say I'm not interested in winning, but I would be more interested long term in having a committed user base who feel valued by the national coaches.
I also saw someone ask about our best trained players. Of course mine would be Frederico Bastos, who I drafted way back when. He started with 1 JS and 1JR (hard to imagine I know) and has been a 3 time Naismith scoring champion, with 130 TSP (19JS and 12JR now!). Over the course of training him I learnt many things as I am still doing with my Utopia team. If only I knew then what I do now...
Ok one more, how would I build a SF with 85 skill points? Of course it would depend on the other players on the team, but if we are talking strict hypothetical (and the player will have teammates who compliment his skills) I would go with:
10,1,14,1,1,9 20,14,14,1. Guy would be unstoppable for pretty much any inside offence and with 14 and 14 OD/ID should shut down the opposing team. The 14 reb would also dominate. Of course the range, hand and driving would suck, but with some more balanced team mates, this type of SF could be quite useful.
Anyway, good luck to all the candidates. The 'debates' are always interesting and there seems to be a lot more managers this time than I can remember, so good luck to all! Go Canada!
Green.
Last edited by Green Machine at 1/23/2015 10:18:21 AM