BuzzerBeater Forums

Okay, I suggest that we leave the (civil but at this point tired) flame war behind.

I agree - our positions should be crystal clear by now.

Nice, nice, election times rolls around and there's a chance to hear some new voices.

I suggest that TUG do his homework, and run, maybe, in 2084

With all due respect to the opinion you have - leave it at home. This is a debate thread, not an opinion thread for you to beat down on him.

This is not to say I agree with him, but rather to say your 2084 comment is not necessary in the NT debate thread.

Lets focus on our new coach and not the opinion you have shall we?

Please note that with you and JP not involved for the next few seasons - this will be a ground breaking time. lets allow all candidates to put their best foot forward.

It's not about Juice. It's about you and wozz and Azariah and about how both of those guys have proven to care more than you.

In the end, this is how it is.

I'm not running, yet TUG's focus is on me and what I've done.

::shrug::

You have to admit whether his premise is right or wrong. It seems this candidate is hand picked. Fair or unfair even Vice Presidents get picked for terms that last much shorter than their original leaders.

No one can out do the job you have done - lets leave the legacy intact shall we - you don't need to say a word and your better off letting it go... atleast I have more respect for you that way.

yes, the voters chose you 3 straight times. bob marley said you can fool some of the people sometimes, but you've fooled enough of those poeple all the time.

you have a different take on how you performed in the national team than i did, and we aren't in any danger of agreeing anytime soon.

my positon stands, over 6 seasons your leadership can be termed a failure, and you can call me selfish, but running 3 times, and doing worse each time, well that is truly a spectacular selfish feat.

im done discussing you though, so if you want the last word go for it.

i'd like to talk more about the things i would do differently, so if users have substantive questions feel free to ask away. thanks.

Come back above board so you can actually show you should be taken serous for a NT job from a 10 ten population country!

Ah, real questions! There's a lot of ways to answer this one...

For skill distributions, I'd say there are a few tiers. The top tier would be JS, OD and passing--they're essential. With the defensive changes coming in, the OD is even more important, since it gives us the flexibility to put a good defensive PG on their SG. Tier 2 would be JR and handling. I don't like completely abandoning JR at the PG position, but it's one of the ones that will depend a lot on the offensive tactics. After that, I consider driving, IS and ID nice to have, but not critical. I should add, I think these are all reasonably important for SGs, but for PG I'd rather have the others maxed out.

Of course, the problem here is that it depends a lot on the tactics. The handling/passing balance depends on the tempo, JR/IS depend on the shot focus, etc. I put JS, OD and passing at the top because there's no way to game plan around them.

Also, I don't think we're as far behind at PG as you think. PG salaries are heavily dominated by passing, followed by OD and handling, so a lot of these PG monsters are guys that have just insane passing. For example, Italy's PG (Nicoli) put up a 15.0 rating in the final. Qu is a consistent 14-14.5 guy. If he had 2-3 more passing pops, he'd be a 100k+ PG, but I'm not sure we'd see tremendous returns on that (especially if it came at the expense of 2-3 JS pops). Granted, guys like Lizaranzu (Spain) are at a different level than that, but Italy proved you can win without that.

Willis Lundy ;) (Sick of hearing that name yet?)

Okay, I suggest that we leave the (civil but at this point tired) flame war behind.

I asked the candidates: how you plan to solve our PG situation (we have good but not star caliber options)?

What I want is not the name of a player, but an ideal (e.g. skill weights: how would you distribute points percentagewise among the 10 skills before the last line on a PG).

I'd be looking for a PG with OD, JS, and PA roughly equal -- JS maybe slightly behind. Enough JR to have some range, but not a huge amount (say 7-10ish). HN and DV should be similar and within a couple levels of the OD/JS/PA skills. For an Ideal Point Guard, RB and ID would need to be better than zippo ... say at least 5 for each, preferably more. IS and SB would be low priority.

I know your question was excluding the last line, but I'd also say that FT of at least 7+ would be strongly preferred on my Ideal Point Guard (and most of my players) as well.

Okay, I suggest that we leave the (civil but at this point tired) flame war behind.

I asked the candidates: how you plan to solve our PG situation (we have good but not star caliber options)?

What I want is not the name of a player, but an ideal (e.g. skill weights: how would you distribute points percentagewise among the 10 skills before the last line on a PG).

well a few things.

one as mentioned by burlington, the defensive options are changing.

i think this can specialize us somewhat. One of the interesting options is that someone like a whittington, who was almost more of a combo-guard really but used more as a sg by the national team (and either a pg or sf on his club team), could really be deployed anywhere. thad's probably a good defensive player but not our very best but offensively does so many thing so well.

so you are looking for more numbers

maybe js: 15, jr: 11
od: 11 (low i know) handling: 16
driving: 17 passing: 13
is: 5 id: 8 (or even 9)



this player would in the old days be considered blackmarked as being defensively weak.

(incidentally spain has a fairly similar player up right now)

but you could sort of hide that guy somewhere, maybe small forward against most teams (unless were playing canada of course), and let him do his thing offensively

thats one option.

the other thing is if we are looking to run a look inside offense often, the offensive flow requirements have to be much higher than before for meaningful success. so i think you answer the pg question two ways, you play whittington or someone of his ilk at sg, and a pass first point guard, and your small forward has to be able to handle and pass on top of his big man skills.

i realize thats a round about answer, but its important to understand what kind of pg we are looking for in the context of the team.

From the outside, it seems as though wozzvt and Azariah come from the lineage of juicepats, so my questions are:

Do you consider the past few seasons of the NT a success?

How would any of you define success for the NT moving forward? Is it just incrementally moving along laying down a foundation for hopeful future success, or are you a win equates to success, and everything else is unacceptable?

Also, I'm active on the team level (my team), but not NT. It seems as though you have to be in the good ol' boy network to get some respect when it comes to contrary viewpoints. Granted, I'm only going from the experience that I've read from in this thread that contains much vitriol towards URG for not agreeing and challenging Juicepats. Is it mandatory to be on the offsite forum or participate in chats during games in order to have a valid opinion when it comes to the NT? If any of you got challenged or criticized for decisions made, how would you handle it? With venom, or diplomacy? I'd like to help with the NT in some way, but I don't feel that having to be a yes man would work for me, and I certainly wouldn't want to be dealt with like URG if I disagreed with anyone from the current power structure.

Take care!

For those of us who haven't followed the NT a lot (and new USA users), we have heard a lot about your disagreements with JP, but we have not seen you articulate on how you would construct the team differently or use different in game tactics. For us new folks, could you use this forum to elaborate on your different philosophy? Thanks.

well here's a simple philsophy i have and alot of others share.

in games where you are the heavy favorite (and thus the better team, or at home with better enthusiasm etc etc), you want to increase the total number of possessions. If you are expected to score... say 1.1 points per possesion (with a huge variance of course) and your opponent is expected to score only .90 points per posession you have a material edge. This is fairly similar to the report you see with bargraphs after the match report, but of course the report is per shot, and doesn't factor in turnovers. for the sake of argument let's also say that if you get 2 offensive rebounds and thus 3 shots, its still effectively one possession.


With me so far?

Great.

So lets take two extreme cases to prove what should be obvious.(leaving out free throws for now)

Case one:

Each team gets one possesion per game. The team that scores 1.1 points per possession has a 40% chance of making 2 points, a 10% chance of making a 3, and a 50% chance of missing altogether.

The weaker team has a 10% chance of making a 3, a 30% chance of making a 2, and a 60% chance of missing altogether.

What are the odds of team 1 winning or team 2 winning?


well the teams will tie (and thus overtime) 43% of the time.

of the remaining 57%, the stronger team will win 33 of 57 cases.

the weaker team will win 24 out of 57 cases (90% of the time when they hit the 3 ball, + 50% of the time when they hit the two ball), .9 + .15 = .24

So despite having a material edge, the stronger team in this case will only win 57.24% of the time, assuming that if the game goes to overtime the same scenario plays out.


Thats clearly unacceptable.

Now in the other extreme. Lets say each team, same percentages gets 1000 possessions a game. What are the odds that the weaker team wins? The answer is very near 0 %

So if you have a sliding scale, you can see a clear correlation between the stronger team wanting to increase the number of posessions and their odds of winning the game.

Even at a sacrifice of .03 points per posession or so, it's still well worth it to increase the number of possessions.

This doesn't even factor in one major factor: Point differential, which is mighty handy to have if there is a 3 way tie with 4-1 records or whatnot. Clearly increased pace = more possessions = more points in blowout wins

So what do we do in the America's tournament?

That's right, not push the pace. We played base offense 4 times, and push teh ball only once. You could say we played base only against strong teams, but there were cupcakes in there, teams we beat by 30 with base offense and we would have beaten by 40 points pushing the ball. Why not full court press a diabolically bad team, run up the score and really have that huge advantage in point differential? (note i dont advocate FCP against good teams).

This isnt high school football, where it's considered bad form to win by more than 4 touchdowns. Blowout wins help here, and help dramatically.

That is one major area, and would keep us with a better margin for error in some situations both in continental play, and in worlds, though in worlds the effect is probaby limited to some of the weakest african opponents etc.