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Great insight from you about this! Too bad for your loss but amazing season! I'm going to comment on few things on this.

I agree with those saying that 3-2 might be becoming unrealistically strong. I can't understand how the big mans are able to defend, block and rebound so well at the same time. I feel that there has to be some penalty somewhere. If the outside players are unable to stop the opponent outside player from driving in, doesn't it make sense that it would be hard for the inside player to do all of that together in such a good way?

I agree that it's too good as a defensive option but overall the negative effect to offense balances it out. It would be difficult to nerf just the defensive side without actually affecting the usefulness of 3-2 zone. If nerfing the defensive side, they should also make it so players with 5-10 IS can score at least from dunks and free lay ups. That way the total amount of points would increase in 3-2 defensive games but the balance would stay as is.

If 3-2 works like that, what stops us from making outsides player with 25 OD, no ID at all, inside players with 25 ID, no OD at all, and just play 3-2?

Because you can't make 25 OD players that have enough offensive power to counter the downside of having only 3 offensive players on the court. If I understood correctly, DY had only 19 OD on few of their players. This is the compromise you have to make to have enough outside offensive power overcome the dilemma of having only 3 offensive players. So ironically this leads to situation that actually the weakness of 3-2 zone becomes the outside defense since 19 OD players can be pretty easily beaten by 20-22 JS players which there is plenty in the game currently.

I really think it's about time that we change the foul system in Buzzer. The fact that it's mostly based on whether the player has the secret attribute of aggressiveness or whatever, and not based on well - how good of a defender he is - is crazy to me. I mean, it's ok to give it some weight, but it's crazy that it's the main factor. Mainly because we as managers has nothing to do about it, but avoid buying/training these players. If I could tell my players to be less or more aggressive and to do more or fewer fouls, the situation would be different. But to lose simply because my players like to hit more than the opponents? weird foul system in my opinion.

I also believe there needs to be changes about this. Possibly tying weaker of the defenses to the foul proneness? That would also counter the unrealistic builds of having high OD no ID and vice versa. Maybe the bigger the difference is between these skills, more foul prone the player is? Young players would naturally have pretty similar defenses before they are trained so this would help the younger players a lot too. Fouls would become a problem only later if the players are trained to be too much focusing on one defense. This also would naturally nerf 3-2 zone a little bit or at least raise the requirements of the defensive bigs.

As some people probably know, Finnish national teams have focused on 3-2 zone for a while now and we've been able to build these players ready to play in NT already at ages between 23 and 25. Of course the skillsets are still a little bit limited at that time but still shows how little effort is needed to build top level bigs. If they would need ~10 more levels of OD not to be so foul prone, it would take 2 to 3 extra seasons of training which would make them be ready to play much later as well - similar age what players at other positions require to be ready. And of course the OD would take a little bit out of the potential. Although not much, but still might put you to a situation where you have to have 1 or 2 less skill points in the main 3 skills.

But as I said before, I really don't think 3-2 zone overall is that overpowered. Just a good option to build your team differently.

Last edited by atsii at 1/6/2022 1:52:30 PM

But that's exactly my point! The way that was found to stop inside offense is with the same defense that is most effective against an outside offense. If that doesn't state overpower I don't what is. And it's a zone defense.

I wouldn't start with just changing the 3-2, because as you say, people found this solution and based their team builds on it. I also think that this kind of change requires a few seasons notice, to let teams and NT make their adjustments.

In my opinion, we should start by fixing other defenses that aren't 3-2 or M2M, and M2M should be able to perform better against inside offense too. The guards driving inside is something that should be able to be handled by M2M defense. if it's not, then something doesn't make sense and needs to be change, It doesn't make sense that the only solution for each strong offense in buzzer will be 3-2 zone. And as long as it is, it's overpowered.

Regarding salary, I think that in general the salaries and many other aspects of the buzzer economy should be changed. Some of them were even discussed here. But I find it as unrelated debate to the question of whether 3-2 is too strong. And maybe it's important to emphasize - Too strong compared to the other defenses in buzzer.

Imo, LI continues to be the strongest offense. 3-2 zone is likely stronger than M2M at this point. You can't analyze matches unless you're taking into both though, and a manager can't reasonably build a team with both.
I've decided to build a team to use 3-2 zone and to create a less-than-perfect but versatile offense because I want to make it more difficult for my opponent to correctly use GDP, I guess similar to Capali. Maybe having a GDP for defense could help encourage more versatility in defensive options as well? Coaches game planning for an opponent who always uses zone/m2m makes sense to me.

As much as I'd like to agree with you and the "3 offensive players is a huge downside", "you have to build a different team" argument, I really can't.

It is probably valid in the B3 scene, where you'll play against crazy players with crazy salaries and to beat them you'll have to go with a crazy roster too. But is it valid in the rest of the game? I really don't think so. Look at U21 games and the defesnive choices of the top teams (Israel, Italy for example), more often than not it's 3-2. Do they have defensive C's? Nope, just the regular "150k salary sell for 50k" type of U21 players, but they still enable 3-2 with great success and no real downside, even on offense.

And I agree that it's not too overpowered performance wise, but it's too overpowered in terms of tactics. It's not good, when a defensive tactic that kills outside is also the best option to kill inside aswell. Especially when there exists a counterpart of the 3-2, that's supposed to do things aswell.

U21 is kind of a specialty in this game where you are forced to build as good players as possible as fast as possible. This often doesn't allow you to make optimal builds to counter some strategies, i.e. the fact that guards have very little IS. I think the shift towards 3-2 zone is more of a result that it's very difficult to build good SF by the age of 21. That forces teams to play 3-2 since they don't have good enough player for SF position to play M2M.

If you go to NT level, you can see that 3-2 zone is much less used and useful in there. B3 obviously prefers M2M besides few exceptions. I'm not sure but I haven't seen BBM tier winner with 3-2 team yet, though I might be wrong with this one. National leagues also are still mostly won with more traditional approach. Even in the lower levels M2M still continues to dominate, i.e. my 2nd division has multiple teams that focus on 3-2 zone. All of them do pretty well but the ones promoting have been M2M teams for as long as I've been in this league. So answer to your question "is it valid in the rest of the game?" - I think it's much more difficult to execute than people think when you have to deal with salaries, potential caps, tactical versatility etc.

Personally I see 3-2 zone as a counterpart to M2M, not to 2-3 zone. In my mind 1-3-1 zone and 2-3 zone are the real counterparts. I agree that those 2 and box defenses need a fix so we would see more differently built teams and argue more which tactic is overpowered rather than just arguing between M2M and 3-2.

Well, open up chinese II divisions and you'll see that almost everyone that's competing for a title is playing 3-2 extensively.

In terms of U21, you seem out of touch. Most top U21 teams have plenty of IS on guards . Plenty being even up to 16 this season. A single case tho.

Personally I see 3-2 zone as a counterpart to M2M, not to 2-3 zone. In my mind 1-3-1 zone and 2-3 zone are the real counterparts. I agree that those 2 and box defenses need a fix so we would see more differently built teams and argue more which tactic is overpowered rather than just arguing between M2M and 3-2.

Well, as it is now, yes, 3-2 is a counterpart of m2m, but looking at the rule page and the intentions of it, we can can clearly see what are the counterparts and what drawbacks should it propose to games. Clearly it wasnt made to be used against inside.

Last edited by Kritulys at 1/7/2022 6:14:28 AM

I didn't say there isn't any IS, but to my knowledge the squads aren't filled with 16 IS players. Last seasons European champion Italy had around 10 IS on their best guards so I base my assumptions on that. I wouldn't think that the situation in larger scale hasn't changed much. But I know for example Poland likes to train much more IS to their players.

And this seasons WC finalists have collectively used 3-2 zone once this season. So I'm not really sure where you see the problem here but I agree to you that 3-2 zone has much more usefulness in U21 matches than in other aspects of the game.

Also looked at the Chinese II division and I could find that 2 of the 8 teams in the finals are regularly playing 3-2 zone. 1 win, 1 loss. In addition 2 other teams played 3-2 zone in the first final but in other playoff matches they played M2M. 1 win, 1 loss. So I think 'almost' everyone is bit overexaggerating.