BuzzerBeater Community

Training Minutes

How many weekly minutes each age group need for full training?

18-19 years old: 45 weekly minutes.

20-26 years old: 48 weekly minutes.

27+ years old: 40 weekly minutes.

In addition to playing games, attending scrimmages, and spending their hard-earned salaries, your players must also find time out of their busy schedules for practice.

Again, we've tried to leave the tactics as open-ended as possible, so you can have a strong hand in specifying how your players will grow.

From the first drop-down menu, you can select from one of many training areas. While many choices correspond directly to specific player attributes (such as Inside Defense and Rebounding), some will improve several complementary traits (like Outside Shooting and Handling).

From the second drop-down menu, you can choose which player positions to train. Players will only get better with a combination of out-of-game training and in-game experience, so you can have the coach choose to train one or two key players per week, who will then show a rapid improvement, or to train three or more positions with reduced effectiveness. Players should ideally get 48 minutes per week, or one full game, in order to get the maximum benefit from their training. If they play more than 48 minutes, this is not a problem. If players play under 48 minutes, they will still improve, but less quickly than they would if they got more playing time.

The first training area on the list is Team Training, and this works a little different from the rest. When this is selected, the second menu lists three choices for training areas: Game Shape, Free Throws, and Stamina. For these attributes, it is easy for the coach to train all of the players on your team (he can have them shoot free throws for an hour or run laps around the building), and they dont depend too much on in-game practice. Therefore, selecting one of these options will train your entire roster, whether or not they play in any games that week.

For the other training types, players will improve more quickly not only with additional playing time, but also a more skilled player will improve more quickly. For example, a great inside defender and rebounder will find it easier to improve his shot blocking than a poor inside defender and poor rebounder would. This encourages you to develop players with a combination of skills, but there are many combinations of skills which work well together -- you can develop players who will be a good fit for your team's needs.

Additionally, each player (active as of the start of season 5) has a potential which will determine the best that player can possibly become. Potential acts as a "soft" cap on ratings, meaning that a player who has trained to his full potential may still improve, but will improve much more slowly than a player who has not yet reached his potential.

Something to keep in mind: as in the real world, younger players will improve more quickly than older ones, and taller players will train faster in some areas while shorter players improve faster in others. You'll have to take advantage of this information to optimize your training routine.

Another important thing to keep in mind is cross training.This method emphasize each skill as part of becoming a more complete basketball player, and make reference to every skill. Thus, improvement in driving is related not just to related skills (like handling), but also more weakly to unrelated skills (like shot blocking). For the average player in the game, this will result in approximately 10% slower training in their primary skill than before, and additional training in other skills approximately corresponding to that 10% loss. A particularly well-rounded player will continue to receive cross-training but will see a much lower reduction in primary skill training, while a particularly one-dimensional player will see a larger loss. Although players will always receive a set amount of cross-training, it is difficult to predict which unrelated skills will improve on a weekly basis.

Players who do not play much each week tend to lose focus and their Game Shape will be sloppy. Players who play too much in a week will get tired and their Game Shape will also be low-quality. These changes are gradual, and will build up over a few weeks' time. If you have three games in a week, you should consider rotating your players unless all three games are really important, because it will hurt your players ability to play the next few weeks. However, Game Shape is an indication of how sharp the player looked in practice and therefore how well he will be expected to play in a game; it is not an indicator of how effective his training sessions were.

With some experience, you'll find that one good strategy is to develop more players than you can use each week, and to sell the extras on the transfer market. For example, instead of training two people on your team in different areas each week on a five-week cycle, you might try, for example, training all of your guards full-time, selling the ones you wont use to weaker teams, and using the cash you make to buy strong players for each of the other positions.

One quick note for new players: in your first week of playing BuzzerBeater, you'll notice that after your first training update, your players will receive training, but their Game Shape will not be altered. This is to ensure that players do not get a severe Game Shape penalty if they were created less than a week before their first training update.

Game Shape and injuries are reset each offseason, as players reset up and prepare for the new season. Players can be injured during offseason scrimmages, but Game Shape will not be updated during offseason training, meaning that it is a particularly poor week to train Game Shape.