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clubber_lang

There some training elements you are missing. Specifically, players over 6'1" and under 6'11" can only train so fast.

What your asking is managers who are trying to promote and make money to sacrifice those elements to take a balanced player. The result is that well balance player who may get 2-3 pops get dominated uber trained single position player. Yes you were able to make a serviceable player and promote thereby offsetting any effects the salary increase created. There were people before you who attempted to train people and didn't have NBBA managers to ask because they too were trying to figure out how to play this game too.

What is really needed is a co-op program (completely legal, but highly unethical) where big men trainers can swap their big men for little men and not lose a beat.

Your also assuming you have atleast a 5 trainer and can avoid the injury bug for 3 successful seasons (Stamina training must come into play at some point)

Your strategy comment outlines why you have depth. Teams can play different tactics against lesser teams and get away with it because they are deeper and simply better. When you get to the top 10 in the world, there are little secrets about their players and what they would do.

Balanced SF's are better trained for the NT level.

I would like to make a very revolutionary suggestion. It is a suggestion so I am okay if it does not go anywhere, but I do want to at least put it out there. I also apologize if this is not the appropriate thread to make this suggestion.

Given the massive amount of time that the U21 NT Manager position requires, I would like to suggest that it be a triage that supports the position. This way there would be 3 people managing it at any one time.

Here is how I suggest it works

1-primary lead who makes all the final calls and is the one who gets the manager designation
2-previous manager stays on 1 additional term as an active member of the triage (meaning when you run, you run for 2 terms at minimum, 1 where you have the manager designation, and 1 where you aid the next manager) - sort of a "mentor/adviser" role
3-when we have an election, we actually vote forward. So the winner will have the manager designation for the next term, and will assist the current manager so that he/she learns from the experience - sort of a vice-president "shadow" role.

This takes much more coordination but the benefits are
1) continuity as the incumbent has the previous manager still on the team
2) an indoctrination period for the next incoming
3) 3 active members to plan and promote (especially since this is in addition to managing their own teams and real-life responsibilities). I believe that officially recognizing the triage system will encourage participation from all 3 members as it spreads the credit around while also promoting accountability for all 3

Just a thought. I do not know whether it makes it more complicated, and whether it is too utopian. This suggestion may not go anywhere at all, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

By the way, I think Jelme did a decent job as well. Remember that all this is in addition to real-life responsibilities.

I agree with you on the difficulty of "community" effort.

However, I think there are minimal things that improve the community involvement and do not cost much: like a more robust presence in BB USA. I feel like the disappearance/drastic reduction of U21 threads in BB USA is what's prompting calls for "community involvement".

Agreed

And additionally, I think it's possible that a U21 team with guards mostly similar to what we usually produce now and big men with only 12's inside but 8-10's secondaries could provide enough match-up problems to at least compete in U21 games. At the very least it's never really been tried.

I would invite you to look at Europe and specifically the mid level countries that are so stocked at either guards or centers they get abused by over or under committing their defense. The position where most of the abuse occurs - SF.

Although I will say this. I do believe the U21 level is the perfect level to run Full Court Press and would not be afraid to use it.

@wozzvt: Imo, playing the 20 yos is not worth the possible increase in performance the next season.~1 pop in experience. It's easiest to get them in on the early games, but then they are taking up roster spaces you may need later. The only get the experience when they actually are playing as well. I can't see starting one of our top 20 yo guards against Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Canada,Peru or Uruguay. You are really looking at 6 actual games plus maybe 3 scrimmages.

(B) We should include the X most promising 20yo's during qualifying and get them as much playing time as possible. (What would X be?)

In a perfect world, X would be about 4 or 5. In a country as large as the US, this type of tactic can be used effectively.

The term is 2 season which means the 20 year olds are just as important as the 21's. I thought the 20's versus 21's should really of been 19's versus 20's. We already know what we have with the 21's, but need to fully understand the gap the 19's have to get to as far as training. (this is not a slight on the game just a thought)

@wozzvt: Imo, playing the 20 yos is not worth the possible increase in performance the next season.~1 pop in experience. It's easiest to get them in on the early games, but then they are taking up roster spaces you may need later. The only get the experience when they actually are playing as well. I can't see starting one of our top 20 yo guards against Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Canada,Peru or Uruguay. You are really looking at 6 actual games plus maybe 3 scrimmages.

In season 12, we went undefeated. Are you saying we couldn't of started a 20 year old? It's clear we may not go undefeated, but possibly be in a better position for the worlds and have a closer ties to the potential 20's managers for the second half of the term.

This isn't an attack, but an honest question. Your response just after my in a perfect world comment prompted the question. Undefeated is as close to perfect you can get.

No offense, and please don't take this the wrong way.......

When was the last time you were blown out by an NBBA team that either chucked a bunch of outside shots, shut your best scorer down, or dunked you into oblivion - this is an honest question.

I ask that because it's hard to digest the decisions you have at the time when you know the team your playing can abuse any hole you have on your team. Oh btw, they also have been TIEing all season so the only wiggle room you have is tactics and deception and if they have looked at your roster, they have a pretty good idea of what your guys have and can do.

National managers who serve long terms have the luxury of focusing their time on building teams - in the hopes they don't burnout. U21's get a new group every year and have to hit the ground running and hope the crop of 21's/ 20's are quality enough to be successful.

I guess I should find out who Chuck Rainey is. I saw the commentary on him but paid little attention because I never faced him.

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How excited are people going to be to get one of their players onto a u21 team that isn't very competitive, doesn't make worlds, and which is known to be nothing more than an honorary reward?

I'm all for the u21 team helping the NT, of course, but I'm not sure why that has to be mutually exclusive to fielding the best team possible and trying to win. I mean, in a best case scenario, any u21 team is going to have at most 2-3 future NTers on it. (Assuming the NT carries 18 players, say, ages 23-35, that's <1.5 per draft class). I think it should be possible to find the few u21'ers that really have a shot and help them, while still fielding a full team that can win.

Well I could certainly be mistaken but I don't think we would be all that uncompetitive. I feel like with ~similar guards and big men who can exploit match-ups we ought to be able to be more than just a punching bag for the rest of the Americas. We might go from contenders to underdogs though so it's a fair point, and if the team constantly appears hopeless, people might lose interest. The community would have to be open to that possibility, which is why I'm trying to be very honest about it.

I'd like to think it will still be a mark of recognition managers value though; there's nothing unflattering about a U21 flag that says "this guy is destined for great things".

I'm also not sure it HAS to be mutually exclusive, but for big men I feel like successful current U21 training is putting a cap on the quality of our NT bigs: U21 big men will never be better than the secondaries they are drafted with, plus however much primary skill we can cram on them before they go salary nuclear, because nobody is going to train 200k 22yr olds out of position for a significant amount of time after they've finished U21. So they either stop getting training around 200k, or get their primaries pushed into the 400k+ zone. Neither of those seems like the best use of our country's talent, that is really what I'm concerned about.

(edit= sorry I have to answer the other half of your post after some classes)

Last edited by J-Slo at 10/7/2010 4:16:19 PM

because nobody is going to train 200k 22yr olds out of position for a significant amount of time after they've finished U21.

Not for nothing, but I've been doing this in the NBBA the past few seasons, albeit with a Spanish NTer. So, it's certainly possible (I made the NBBA semi-finals last season with him playing probably 40-50% of his minutes at PG), but I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about what Spain is doing. In fact, they've typically wanted me to push his core skills more, not his peripherals.

The problem with training peripherals early is that u21 is such a sprint, by spending time on the (slow-to-train) guard skills, big men are going to be throughly outclassed inside. For the NT it's not as much of an issue because NT big men tend to have kind of stabilized inside, so the differences in core skills tend not to be as huge. A 12/12/12 big man on the u21 team is going to get owned. And he's going to be so far from NT level inside skills, that I'm not sure he'd really be able to catch up.