Thanks for the question jozef, SB is something I should have addressed in more detail.
I did mention FT as something I look at as far as secondaries.
I didn't say shotblocking is useless, I said do not train it, though I understand how you could get that impression. Most of the time our bigs on the NT have somewhere between 8-15 SB, because SB gets trained when you train ID. As a matter of fact, one of the bigs on the NT currently has lowish ID, but we live with it because he has the highest SB on the team. He probably wouldn't be on the team if not for his high SB. I consider it an important secondary skill, and you are right I should have included it in my example.
The reason I say do not train SB is actually several reasons. As I already said, SB will get trained when you train ID. If SB wasn't getting trained with anything then I might suggest training it, but thats not the case. Secondly, if you train SB you are eating up skill points that you could be using on primaries. For example, if you have a player with superstar-MVP potential, if he has 13 SB his primary skills are going to cap out much earlier, probably just short of where they need to be for NT consideration. U21 candidates are the same, you only have 3 seasons to train.
Again, due to SB, most superstar potential bigs cap out way before their primary skills are high enough to be considered. In theory some superstar potential big could reach 19/17/15 type skills or 15/18/18 or whatever, which would definitely be good enough to be on the team. At this point I would take a 19/17/15 player no matter what the SB was, but for a superstar potential player to reach that level they would have to have low SB.
Finally, SB is not cost effective at the club level. The hardest part about training NT level bigs is that their salaries get out of control. Look at our roster now, I believe not even one of our bigs is owned by an American manager. The average American manager has to sell their big at age 22. I mean would you want a 14/14/14 big on your team to have a salary of over 100k? It could happen if the SB was high enough.
Last edited by jfarb at 02/17/2011 13:28:06