BuzzerBeater Forums

Firstly, thanks for voting me in as your new manager. My heartiest thanks to the person who disapproves of me already. Like I needed the spur, but thanks for the reminder that I need to work

I'm here to do my best, but the team will always be yours, as a community, and all I can do is look after it for however long I'm here. I had my first proper look at the players today and I have to say they're a pretty decent group. Probably not going to turn over the number one team in the world but we'll do what we can. I'll know more when I've done some proper scouting.

I'm looking forward to the season, and I'm hoping we can learn something from each other along the way.

Much appreciated, thanks very much. I certainly hope to prove you right.

Scouting is a little later than I'd like but will be wrapped up by the weekend. I don't think the squad will look very different to what it does now and while I have an idea of the ideal starting lineup for us, I doubt we'll be seeing the same lineup week after week. Tactically I think we have enough options, in most positions we have players that are different to each other, which is always pleasing.

I don't normally like to say too much in the lead up to NT games. NT coaches tend to watch the oppositions' forums. However, because this is the first game of the season, I'm going to make an exception.

Firstly, I'd like to reiterate that overall, we have a decent squad.

I do have a couple of points that could be improved. There are a couple of players, (I won't name them), not in the squad, who have stamina that is too low. I would hope to see starters with at least mediocre (I'd prefer more), and anyone with less than that can only really be a backup. Atrocious stamina is of no use at all.

The second thing is game shape. This is absolutely crucial, especially to a nation like New Zealand. By getting game shape right, we can have an advantage over similar sized nations, and possibly even bigger nations. To achieve what I would call decent game shape players need to play as close to 60 minutes in a week as possible. The wide range is usually described as 48-70 minutes. (Personally I aim for 50-66). I also believe consistency of minutes is important. (Not everyone agrees). This means hitting that range of minutes every week is also important.

I don't want this to appear that I'm demanding you play your players a certain amount of minutes. They are your players. However, they will play better in future weeks if they're in good game shape, so its in everyone's interests to have game shape as high as possible.

Nor am I saying that always bad game shape is the fault of the manager. Its a difficult job to keep it high without training game shape, something I don't really approve of. Also, first weeks of the season are the worst weeks for game shape. Because of its random nature it can be very variable, and sometimes this carries over for certain players.

This isn't meant to be critical, though I feel its reading that way. Game shape is important simply because it isn't easy. My own team's game shape isn't as I'd like this week. I just wanted to get this out of the way before the season starts.

Normally its difficult to get much out of a 39 point defeat. I was hoping for slightly better, with both teams enthusiasm being low and both teams taking it easy. I think its probably to our benefit to get this game out of the way first. Hopefully the teams we're competing with will lose to China by more. Garbage time also worked against us on this occassion as the Chinese bench was rested compared to our starters, who were starting to show fatigue.

On the positive side, we actually led for a while. Unfortunately I missed most of the first half (I will be watching it later) so missed the enjoyment of being ahead of the number one team in the world, but still, I think we can be pleased. We forced a lot of fouls, shot fairly consistently and overall, I think we did OK.

As expected our big men scored the most points. Benton-Evans also did well offensively. We weren't really destroyed on the boards and very importantly, we didn't turn the ball over an awful lot.

I think overall that was a decent performance. We can certainly improve, better game shape on the squad players would help. On to the Hong Kong game next. Another strong team but at least they're not China.

Bit of a disappointment today. We put up a good fight during the first quarter. Both quarters were close, with us falling away slightly in the last minutes. Ball handling was poor, as was our outside defence. Playing 2-3 opened up passing lanes for the Hong Kong offence, and they used that well, as the assists in the first half, especially the first quarter, showed. It was always going to be a gamble playing 2-3, but I felt the advantages would outweigh the negatives. Our rebounding held up well, but we didn't really defend the basket as well as I'd hoped. I feel most of their shots were probably open because of the passing. Hard to say for sure 2-3 was a mistake but watching the game it was clear it caused us some problems.

The third quarter was where we really fell away. The offence just dried up and they started to control both sides of the game. In the fourth quarter we just couldn't find enough to close the gap and in the end, it was fairly comfortable for Hong Kong.

Game shape was good this week, thanks for that. Shame about the result but the performance wasn't all bad. We're still looking for our first win but despite our lowly position at the moment, I don't feel we'll stay there.

Dony worry, the 2 most hardest games past, now we need to take 2 at least, and try to take 3 games. I think that with good game shape, next week NZ could win.

This is becoming a bit repetitive now, but again, a bigger defeat than I was expecting. Its clear looking at the stats that while we were similar in strength to Indonesia offensively, we came up short on defence, especially outside. That's a combination of the lineup I chose and also the game shape of our outside players, which unfortunately wasn't quite as good as our inside men.

I set up the team today in a certain way to emphasise our strength in rebounding. This is reflected in the ratings, which give us a much higher figure than the opposition, but only led to 5 more rebounds in total. This is due to the fact we didn't make them miss enough, and their C outrebounding ours.

For much of the game we played well enough, but the periods when we were dominated were enough to give Indonesia their big win. Interestingly our backups played well, giving me much to think about when setting future lineups, and it does indicate we have some depth.

Results elsewhere show the gap between what you might describe as the stronger nations and then the rest of us, with no shocks so far. Next week we have Malaysia, who I'm hoping will view us as one of the weaker nations. They're unbeaten of course, as have been all the other teams we've played so far. I haven't given up hope yet and hope you haven't either, I do feel we're getting close to a good performance/result.

This was a hard defeat to take. Going into today's game (yesterday's by now to you) I knew it was going to be tough. Having lost one of our big men to a two week injury weakened us a bit, and Malaysia certainly seemed to have better guards than us, and they'd already won two games to our none, it seemed to me we needed to gamble a bit to have a chance.
I felt they'd go motion against us, it attacked us where we were weakest, so I felt our best option was to sell out and try to defend outside. So I went with a 3-2 defence and also used gdp. Offensively I thought they would predict inside, since it was a must win game for both of us. In the end they went with the sensible option as the stronger team and didn't predict. My feeling that they would predict is probably what cost us the game in the end.
The game itself went fairly well. We had the blow of losing Fisher to a foul out, but that wasn't a big factor as we had good backup for him. The injury was slightly more of a factor as Bertrand was having a decent game at SG.
For the most part Malaysia had the lead in the game, but we kept chipping away, and in the fourth, their star PG fouled out, and we too the lead and it seemed momentum was with us. Most of the time I think we would win the game from there. But an unfortunate run of bad shot choices led to Malaysia retaking the lead in the last two minutes, and we were unable to close the gap, in what looked a panic stricken last minute.
This one really hurt, as it looked like it was going to be a special day for us. Qualification is now impossible, though the nature of the loss was bad enough in itself.
We have a week off now, during which I'll be whinging about the game engine every time I log on.

Too bad, But The two next games are easy games, so we will win them. we received a hard schedule
is not easy at all. bad lack. we need win the next 2 games and finish this group in the 5th place.

The news today is: no news at all. Game hasn't happened yet. 14 hours now since the game was supposed to start and still no sign of it. No real apology either, just a this is how it is news post.