BuzzerBeater Forums

Hello Everyone - I am extremely excited to place my name among these other well qualified candidates. I will not waste my time and comment on any of these other amazing managers, but what I will do is present my humble case for this position. This will be my second season in BuzzerBeater, and hopefully I will gain my second league title in a stacked III.8 league! Last season I had some learning to do, as I started off as a bottom feeder. I was able to do some serious analytic tracking and overhauling of the team I inherited, and ended up rattling off 16 straight victories en route to my first career title. As the NT team manager, I plan on consistently being involved. I will never stop considering lineups, players, strategy, etc. My plan will be centered around the community and finding out the best talent this great nation has to offer. USA will reign the best in the world and never look back. I will be open to questions, comments, concerns, ideas, and even some fun chatter with the community, as this game is meant to bring us all together and have a great time (while winning many games of course)! I hope you all the best this coming season, and humbly hope for some votes to come my way!

Hello RonDuranr!

Welcome to buzz first of all, however I do see that you are in your 2nd season as you’ve stated.


My question for you is, what experience do you have training such players to run uh, let’s say a nice Look Inside Offense. Give me a skill set of a nice look inside big man that’ll dunk on the competition…I see other candidates are also very seasoned so feel free to chime in. We have lost to Italy 2x in a row and there’s reasons that myself and the staff are looking into.

tough

Thank you Mr. Tough!

I am a firm believer in a versatile big man. My main addition last season was a Center, Mr. Rillo, who helped carry me to a title. No matter what offense you run, I love to have someone who can hold down the middle offensively and defensively. If guards from another team can drive past our exterior defense, I need someone who will rim protect and rebound in the same boat. Rebounding is the way to end any possession, or extend an offensive stretch. Guards need to compliment the big men as well - having good handles and driving skills help to set up easy assist opportunities. That is what I used to have my big men succeed the most!

To beat Italy: Donkey Bigs will get us to the finals in most cases, but they won't win them; Italy didn't rely on theirs and everyone was terrified of them for most of the season. I don't even think they start either of them if they were both in 9 GS. Allowing our beasts vs their beasts to clobber each other all game is not a recipe for success for either team. Their manager also used the knowledge that we would be going inside for the finals, probably because he scouted how we "performed" in outside offenses, most notably against Spain, and knew that our two donkey* bigs would be the stars, so he put his specialist bigs in, and instead let his SGs and SFs taked over 50% of his shots.

We need more specialists, more variety in the type of players we have, and to maybe actually use a non-inside offense in a big game once in a while. Teams who went outside or neutral are now 6-0 in finals since season 35 against teams who went inside.

And FTs matter more than ever. The average FT skill for the starting 5 in our game was 8.8. That's just not good enough.

*To Sherrod and McClelland's credit, they weren't the most donkey of bigs we have ever had, but not good enough for the finals.

Last edited by oriolekid at 07/03/2021 10:11:04

Here is my question to the candidates:

To the incumbent GForce: you’ve done well as the U21 manager through 2 terms, narrowly missing gold this past season. I’ve really liked the way you interact with the community, you’ve built a great pipeline, and you’re very tactically sound at the game. From your perspective, what are some of the things that you have done right to help lead USA to success? On the flip side, what are some things that you think you could improve on?

To the challengers: what have you seen from GForce or any other previous manager that you appreciate and want to carry into your term? What are some things that you’ve seen that need improvement, or ways that the manager could build the team differently that you would be willing to try? And not specific to game by game tactics, but also in terms of community outreach, training, creating a pipeline, and working with a wide variety of USA managers.

From GForce: he wasn’t afraid to message managers to tell them to train GS for the last two. People had 40 weeks to get their guy there, 2 more weeks wasn’t going to win us gold, but 9GS could. If it’s happened before, terrific. GForce is the one I saw it work the best with.

It’s a double edged sword when it gets to interacting with the community. GForce always asks us what we want to run tactically, but for the finals especially, you could tell he wanted to go Motion more than LP. He went with LP but maybe his guy instinct would have been better. Now, as much as I like to joke about Princeton, I’m not going to run it more than once or twice for games we will clearly Winn irregardless of the tactic. But I think I could stick to my guns about doing something against the status quo.

I would communicate with managers of the new 18 year olds to see if any prospects aren’t likely to be good enough to make u21 trained like everyone else, but instead would search for players that could make u21 with some niche, interesting builds. At least do it a bit more than previous managers have.

Andddd, I have off Saturday, Sunday and most importantly Monday. That may seem strange that I would bring that up, but I would be fully free to scout, plan, and watch all games.

I can't agree more on the FT skill, it is a deciding factor when it comes to big games. However, it is really hard to force U21 managers to get a training court, as some of the teams are only around for so long, I want to say it is a must-have, but we are not going to skip certain players due to a lower than optimal FT.

As far as the tactics go, we do have versatile players, the Motion against Spain was more of a smokescreen I want to make it clear, as we were starting sub-optimal players for Motion at that game due to game shape reasons. I did consider guessing PtB against the Italian team in finals, however, the Buzzerbeater game engine is still way too ass to put my faith upon guessing the opposite manager choosing such tactics, so hats off to Davide_12.

Moreover, I want to make it clear that, Sherrod and McClelland are definitely finals material, given how similar they are to the other bigs on the Italian squad, Torroni is just a unicorn for the U21 scene, whom we should definitely take into consideration when we are building different types of players.

While we want more specialists, it is already hard enough to get enough managers to train their guys properly, I have seen so many talents go to waste due to negligence of proper training, or ANY training per say. I have tried reaching out multiple times to BB-Mail but there is only so much we can do if the managers decide to let their draftee rot.

Thanks for the question Nick22.

I'm glad my communication was clear to everyone and best of all, I didn't offend anyone through my 2 terms. A couple of things I think I have done pretty successfully was:

- The extensive scouting, I usually go beyond the normal cut-off salary and scout more players than needed in order to find some diamonds in the rough, though rarely called upon, it is good to know that we have the depth if needed, even for decoy purposes.

- I'm not afraid to use guys with specialties, as most are aware, shot-blocking bigs, we have seen how effective Torroni is, so I will always be an advocate of utilizing guys like that even at the expense of some offense.

Things that I think I can improve on:

- Be bold and trust myself more, when it comes to making the final decision in big games. I was thinking I shouldn't have wasted the time these managers have put in to get us to the final stage. However, I can be a little more selfish sometimes, it is my legacy as a U21 after all, I live or die with the decisions I make, whether if the result is positive or negative, as long as that decision is reasonable. Looking back at the game against Italy 3 seasons ago, the decision of going Inside Isolation actually was not a bad decision, not going POCT actually cost us the game.

With the ups and downs from the last 4 seasons, I think I'm well equipped to make one final attempt at Gold, should I get elected again.

I would like to thank all of you for the week of questions, here and in he discord. I know I'm not the favorite, and I don't have major complaints with GForce, but is he really desrving of being the first manager to manage for a 3rd term? What has he done to earn that? America wins, and getting beat by Italy twice? What makes you think he will will succeed with a 3rd chance?
I think you all should roll the dice on me. I've spent too many seasons working closely with the U21 that I can't fail. I've learned from some of the best managers over the last 45+ seasons to flunk. I would do well, and I believe I would win the Gold.

Thank you all, and I hope I have your vote!

Last edited by oriolekid at 07/05/2021 14:52:04