BuzzerBeater Forums

To all candidates, please tell me the importance of Shot Blocking to you, personally and u21.

Reuben Jones in theory was an awesome player, but he never played like one. SB is tricky at u21 for that reason. I like it a lot. I think your teams interior D is better with SB even in place of ID sometimes. Zone offenses work better with SB, and you have to construct a team that can do M2M as well as a zone D. So for overall roster construction, it is key.

To all candidates, please tell me the importance of Shot Blocking to you, personally and u21.

Ill start with personally, up until recently I really didn't care about SB for my team. I just never thought it was actually very useful. But after seeing the effectiveness of some players with it, I definitely like to see it on my players much more. I think you can do some pretty cool things with SB.

For u21, I would say it is pretty important. I don't really like seeing 7 or 8 SB on bigs anymore. That used to be the norm but the norm is outdated. SB can be used to exploit teams in a very unique way as long as you have the build to do it. The SB build will obviously have tons of it, but the typical build we all always see definitely needs to have SB trained in some capacity. A big without SB nowadays is an average big.

But to expand, it’s tough for a u21 to have SB, ID, IS, and Rebounding so you have to pick which one you leave out. I could look long and hard at a 15 IS 13 ID 9 Reb 16 SB guy, for example. My curiosity might demand me to see how he plays.

No thanks

With the instruction to be train ID until I tell you to stop.

Is not the ID, 9RB is just asking for some sort of a treatment with no lube.

1) My team of BB Elites will staff the pipeline scouting team.

2a) No specific builds but builds that have the necessary skills. Not a great deal of variance for this age group to attain compared to NT.

2b) I don’t care where they’re from as long as they train and manage GS. Some of the best NT players I had were foreign owned.

3) Me.

Personally:
1) SB
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374) Everything else


For U21: It depends on the rest of the skills. I built some of our first SB bigs for U21 but also know they have to fit with the rest of the team and have others filling in the gaps if you have higher SB and a lower bigs skill.

Looks like I am going to have to change my vote

1) With every season that has come and gone where the u21 hasn't had the ultimate success, what can you take away from u21 winning teams that will aid you in creating a tweak or a change in philosophy when considering u21 players and how to build them?

2) Spain's approach is somewhat public knowledge, they have specific owners on specific scouting assignments that doesn't necessarily light up with specific age groups or types of players. Why do you think such an approach has worked for them, and what sort of pros and cons do you see to such a strategy? Do you feel as if the current system that the US u21 uses needs to be tweaked.

3) If you are elected, how do you foresee your working with the NT manager on players of significant potential (occasionally MVP's, and more commonly HoF potential players)? How often will you look towards filling out the ranks with mostly 8 potential players, and what is your anticipated amount of 7 potential players needed to round out the squad?

Interested to see how these are answered as i am reentering BB after an extended hiatus

Welcome back!

1) With every season that has come and gone where the u21 hasn't had the ultimate success, what can you take away from u21 winning teams that will aid you in creating a tweak or a change in philosophy when considering u21 players and how to build them?

We haven't won gold since S29, and the game has changed much since then so I will refer back to teams from S51 and S53 where we had some success making semis and finals, respectively. We have actually had some really good rosters, so I am not sure there necessarily needs to be a tweak on how to build the players. It is more along the lines of the variety of players at our disposal. We get a lot of similar builds, because some builds are easier to train than others even though those harder builds could potentially be very useful. I would like to emphasize getting some of those harder builds created so we are more flexible in season.

2) Spain's approach is somewhat public knowledge, they have specific owners on specific scouting assignments that doesn't necessarily light up with specific age groups or types of players. Why do you think such an approach has worked for them, and what sort of pros and cons do you see to such a strategy? Do you feel as if the current system that the US u21 uses needs to be tweaked.

I think they just have a highly dedicated, tight knit group. When you have a group of managers like that it is pretty easy to stay on top of things, and shoutout to them for it. They are able to keep everything in order and make sure their players are being built how they want, but could definitely fall apart if people start to fizzle away. We actually attempted to set up a scouting system not too long ago, where we had assigned certain managers to certain positions, but it fell apart pretty quickly. There honestly isn't much of a current system, and that is something I plan to focus on rebuilding.

3) If you are elected, how do you foresee your working with the NT manager on players of significant potential (occasionally MVP's, and more commonly HoF potential players)? How often will you look towards filling out the ranks with mostly 8 potential players, and what is your anticipated amount of 7 potential players needed to round out the squad?

I actually know Dubness quite well, and have been part of this process for quite a few seasons now. I know we will be able to continue pulling players for NT in an effective manner. I am fine with 8 potential guards/forwards, 8 potential is still plenty of room to make a very strong guard/forward for u21. Bigs are a little bit tricky, because if you spam primary skills on an 8 potential big, they will cap very early into their 21 y/o season, if not before that. So to prevent this from happening, we have been instructing managers to start by training a few secondaries to make them more well rounded and this has been working out well. 7 potential guards are tricky, because similar to 8 potential bigs you can cap them pretty early if you take certain skills too high, but you can definitely create some depth guards/forwards with 7 potential. 7 potential bigs are nonexistent nowadays as they cap way too quick.


Last edited by Antwon at 01/11/2022 21:03:22