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Updates heading into monday.

We had a relatively good gameshape week this week, with all but one of our players in 8 or better gameshape. Our sole non-strong gameshape is one of our backup/reserve rotation players at the moment, so I do not anticipate heading into monday with any drastic changes to the team.

Owners of 20 year olds will start to see some mail come their way over the next week or so. There are a lot of potential spots for our worlds/repechage/consolation tournament run, so if you have a player in the 7-8 potential range and you develop them in primary skills, there is a reasonable chance that they could make it (especially the bigs given their are only 4 skills to boost directly).

We're starting to see some really good development on a handful of 18 and 19 year olds. I can't stress again how important it is to get players off to a good start in skills that can help you win games long term with the changes a handful of seasons back to the financial structure of the game. You've seen a success story from me about the financial benefits of talent development for just the u21, but developing any player for any purpose really is beneficial, even if you are only developing them during the cup and scrimmages during the season and playing to win in the remaining games. So if anyone wants help with that we are perfectly willing to help, u21, nt, or personal, feel free to talk to anyone in the discord at this point or even shoot me a pm.

I am hopeful to be around for part or all of tomorrow's u21 game, feel free to stop on by.

Quick reactions from our game today!

1) We are too troublesome for teams to be competitive without a talent advantage to get around the defense we can put up right now. Our defense is not good enough to win against the top 10 teams in the world, but against teams 50th and below i suspect we'll see more of the same.

2) Motion is an interesting offense, but i don't know that we gave it a fair chance to show much today. Maybe we will use it again in a future game with more players that fit the playstyle.

3) Our rebounding this game was poor in comparison to everything else this game. Part of that was to be expected based on the bigs we have called up, but watching us play Paraguay like this after getting destroyed by Peru makes me wonder how well we can play at full strength in comparison. Won't know until we make all of the moves.

We have a bye week this week, see you in two.

A quick hitter this time, since i'm not sure there is a ton to talk about

1) We've changed it up a few times now with the offense, but this week's performance in terms of ratings was the best (even though we stopped running it up due to minutes from our bench eclipsing that of our starters in some cases, while our opponent kept throwing the starters out there). Our starting bigs were just too much for the talent that our opponent could put out against us, although i am a little disappointed with Mario Brunori and Daryl Tracy's performance off of the bench. While not massively talented offensively and known more for their defensive skills, i had expected something more than i saw out of them.

2) We sit at 3-0 going into the Argentina game. 4 of the 7 teams in our pool are now at 1-3 or 0-3. With a win in any of the next 3 games, we stand a reasonable chance of finishing 2nd or 3rd in our group. This means very little enthusiasm has to be used in the next 3 games.

While this likely means a 4-2 outcome to the groups, i remain confident that we can catch Peru and Argentina in terms of talent should we eventually get into the semi-finals near the end of the Americas seasons. More importantly, the presence of several 20 year olds this season puts us in great shape to fight for a repechage birth and/or take care of business should we get relegated to the consolation tournament.

As we get closer to the halfway mark, a lot of you will get a few messages on your 18-19 year olds as i would like to know more about what i can expect from those trainees going forward. Hopefully you are all as excited as i am about the future of the canadian u21 tournament, or at the very least are very hopeful to have your players perform at a level capable of boosting your team to the next division or keeping you at the top.

FurYak

We took a calculated gamble in our game this week against Argentina, given we are a bit behind peru in terms of overall 21 year old talent. Unfortunately, Argentina even with protection against their dominant strategy and additional effort was not enough for us to overcome the skill gap that we had. This in turn also likely will eliminate our ability slide into the semi-finals without some outside help.

We are looking at a 3rd place finish in our group at this point, baring some sort of crazy point differential, so whether we go 4-2 or 3-3 will not matter too terribly much.

My current goal is to still attempt to get into the repechage so that our 20 year olds this season can come back next season and potentially give some of the european teams a run for their money. We also have several good 19 year olds that i have yet to reach out to, but i promise i will get around to it :)

So we are destined for the consolation tournament. Not that i am entirely surprised, outside of probably not making the best call in our match versus Chile (we could've and should've won that had i used enthusiasm there in my estimation, but gameshape on our secondary Patient options left me feeling like it wouldn't work), but it is disappointing that we could not turn the talent corner quick enough this season. We did CT this last game (so did argentina). we likely had a 1 enthusiasm advantage, but talent gap did not do us much of any favors.

So now that we're in the consolation, nothing much changes for me, it is still all about pushing the development of Canadian players for both my own (u21 run) personal gain and for your (team development) personal gain. I'll again kinda outline what we are looking at in terms of development.

u21 USA a season or two ago

5th best big at the end of americas: 52 BSP, 26 GSP

Canada's total number of 50+ BSP bigs this season: 0

Talent wise, we should be able to produce 1 or 2 50 BSP bigs for every 5 the USA produces, so the big thing that needs to be fixed here is how do we develop such talent? The answer is not as difficult as it might sound

1) Invest in bigs with 7+ potential

2) Invest in either a level 4 trainer and a youth development specialist, OR invest in a level 5 trainer

3) Utilize Elastic Growth to improve the overall time it takes for you to get skill pops early on in a players growth cycle.

Example growth paths:

5/5/5/5/5/5 4/4/5/4 (47 skill points total)

1v1 @ FW until DR/HA is substantially above OD (3-4 levels). Typically it's 3 pops in those skills per 6-7 weeks, in which you will net a JS and OD as well as maybe a cross pop aided pop at random.

6/5/5/8/9/5 5/4/5/4 (56 TSP)

From here, 1v1 will still train without falling off too awful much (takes 5 levels roughly from my own persective for it to do so), so you can either divert to OD now and train 1v1 @ FW in short weeks, or train 1v1 in full blast until the end of 18. Elastics on Od are best at this point, but sometimes it is easier to pick up secondary trainees for 1v1 training and get it done early, and it only costs

Path A: 6/5/7/9/9/5 5/4/5/4 into 6/5/7/10/10/5 5/4/5/4 into 6/5/8/10/9/5 5/5/5/4 (62 TSP)
Path B: 7/5/5/10/11/5 6/4/5/4 (62 TSP)

Thomas Blum on my team was 47 TSP to start, and has exceeded the 62 TSP on a path B route.

8/7/5/9/11/6 4/7/3/3 with 1 week left in this development cycle.

From either path, you can go a variety of routes. Passing trains last in most cases as it is elastic off of almost every skill in the game, you can get it to pop somewhere between 1.3 and 1.6 points per week if you get a build in either pay to say 11/6/12/14/14/5 8/6/5/4 (85) trained 4 weeks in PA would pop 3. if you train it early (say right off the bat) it trains regularly and would take 6-7 weeks to get those 3 pops. So there is always a reason to develop the ball movement skills (HA/DR) prior to PA in case you needed any motivation.

Secondaries are nice on guards and bigs alike, but that has to be the initial investment to some degree. Trying to get a player from 6/6/6/6/6/6 3/3/3/3 to the same secondaries as a 4/4/4/4/4/4 6/6/6/6 player with 6'4" or smaller height takes too long. The JR is the only aspect of the guard that will take some time to train. So you are much better off sacrificing a handful of primary skill points early.

The key rating for the bigs is IS, which elastically improves ID/REB/SB the higher it is. So taking a player to 10/6/6/6, and improving that player in ID, REB, SB, and IS in rotation will improve the rate of return by 2-3 pops.

Hopefully this insight improves your overall training plan for your players. Like i said, this isn't just for the u21, it's for the player, the club team, and the u21 all at once.

Will start evaluating talent shortly, see you next season!

Salut ! Va-t-il y avoir des matchs amicaux , merci , Sylvain

Not sure he speaks french ;) (sylvincent asks if there will be scrimmages)

Furyak, how is the training of 19-20yo going? This season you didn't have any say in developing your players so no worries about the result (and I think it's better to go to the consolation directly instead of fighting for a worlds spot, unless the 20yo are really good).

However don't forget that there's a perverse effect of not having the size of the US for example, it's that there are only ~10 players being seriously trained per generation. That means only those with MVP+ potential get training (with a few exceptions), and the priority for their owner is not the u21, but the nt (and their team on the long term, not 3 years ahead).
That's why you rarely (if ever) see u21 bigs with 50+ ISP. The only time we do is when a chinese farming team trains him and that happens once in a blue moon. Priority for a high potential player is secondaries at first for most trainers (as it should be), so you're only left with players with lower potential that could really get a pure U21 training, but most owners don't focus on these.

So in the end you have a u21 with really well balanced players, that can compete when used properly (see Cletus), but that can also have big discrepencies between seasons (again, see Cletus!). It's a hit or miss.
Looking forward for "your" generation though :) Good luck next season!

I can recognize certain phrases or words (i took French in HS and College for a few years), but not a native speaker and would not want to offend anyone with a bad attempt :).

My policy has always been to limit scrimmages with the talent that is of age to play well in it, because it gives each other manager and staff a chance to evaluate the talent that we have. So unless i need to compare talent here to talent in other nations, there isn't that much for us to gain. If there is a scrimmage that looks appealing, i'll take it, but i don't intend to scrim just to play a game per say.

With regards to MVP-HOF, i tend to lean towards not being as bent on getting them to develop their primaries as i am with Superstar and PAS. I won't speak for RiP, but i would think that his general feeling is that most of those players, with the exception of the middle height (small forward sized) players, is that they will not be a part of successful NT run outside of backup roles. So i then can look at the active base of both nations. The US, like many larger regions, has a lot of farm/trader teams that beef it's numbers. I think the active base there is much closer to 350-400 users, compared to about 75-90 Canadians. So i never really anticipate having the same amount of guys with huge big skills or guard skills for that matter. We did however have competent guards this season, thanks to one owner who was really good at developing both a 20 and 21 year old.

Our top two bigs did have decent secondaries, and it did work ok for us when we ran patient once this season (the inverted patient, and not the traditional), but unfortunately you have to be within 3ish BSP to be competitive. Peru's top big was almost a full 10 BSP ahead, with their second and third option 7 and 6 ahead while their two 6 potential bigs were about even with ours by the time the season concluded (given they capped out early on). More importantly, Peru had a decisive inside defense and perimeter defense advantage (average 16 OD across PG/SG/SF and average 15 across the bigs used). We didn't have a big above 15 ID on the team (won't disclose where each player is at beyond that, don't want to make it hard for those owners to be league competitive with their talent), and our one player that paced there as a 20 year old has fallen off since being dealt in gameshape so was quite unusable by seasons end. Peru in terms of it's user base is smaller, but have bought into using 6-8 potential players to make millions to fund their competitive teams, so that buy-in is what i am trying to bring into play here.

My generation is only as good as Canada can produce, we'll see what happens :)

Last edited by FurY at 01/23/2019 21:06:34

A couple of updates since it's been a while.

1) We had two preliminary games against teams well below our standard of play. As to be expected, we ran both games with an up tempo offense, and did not see too many problems in both cases.

2) We lost our game this morning to Romania. We didn't have a callup in my opinion that changes this outcome, though i would like to have some depth it just doesn't exist. The best big i could call upon is owned by someone who refuses to manage gameshape, so for now we'll continue to trudge on with what we have. More specifically, they set fire to their enthusiasm in this game by Crunch Timing. I remain confident that we can get 4 or 5 wins in this stage of the consolation and make it to the bracket rounds without issue, but the same in my opinion probably can't be said for Romania with likely less than 4 enthusiasm left in the tank.

3) We have 4 games that feature matchups with teams that cannot beat us in the next 5 weeks baring injuries or massive gameshape issues. I anticipate that at worst we will be 6-2 and in decent shape for the top 32. I'll evaluate whether we should really spend anything on the game against Hungary following the match next monday.

FurYak

More updates!

1) Beat Moldova by quite a large margin as expected, with a few of our 2nd and 3rd best callup options to save some cards for later to win with. Wins like this against opponents not managing gameshape are important in the consolation to keeping yourself well ahead of the competition.

2) Beat Hungary because of two pretty significant factors. The first was i used a completely different tactic than i had used up until this point in the u21, and one that i rarely use in general as i don't find it to be particularly good against most defensive schemes. The second and perhaps more meaningful development was that Hungary's top two bigs were not in proper gameshape. I feel one probably could've been a better option than their backup big, but the other was clearly a no-go. So a bad loss to a CT from Romania, and a good win against a good team with a bit of a gameshape issue at a convenient time, means we are right where we expected to be at this point.

While nothing is ever set in stone, this all but secure the next stage of the consolation, so a good chance for Canada to make some noise this season!

We finished the Consolation pool play ranked 9th amongst the active teams. Our reward is the Makedonija U21 squad. Our goal is to advance, not to win this tournament. In order to advance, we will try our best with the squad available, so please those of you with players on the team make sure to have gameshape managed effectively this week.

If Chile and Costa Rica lose, we will be the last Americas team left in the tournament. I believe we can get to the last 8 if we play smart, and top 4 if we get some decent fortune and see both of these teams lose early. We are the 11th best squad in this tournament in terms of talent, so finishing above that would be my goal no matter what.