#SLOE: People's Basketball Sim League

There's been a lot of discussion about rule changes and why they'd be useful. One key thing is for "parity" and help new people possibly find ways to win quicker, compete with the old timers. For now, let's forget about rules to change and let's focus on what you think GMs need to learn/do to get to winning on their own.

What's do you feel is the most important aspect to winning in sim league?

And for seasoned GMs, what mistakes do you see new GMs make most? For newer GMs, do you have any GMs you are currently trying to model your game after? How?

Rules: 1 point if you give thoughtful answers which I will award after the timer ends for responses. The timer ends for responses at the moment the corresponding week's Sim is run.

Note: Use approximately 5 sentences as your bare minimum for 1 point. If you write 3 long, complex sentences, you'll still get a point. If you write 5 3 word sentences, you will not get a point. Don't @ me.

Due: Sim 10 deadline.


Sent from my SM-F711U using Tapatalk

I think the most important aspect to winning in Sim League is participation. You have to be active to insure your players during TC, create gameplans during the season, update your trade block to acquire more talent, and you need to be around to retain your players during the offseason. If you go autopilot all season long, you will just meander around as an average team at best. I always feel like you get as much out of sim league as you put into it. The GMs who stay active get rewarded for their participation while the quieter ones just continue to float.

The biggest mistake I see new GMs make is playing too passively and being risk-averse to taking a big swing. They do not trade much, they do not train their players, and they dont experiment with their gameplans to see how different schemes work. They just create one plan and stick to it for 3-4 seasons until they get tired of losing and/or bored and restart only to do the same formula again.

I like K-100's answer here, so yeah, participation is very important, but I'm going to go a different route and say patience is the most important aspect to winning in sim league. It's natural to want to take a bad team and make them good right away, and for a lot of GMs, it's hard to wait for a rookie to meet their potential. So they might try to speed it up prematurely and either trade before the rest of their team is ready to go from rebuilding to competing...or they might try to pump him full of points and not budget their banks correctly. Other times, GMs are so desperate for a trade to happen that they'll take the first offer and not the best offer, and not really get a sense of what teams in the league might be able to use their player or have a better package on the table. Conversely, it is possible to be TOO picky, so it's more about finding a happy medium than employing eternal patience.

The biggest mistake I see new GMs making is not getting involved in the league enough to go beyond their mentors for advice...or even not going to their mentors for advice. To ramp on the patience train, I think it takes a good 8-10 seasons to develop an understanding of this game well enough to start standing entirely on your own. This way, you get to see the lifecycles of players and go through a couple sets of contracts to see what works and what doesn't. But yeah, rely on your mentors, don't feel like your bothering them, and don't ONLY rely on your mentors. Check out who's doing well in the league and get their opinions on trades. Most GMs are more than happy to talk your ear off over whether they think a move you're considering is good or bad and what moves you can consider instead. Getting multiple opinions lets you cross reference biases and personal stakes.

Not that I speak from experience at all. So all the following is going to be me paying attention to the people that have won over the course of my tenure.

I think the most important aspect of winning is building a balanced team. This sounds simple and easy, but the right depth can be the difference between winning in the regular and winning in the playoffs. What the pistons have done by gathering 2 of the 3 best players in the league isn't a sustainable recipe for winning. And shouldn't be used as a rule but rather a fluke. Overall, a team should have balance of offense and the ability to defend. Players who stuff the stat sheet in multiple areas should be desired. 2 way players are also crucial. When to strike is also an underrated aspect. Some folks have slow built to it, others have done it suddenly.

I don't know if any of the new folks are doing anything wrong. I would encourage them to all continue stockpiling talent and learning the rosters around the league. Stay active in trades and try and sit on more points. This is something I'm guilty of and am now learning after having my first tax scare last season. Make sure you keep a decent bank, because if or when you're eady to strike. It may take a few seasons. And if it does, you want to make sure your savings look good so that you can push, push, and PUSH. Not too many things worse, than building a contender and having to blow it up quickly because you don't have the points to keep the unit together. Don't do what I have done, make sure you save!

This is your captain speaking

The first step? Actually read posts like these. It's being put out here and responded to by people who know how to win in this league, so, ya know, take advantage of that knowledge. I absolutely agree that you usually get in what you put into sim league. If you don't write articles or do DCs or work in Sim Vegas or Town Halls, you probably aren't gonna build your point bank up to use for developing your players/roster. If you don't trade and take chances, you won't learn what does/doesn't work best. That said, I know not everyone who plays this game has equal amounts of free time, so not everyone CAN do all of those things even if they want to. So, an important thing for sim league is something we all have to be able to do individually: Decide what brings you the most enjoyment and what you feel is your own success and hone in on those parts of the game. If you want to win a championship, but don't want/can't do the things that it takes to get there, you may have to admit that and readjust what success is to you.

Is it a certain number of division titles? Is it being better than your mentor? Is it developing your own draft picks to earn All-League honors? These things are all tasks that one could manage without feeling like it's championship or bust and along the way, maybe you do stumble on the recipe to a trophy. I just suggest to be reasonable with your expectations, put goals in front of you, then just experiment and have fun.

Sent from my SM-F711U using Tapatalk

I like all of these answers. @ garbageman is right, I think in this current format patience is one of the most important things. In multiple podcast you can hear people talking about how a team doesn't have anymore assets (i.e blue pot rookies) to move so they need to look at rebuilding or moving core players. If you don't give yourself enough time you won't have many assets to build with. Participation and balanced rosters are important but if you look at the Pistons they don't do either. (I think I'm going to nominate them for GM of the year for winning without doing either.)

Figure out the timeline of your rookies. Some rookies develop quickly and some develop slowly. Most will be playable by their second contract, some will take until there third. (Looking at you Zepeda!)

Don't worry about points to much, if you have a winning team. If its your first year in the tax and you don't have many points and your a mid level playoff team you'll probably earn enough point throughout the season to play your taxes, roll with it.

As a mentor I will start out first with what I see done wrong. If you are new you need to be patient, as K-100 said. You need to not just dive in and try to be good if your team is in a rebuild. Second, you need to talk to your mentor when you do things like Free Agency. Both the Pels and Nuggets offered albatross contracts their first years that were signed because they did not talk with me before hand on if it was a good deal or not. Thankfully they are both doing well in spite of the deals, but that is because they learned from their bad mistakes. That is the last thing of note for new people. If you make a mistake or a bad deal (get slimed) take the experience and learn from it. IDK, there is more, but a lot has already been said...

I like all of the answers so far, but I think the key to winning is to be flexible. The league can change so quickly if a GM decides to sell their star players so you always want to be ready to strike. Try and keep some assets around to trade but also stick with your plan around your veterans and try to compete. I know this is easier said than done (trust me I know from experience) but that is what makes sim league fun.

As a newer GM, I ask AngryBanana a lot of questions about how to build my team so I can see shades of his style in my gameplanning. I also like to look at garbageman's teams and try to mimic their style of play. I really like how the Bulls value wing players, particularly strong 2-way players so I've tried to accumulate a few myself this season. I have a long way to go to match their winning ways but these kind of rosters are a lot of fun to manage.

Being a newer GM, I clearly made a lot of mistakes early on (I’ll never forgive myself for Ayo but thank you to the Magic for taking him from me). If I could go back, I’d definitely ask Charles more in depth questions. My first two seasons were still trying to learn the ropes so I didn’t know exactly what questions to ask but now in season 3, I’m really starting to figure out those questions to ask. So I hope he is ready for me to annoy him probably even more with questions this off-season cuz the #FillYoPouch train is coming.

Someone else mentioned reaching out to other GMs and I wish I would have done that early on too. I feel like I learned more this season not just from talking to Charles but talking with other GMs as well, mostly from trade talks. And that’s been a great learning process for me is having talked with a lot of GMs this season about trades where my first two seasons I didn’t really get into trade talks that much.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

One of the first things you need to learn is about Salary Cap/Taxes/ Free Agency. I found myself in a little trouble early on because I came in pre free agency and handed out a couple bad contracts that were unneeded or could've been Vetmins with little attachment. I had to trade away points and picks to get rid of those which would be helpful now that I'm about to be struggling for points with a big tax bill.

Secondly, the best thing to learn, which I haven't yet delved too far in, is how to negotiate trades and learn what people are looking for, or how to swing good players in trades. I had my set team that did great and I was scared to do any big moves, but maybe I could've been better in the season, or not gotten swept in the finals if I could have tried to navigate the trade market. That is something I will definitely be looking into after this season and break out of my isolationism policies,

I think one of the most important aspects of winning in sim league is flexibility: Plan A, B, C and D. There are many aspects to this game outside of a GMs control, so if you want to win, you cannot tie yourself to one winning idea and throw your hands up in defeat if it doesn't work. For example, everyone should want to have a team like the Pistons have, but there's only one Pistons and few teams this talented over generations of PBSL. So, things went according to Quail's plan. But for each of the 10 championships that gman has won, for example, did everything always go smoothly? Without consulting I'll say no, it didn't.

For new GMs, I see a lot of 'rookie mistakes' that could be avoided by not just talking to your mentor, but talking to other old heads in the league and gathering a wide array of opinions. Everyone still around today, and some who have gone, offered honest feedback and insight if I ever needed it. In practice, I see this happening in trades. Some trades that have happened should NOT have happened, but I'm sure other deals could have been completed if GMs were open and not worried about getting slimed. I think achieving the best balance for this is soliciting feedback from multiple people. PBSL's best, vet GMs do this constantly.

...Constantly. Seriously. It's no small piece of vet GMs' success.

I think that I am a great example of a GM who takes on bad contracts.
I have to find a better skillset for assessing who is worth how much money and who is not.
My belief is that you can't compete unless you can amass many good contracts.
Not necessarily cheap contracts, but when you spend money, it has to be worth it.
That, and understanding how to game plan for specific skillsets.
Some GMs seem to get more out of their roster than others, and I don't feel like I know how to navigate that very well.

The most important factor is having a plan. When planning give yourself a window of when you you expect to go on a winning path. Look at the league as a whole. Look at trends while preparing. You have to look at things seasons in advance. Chose what players you want as core guys and go from there be patient with intent. I would say more I need to get this in in time to get my one point. I have been here since the beginning before this current version. Have seen basically it all. I would give some trading advice but I need my point. Maybe I'll add to it after. I do have a lot to say .

+1

Mamba
Nate
Josh
K100
Titan
Carlos
Lowry
Jon
Jedi
Pels
Penn
Charlie

Sent from my SM-F711U using Tapatalk