Asunto: US National Team

how often are elections? i'd run...down the road, when i'm certain i wouldn't be my own weakest link.

At the end of every season. Every 4 months.

More popular teams? Come on, Ziggy has worked on team USA. Popular? No. Dedicated? Yes. If you are willing to put in the time and effort necessary (and have a decent grasp of the ME) you have a good chance of landing the GM position or as an assistant.

Btw, this is not a knock on Ziggy, I've always been a fan of his. He is always studying and improving.

I don't see that I would have done anything differently this season either - intensitywise. He was in the process of trying to bring in some younger guys so we might have lost some chemistry too - but I doubt that had much impact. We just got unlucky in a few instances. We don't have as much depth to pull from as the larger countries in PPM and that always hurts most at tourny time when they have 10 800 point d-men to choose from and we have 4-5.

We've also always taken a more liberal approach to the international tournament than some of the other countries too - I have players on Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Latvia, France, Croatia, (Finland?) and the UK and in some of those cases you have to promise the manager at the beginning of the year you will train in such-and-such manner or ratio and you will not play high even in the playoffs to leave energy for the tourny etc. etc.
I've never made any requirements like that since it seemed - not to make a bad pun - un-American and I think that trend has more or less continued.

If we really wanted to win you might have to enact some unpopular policies regarding players.

As far as the training goes, I think when evaluating players to add to the team I look at the ones who have the training we are looking for already. Sometimes that means passing on a natural talented kid who's manager only trains offense, but I think we feel the same way about training/energy

If you want your kid to play, he needs energy, if we pick him for the team, you are training him right kind of mentality

Sorry I haven't been around much lately with family in town. But I have to agree with Legg's there is a large group of countries that have way more players then us to choose from. Also over the last two seasons I did not think it right to ask teams to train or save energy on players when they are trying to win league chamoionships. We have also have agreed to not play players when Managers asked us because they wanted to play them in tournaments. With the lack of depth in players I think we are a middle of the pack team unless we want a Dictator for a Manager. I want it to we know that is what I do not want, If I ever have a player that could make our team I would not like someone telling me how he can play or be trained. I have him on my team to win for me.

I am a supporter of Taloncarde for Manager next season. If he wants me to help him I will if he is elected. I also think he should maybe look at Managers like Headhog who have played in some of the big international tournaments for the US for help too.

We need more people to run. I think Taloncarde did an excellent job and would continue to do so. I just hate to have only like 4 guys to choose from. I think most managers are probably a little intimidated to run because of the responsibilities being the NT manager. I'm sure there are tons of managers out there that would do an excellent job and maybe even make changes none of us ever thought of. I just feel the more options we have the better chance we have of picking the right guy for the job. Good luck to all that run.

One thing I know that is affecting us, a lot of our d-men were built and added pre-season 7, when shooting was not as big a deal. So we need to build the shooting up on the d-men where we can, and find some new d-men who can shoot

Tough loss today, they only had an 89 goaltending and still kept us to 1 goal. Sometimes you just get bad beats. I assume the clinches the fact that we are getting relegated. Energy definitely played a big part this year.

Our lowest energy player had 70 after today's game, but as Legg pointed out, almost all our d-men were in the 70s energy wise. Our lowest energy was 62, who was not on roster, and highest was 92.

Yeah, its tough to win games with energy that depleted. But like others have stated, its hard to tell managers to play lower importance to save energy. Ultimately everyone wants to win in their leagues/cups and sometimes that requires a higher importance to guarantee a win.

I think the future managers should be a bit more assertive on what requirements are needed for the team. In particular I mean about energy levels. That's crazy to hear people ran the players down that low! Personally I think the bare bones minimum should be 85 going into the WCH. I think 90 should be the goal.

I went back and looked at all the starters and I'm surprised at all the penalties (despite the higher importance) given the seemingly solid tech/agg ratio.

but how do we enforce it? On top of that, if we add a player beginning of the year and the manager promises not to use too much energy, but does anyways, we can't just cut the player and add another one. It's not a very easy thing to enforce, especially when you consider the limited pool to choose from. Would you rather have a 5 star Dman at 75 energy, or a 2 star at 90?

Its not like we were the only team who had players with low energy.