Subject: I.1

I wanted to upgrade my backup goalkeeper, so I bid on a few players. I ended up getting 3 of them.... I usually have to bid on a few because I never manage to be around for the deadline and lose on 95% of the players I bid on (though I guess handball tends to be less competitive).

I'll have to get to work! I dont have everyone scouted yet since I didnt think I'd be taking over a team this soon haha. But I am excited to get to it

OK I sent invites for every open match we have left, including one for tomorrow which i dont know if it can even get accepted but worth a shot haha. so Hopefully everything goes well

Might need to ask for some advice later on in the national team going, right now I dont have everyone scouted and am just trying to get everything checked out so i'm sort of just trying to get acquainted with this new feature. If you think of something I should be doing and you see that im not doing it, feel free to tell me!

ok cool, so won my first game as national team manager! Very handily as well. was on high with them on very high and still won by 12. Was that maybe too high of a priority or were they just a weaker team? still trying to understand that bit

Also reached out to Argentina, hoping they can fill our remaining slots. I originally send one to UK but they went with another team :/ rip

Team USA was definitely a cut above Belgium in that game (and I'm pretty sure there is a home advantage that helped here, too).

Given you've missed 2 friendlies and so far haven't filled all remaining spots (you may need to go reaching for U21 or U19 teams at this point), it's actually a good thing you played on high, since you want to rebuild some chemistry into that team and you have less games to do so - and making sure to win is in no way a bad thing.

You've got a lot of older players on that team, which means they have a lot of exp and probably have a high chemistry to begin with, but it won't be super sustainable over the long run as they will start to lose OR. During friendlies and games you're definitely losing (you can check other team's profiles from the calendar and see your stats vs them to figure that out) I would definitely try to give some play time to any of the younger guys (thos with CL remaining).

Also, if not already done, you should start scouting the highest US OR players you can find in the I.1 league, and also check their transfers from many seasons back (you want guys maybe 23-26, so 8-11 seasons ago and up) to see if they might've sold a promising player in order to find potential replacements for the next few seasons.

It's quite time consuming at first, but if you keep a spreadsheet of the players (on something like google drive) then you can copy/paste the link to their profiles and check on them quickly afterwards

Gotcha! I still am a little confused on everything so I'm just trying to make sure I'm not royally screwing up something thats gonna cost us in the future lol.

Yeah I havent started scouting the other players yet, but I am about to, I only have 2 players on the national team left to scout, so I'm about to start processing all that. Wondering how I can track any players from teams that have gone IA Also thats a good idea keeping the links, I had a spreadsheet but didnt have links on it yet, didnt think about it until you said something haha

I have a google spreadsheet where I keep the canadian players, I can give you a link to view it if you want. Might give you ideas haha (I don't think you'd be able to use it against us much, anyway ).

As for the players that have gone international, like I said, your best bet is top teams transfer lists, as well as U19/U21 match reports from a few seasons back.

The best way to track players that have been transferred is to look through the league transfer list for past seasons for all of the leagues that have been active (not that some leagues that are not active now could have been active at some point in the past). The league transfer list combines the transfer lists of all the teams in the league.

One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes good players get terminated and end up going to a good team where they get developed into a player worth consideration. To catch these players (and other players in general), you can look through past drafts.

To keep track of players, it helps to follow all players of interest. This creates a list of players that you can track on the followed players page under the scouts section of the player tab.

Keep in mind that older players start to decline 1 season after hitting 0 CL (.06 per attribute per day, increasing by an additional .06 each season). Younger players with 3+ CL can also continue to improve.

Also keep in mind that experience effectively adds additional OR. I've found it to be a (1+exp/1000) modifier.

Just a little note that player following and league transfers are both propack features.

IMO propak is well worth the money for managers who wish to be/are national team managers!!The "followed" feature is invaluable as it is always current. I attach notes which also show up on that page. It can be downloaded and sorted easily. It can also be edited. Player scouting allows you to list up to about 30 players for scouting, whose order can be edited. The "market" feature can be customized to a specific target group, which makes it easy to check quickly daily if new players have come onto the market in that area. After 3 seasons, every 26+year player's contract will have made an appearance on the market, so finding offshore players is much easier. If you scout the younger national team rosters, and scout the division one teams and teams relegated from division one, you should avoid most players from slipping through the cracks. I try to check the team I play each day in each sport for new additions from the academy and drafts. A little bit of scouting each day is much easier than trying to cram it all in in a week or so!!!

quick question, how much does preferred side matter? is there kind of a threshold for when you should play a person out of position if he is X amount better than the best person on that side?

An interesting question! I have played players out of position literally hundreds of times in all four sports, , and yet I have no idea where that threshold might be. Generally speaking, it was done to build a player's chemistry on a national team in a friendly game, or in a league training period, where I had little to no chance of losing my league games, no matter who played where, so that I could train an extra player. I have played goalies as centers, defense as offense, basketball centers as guards, and virtually every other conceivable substitution combination possible in the four sports, but have never paid much attention to the performance differences, because that was not the major motivational factor. To establish an accurate threshold would require the playing of far more than a few games under specific settings to have any merit. While one might be able engineer a home team configuration for suitable comparison use, I'm not sure how one would be able to guarantee enough consistency in the away team configuration for the results to be of value. I know you can play players out of position and still win, but I have no idea how much that out of position player affected overall team performance.

I seem to remember I ran a few tests to see the effects on line ratings a few seasons back (using the 5 daily challenges), but it wasn't super conclusive so I don't remember much. It's hard to find two players that are close enough to really do good comparisons, tbh.

I can run a quick one this AM though:
we'll take my team with Allan Gregoire and Jeffery Lemire, 661 and 614 OR, both Ds, one with 230/120/70/120 and U, the other 220/110/70/110 and L, same age, same exp, also both 6/6 CL (doesn't really matter but w/e lol). I've got them on the same line, so I'll just swap their sides and we'll get an idea.

Game 1, with L on the Left and U on the right:
https://hockey.powerplaymanager.com/en/game-summary.html?data=ic-7119929

Line 2's defensive rating = 100

Game 2, with L on the R and U on the L (so ANY variation will be caused by a single player here since the rest of the line is exactly the same and the U player shouldn't get any penalties from being switched over)
https://hockey.powerplaymanager.com/en/game-summary.html?data=ic-7119933

Line 2's defensive rating = 93

As a side note, neither the shooting nor the offensive rating of the line has changed (so either the offensive capabilities of defensemen is completely ignored, or it's taken into account so little over such a small number that it causes no variation in this case)

it'd be nice to do the same experiment with higher OR players to see if the difference is similar (7% here) or not.

I do have 2 wingers that are similar enough to do the comparison, with ORs near 1300 (Matteo Alstine R 404/310/211/211 37 exp and Roberto Weber U 440/325/222/220 43 exp -- yes, they're both subpar for their age, still paying for my fire sale of 2-3 seasons ago xD)

The center in this case is around the same OR as the wingers, so everyone should weigh in pretty evenly in the rating.

Game 1 with R on the right and U on the Left
https://hockey.powerplaymanager.com/en/game-summary.html?data=ic-7119942
Looking at Line 4 this time.

Offense is 166 and shooting 121

Game 2 with them swapped
https://hockey.powerplaymanager.com/en/game-summary.html?data=ic-7119943

Offense is 157 and shooting is still at 121. So this time the difference is 9... so we're down to roughly a 5% difference

If anyone's got 2400 OR players that could fit this experiment, feel free to chime in. Otherwise, figuring that with a U player his contribution does not change on either side, I could run the comparison with a more skilled winger tomorrow. I'm out of free challenges for today xD

thanks guys. for context: reason im asking is because of the National team. there is a player with abut 300 more OVR than another guy at a position, and is much younger, but is a left preferred side, which is already taken by another player (who is about 300 OVR better than this player). I would like to play him on the right, but I didnt know how much that affected things, plus the previous NT manager had the person with the right preferred side starting, so wasn't sure if that meant I should be starting him