Asunto: II.1

Honestly, I'm not sure if it really benefited Rub and Tug to bench Kaleb Leavitt so much this season. The guy is over 800 OR and one of the best goalies in the USA, but he only played 24 regular season matches.

I think the majority of those matches were at the beginning of the season too, so I'd imagine his chemistry wasn't very good heading into the playoffs.

At the very least, I have to believe that R&T could've gotten a more favorable seed / matchup in the first round had he played Kaleb Leavitt a tad more during the regular season.

I am worried about an upset myself. Not that having to face repairmen or cats in 2nd round is a picnic worth looking forward too.

I'd agree with you but my chemistry is exactly the same with him on the bench and starting. I was hoping that would be the case so I would know what do for next season but it made no difference. I benched him to conserve his energy obviously and didn't matter either.

I'm just at a lost for words how my team was dominated. I almost put my entire team up for sale and quit HB when I first saw the outcome. I mean other than buying 800+ ovr players, I have no idea what to do next season.

I was looking forward to a nice semifinal matchup.

Honestly just stick with it... Our division is getting to the point now where we have essentially 5 to 7 teams that can beat each other at any given time.

You absolutely owned me the last two times I played you in the regular season, so I don't think you're doing anything wrong. But everybody gets unlucky from time to time... and I'm not sure that Cactus HC was a great matchup for your team (why I speculated that you might have done better with a different matchup).

As much as it might suck... training your guys well and having a good team on paper is only 1/3 of the equation for winning games against "comparable teams." The other 2/3 is all tactics and luck. The more similar the teams are on paper, the more it comes down to tactics and luck.

Speaking of the tactics and luck. I still haven't figured out if handball has a good tactics "wheel" like there is for hockey. Do you guys have any ideas?

This is why I feel in 30 mi utez I will be a very upset man. Literaly and metaphorically

I have different tactics that I tend to use for certain teams and certain tactics I tend to use against certain tactics, but honestly... sometimes (oftentimes) those conflict and I'm left with basically flipping a coin about what to do.

In other instances, I'm completely 100% set in thinking that I have a good strategy lined up, and then get creamed and end up wondering if my "strategy" is worth anything at all.

Long story short, I think there is somewhat of a tactics wheel, but I still havent figured it out, and I'm not sure it's as big an effect as picking tactics based on the team you're playing against (ie. If the opponent has poor average speed, playing fast breaks... or if their backs aren't great, using back shooting).

I would love to know too. I've been trying to determine what constitutes a "good" match up vs a "bad" match up and how the tactics come into play with different situations. Or what certain tactics match up well with other tactics. I believe that would solve the remaining 2/3 I need the most help in haha.

Good luck in the final, Lanky. As I feared, once you switched to Yery High, my goose was cooked. I think I got all I could out of my team this season!

Look at today's game though... you played VL in the second half and did as well as you did playing VH in the first half. That's bizarre. Either match intensity has little effect, or you just had an unlucky first half.

I'm inclined to believe the latter... since you scored the same number of goals in the second half as the first, despite the fact that you played on VL and got a red card.

If I had to guess, it'll be a decent final game. Definitely good luck, mate.

Did you not have your regular starting lineup in there?

In all honesty, it was a bit of an accident. I was in travel status today, and I sort of rushed through my game planning first thing this morning.

Turns out when I set my tactics, I completely muffed the intensity portion. I have a pre-set tactics setup for each defensive formation, and in my rush to edit the 6-0 formation, I apparently forgot to change the intensity (or forgot to save it or something)?

And the lineup WAS my starters... but it was a lineup I experimented with during a friendly game towards the end of the regular season. I have multiple lineups too (each one is for a different scenario), and I use the "match->planning" so that I don't have to be conscious about always tweaking stuff for friendly games, league games, national cup stuff, etc.

Well... in my disorganization, I didn't realize that the lineup I used/tested for that friendly game a while back was actually the one marked as my "playoff lineup" in the "match->planning."

Most games, I manually set my lineups, and really only use the "tactics planning" as a fail safe in case something prevents me from doing so (to protect against the chances that PPM will blow an important game for me by playing a randomized lineup), but in this instance, it certainly didn't help me much at all.

Well I guess your complexity worked out in my favor for once. I'm still shocked I made it through this group. I suspect I'll be back down after next season.

Yeah... i think next season I might just have two lineups set. 1 for "competitive games" (national cup, regular season, and playoffs), and 1 for friendlies. Even though I pay more attention to handball than any other sport on here, it's definitely gotten to be a lot of moving parts when I have 5-6 different tactical setups, 4 different lineups, match planning, automatic practices and staff training, etc.

It's great when it runs well on auto pilot... but if the auto pilot is a retard (or if I am), it doesn't function well at all.

In some cases, simplicity is king. I might try that out. It'll probably be less stressful too lol.

But congrats on the win and advancing man. Good luck up top next season!

BTW. Unrelated note... draft is looking pretty damn weak... again. I've scouted 64/69 of the 6/6 CL draftees and only 7 are Bs. None were As.

So we have a league of 14 teams... and there's only enough halfway decent 6/6 CL players for 1/2 of the teams to get one. That's atrocious. Especially when you consider that many B players are BARELY even worthy of a roster spot.

Maybe there's a some gems in the 5/6 CL guys? Hopefully... because otherwise, I'm not sure why I even wasted my time clicking the buttons lol.