Zadeva: Tips on player development for National Team purposes

Hello guys,

I figured we could set up a thread to give some guidelines to the GMs of Canada for the optimal way to groom players. As we get more experience at running National Teams (NT), we learn what makes a player effective. It might be interesting to share this information with other managers in order to develop the best players for our NT as well as allow the most managers to try to send players to the NT (and get the training bonus. Win-win.

I encourage other managers to discuss this topic to bring more to the conversation and perhaps improve my/our knowledge.

*Warning: if you do not have lvl 14 or 15 training facility, your players are very unlikely to reach the level necessary for NT at the U18 or U20 level. You may, however, want to consider sending your good young players to the market in order to get some money (to build your facilities) and get those players developed by another team.

If you have lvl 14 training facilities (TF), your priority should be to get the lvl 15 TF as well as lvl 15 Sports Academy (SA) and 2x 200 OR coaches (and 2x 200 OR sporting directors). The ultimate priority is to maximize training output, because no matter how you develop the player, without the optimal training, it will not be good enough for NT. I would even argue that medical facilities should be high because injuries can disrupt a good development.

Now that you have optimal training conditions, your young U18 player trains anywhere from 1.5 to 1.9 point per day (PPD) depending on his Qs mostly. In training camps, they can train as much as 4 to 5 PPD. Overall, in a season, players should go up around 200 points. SA will have a big impact on the starting OR of your players and that has a huge impact on the players rating at 18 or 20 years old. As a guideline, a player that is not 500 OR by the end of his 15 yo season is probably not on track for the NT (unless his Qs are amazing and/or he plays a position of need).

Now, as far as what to train to make the best players, the guide covers most points quite well:

(In parentheses, find my general preference of development, of course, each case is different with different Qs)

Centers need Offense (100%), shooting(90), passing (50) and technique (50).
Wingers need offense (100), shooting (90), technique (50) and aggresiveness (50)
Defensemen need Defense (100), passing (50), technique (25*) and aggressiveness (50). If the player has strong shooting Qs, that should also be developped (70). If not, make him a defensive defenseman.
Goalies need Goaltending (100), passing (50) and technique (50). Some people feel that D has some impact on the players' effectiveness, but I have not witnessed a strong correlation here, so I would not advise putting points in this category at this point.

*There is debate on how much technique you should train on a defenseman. I feel, especially at a young age, half of the secondary attributes is plenty. Training it more would take away from more important skills and make the player overall less effective. Also, the link between penalties and technique is not strong enough to warrant a big investment in this skill. (IMO)

I feel strongly about the importance of the shooting attribute. 90% of the offensive attribute is not always realistic at such a young age, but I would still advise to invest in it more than the secondary attributes unless the player has very weak Q for it.

Another way to make your player more interesting for the NT is to find a role for that player. We need specialists on the team to play the PK and PP. At the U18 level, we need defensive defensemen (400+ D), defensive forwards (players with 50+ in D), offensive D (150+ shot) and offensive forwards obviously. Note that an offensive D should still have around 350 D. Lower than that would make that player too much of a liability 5-on-5 and tough to put in the lineup. Role players can be one way to get your player in the lineup if he does not have a great shot.

Lastly, and I have addressed this before, I feel that people should try, when possible, to host their training camps away from the last week of the season if they have players on the national team. At this period, we have the world championships (WC) and the NT plays every day. Two considerations here: (1) the lost training bonus and (2) having our players as ready as possible for the beginning of WCs.

There is a training bonus (of around +40%) that is lost if the training bonus of the training camp is applied at the same time. NT can play up to 9 games in a row in WC. If you have optimal training, each day you would lose more or less 0.8 points, for around 7 points per season. I realize that it is a small number, but if you apply it for his 17 and 18 seasons as well as 19 and 20 (for the best players), that is 28 points that have some value.

More importantly, each training camp can improve your players by more or less 30 points (almost 20 points more than regular training output for a week). We would prefer to have these additional points on the player at the beginning of the tournament. At 18 years old, when players are around 1100 points and each team is similar, that is a valuable difference.

This is all. A very long post, but I hope it contained some valuable information. Some of it is definitely up for discussion, but it provides some guidelines.

Overall Samuel, an excellent article with many good tips and pointers.

I might argue that IMO, shooting for forwards need not necessarily be as high as 90, but could be as low as 75 and still be effective depending on training percentages.
There are 3 factors involved in the selection of national team players.
1) His total OR for his age and it's distribution regarding his positional attributes.
If you wish to see how your player stacks up against the national team, check his OR number against the lowest player currently on the team. If it is lower, he has little chance of making the team. If it is significantly higher, he may have been overlooked and should be brought to the GM's attention.
2) Chemistry
Chemistry on the national teams is totally separate from his league chemistry, and does not start to build until he makes the team.
Most national team players will have at least some team chemistry. Yours will start at zero unless he has been recently cut by that same national team. When a player is cut, he retains one half his chemistry which decreases daily becuase he is not playing.
3)Experience
Experience is carried over to the national team, so it is to your advantage to play him in league games if you can do so without jeopardizing your chances for a win.

There are performance bonuses for both chemistry and experience so more of either is better.

If you have any further questions, I am sure that Samuel or I can answer them for you. If not, we will go looking for the answer.

Regarding shooting, you may want to read:
ppm.powerplaymanager.com/...

You can see why I train 90 shooting.

I recall reading that article in the past. I couldn't remember the exact percentages you arrived at, but I do remember deciding to start with 80% and adjust up for players who had higher shooting training percentages and marginally down for players with lower training shooting percentages.

Generally speaking, most of my players major attributes, whose attribute training percentage is higher than the overall training percentage, have some sort of increase added so that the overall real training percentage of the player is higher.

I remember reading your article in the past. Great stuff. I went through it again and looked through the comments section. There was one comment that echoed this impression that I have now: that technique influences the quality of shots. Of course, forwards develop technique, so there isn't much to look at, but defensemen train different levels of technique... Some as high as the secondary attributes, some half of it. Since writing your article, have you noticed a similar trend?

My main reflexion is based around the U18 team. One guy in particular, Dawson Duerden. He was my player. I tried to develop him to be a PP specialist. I trained his shot quite high for a defenseman of 18yo (over 230), but I haven't noticed much success from him offensively... Even in terms of generating chances. I have been mostly disappointed with his play and so I am not using him as regularly as others.

As the PP keeps being inexistant for us at the U18 stage, I am looking for answers. I know a 4 fwd PP unit doesn't really yield particular results.. maybe I haven't focused on the right attributes from my players on the PP? Could defensemen with high tec be part of the solution?

I went and looked at the stats of my offensive defensemen that were on the NT to try and answer that PP question.

Alexander Gregoire, played all 4 seasons in the NT tournament from U18 to u20, as an offensive specialist. 1 Goal, 7 assist in 24 games (took 26 shots total, 10 PIM).
His distribution is around 10:1:3:5:4:5 (defense, offense, shooting, passing, tech, aggressiveness)

William Sutton, also played 4 seasons for the NT
0 goal, 4 assists, 22 games (23 shots, 22 PIM)
He's 6:1:1.5:3:2.3:3 (so I gave him more offense, but he has a similar distribution than Gregoire otherwise)

Rory Stinson, only played his 2nd seasons with the NT
1 assist and 3 shots in 10 games... 0 PIM, though
He's essentially 6:0.5:1.5:3:3:3 (these ratios are hard to explain and I can't math for percentages...)

Now we get into the juicy stuff. 2 past NT defensemen that were NOT offense oriented (I do still train their shooting a smidge)

Eddy Bibby
1 goal, 6 assists, 18 shots in 23 games, 8 PIM
He's about 10%, 10%, 14%, 50%, 45%, 50%
Did not play on the PP as far as I remember, and was even behind Gregoire so I think he was on the 3rd or 4th line until his last year on the NT

Eddie Kaye
2 assists, 7 shots in 18 games, 12 PIM
he was 2:1:1:1 for the main attributes during that time, with his basic offense attribute (31) and about 60 points in shooting at the end.

Non NT members and their regular season stats, for fun (these other guys did not play enough games on my main team to be relevant yet)

Niko Zucic
40 goals and 109 assist (149 TP) in 249 career games (274 shots, has been on the PP his entire career). 92 total PIM
His distribution: 8:1:2:4:3.5:4
(yep, he's got 120 in offense)

Daryl McNabb
54 G, 192 A, 246 TP in 461 games. 300 PIM, 544 shots
First line D and PP and PK units for most of his career, too.
Distribution: 8:0.2:1.3:4:2.8:4

And last but not least: Oskars Jurjanis, the defensive specialist
15 goals, 60 assists (75 TP), 216 shots and 56 PIM in 175 career games (to be fair, he didn't start very early, had no exp when I bought him, so he was already a beast when he started playing).
Has only seen PP time during camps when I didn't have all players, but does assume first line duty.
He also has 1 goal and 9 shots in 14 games on the NT
He was straight up 2:1:1:1 for a while, but I've been letting his tech drag a little behind

I went back in my team stats from all seasons, my most successful offensive defenseman was Reese Carlson (I am still beating myself up over the head for letting him go RFA for 100k, without meaning to obviously). He had high shooting, but no offense and essentially a 4:3:1:2 defensive stats (with shooting around 25% too).

My findings here are that there really isn't much that goes into a defenseman's offensive prowess, aside from actually being good defensively. Higher tech doesn't seem to correlate much with PIM, or shooting for that matter, but it does seem to correlate to better stats in general over time (like comparing Bibby and Gregoire, who are the same age and played on the same NT team, just on different lines)

i forgot to add keaton Samson
He had terrible tech and like 20 in offense, but high shooting. Still manager 75 goals, 203 assists, 526 shots in 453 games. But also had 300 PIM.

If we take away this season where he did not play on my team, that's - 3 goals and 20 assists, 22 PIM (in 37 games)

So he may be one of the examples where low tech does make a difference defensively, but does not really affect offensive output.

Hi, everyone. I'm not the Canadian, and not even on your side of the Atlantic, but I found this thread very interesting, cause it's always puzzled me how could the hockey game NOT penalize for defensemen not training to shoot. It's been several years, since I was watching NHL regularly, but back then the slapshot was the domain of MacInnis's and Gonchars, not Forsbergs or Tkachuks. But of course there were also "defensive D-men". How to put both pieces together, especially in the game with as few variables as PPM is?
And the idea that came to my mind was - it's not the individual player's stats that matter. It's the line he's on!
After all, unlike in soccer or basketball PPM games, we don't get the individual player ratings, but the rating of the line they are the part of!
There is one other observation, which led me in this direction. If I sub a young player, with very low totals, on a top line, it's quite frequent that he, and not those players with twice or three times his totals, whom the engine credits with shots, assists, goals.

So, regarding the data Krokador has been so nice to present, could it be that the reason why the defenseman with high shooting has much fewer goals scored in his record than another defenseman, with no shooting whatsoever, is the overall shooting rating of the line was different in both cases?

Sorry for a long post, especially for someone who is only a guest here. And for all grammatical problems obstructing the points I was trying to make.

Just one last thing. If the engine really works the way I'm suggesting here, the advice for training seems obvious to me. NT defenseman's spread should be the standard 2:1:1 (main and secondaries), but if shooting quality is high, it does not go to a waste to train it up a bit. And the challenge for the Coach would be to try to setup the lines in such a way, that each of them would have at least one such defenseman.
I'm speculating that the same might be true regarding Tch and penalties, but if I make this post any longer, the chance that anyone reads it will be lower than Poland winning gold medal in Elite in a couple of seasons . So there, the end.

Rather than provide an opinion on the matter, like on a "news" channel or "news" website, here's some (scientific) research on the matter of training shooting:

https://ppm.powerplaymanager.com/en/pp-magazine-article.html?data=en-12169

That's a very interesting point. And something I will try to look for in my upcoming matchups. It makes a lot of sense as often defensive defensemen on my team who have a bad shot end up scoring as much as offensive dmen.

Ever since I had read it, several seasons ago, I never trained my forwards below 70% shooting Mind you, based on what I've seen as an assistant coach for Poland's U-18 (a few seasons ago), very few ppl train shot to 70% ... to their Centers! In fact, 70% was usually the most for any forwards, but most of the NT centers had shooting at 50-60% of the Attack. Ridiculous!
I also experimented having 1-2 forwards with shooting at 100% of the main attribute, but although I've never done the research as scrupulously as yours, my impression was that it did not help my scoring considerably so I gave up this idea. May be I should have done the "scrupulous" before I gave up...
But the main part of my post was defensemen, and your research, the way I understand it, deals with forwards primarily (because they, not the defensemen, generate most shots). Do you think that what you had found in your research, and my speculations in the post above, can be half of the solution each?
I mean, my understanding is that you did not consider the possibility of the Lineup Shooting Rating (LSR) /just invented this, to avoid constant explanations what model I'm referring to/ but the Individual Shooting Rating (ISR).
It would be quite interesting (to me), to see, if the results for LSR would also lead to relations similar to those in your research. And, in relation to defensmen, if it would confirm my supposition (above), that increased LSR due to higher shooting attribute of defensmen improves scoring just as much as increased LSR due to higher shooting of wingers/centers. Although there is also another possibility - input to LSR included in the formulas as some function of individual Shooting and Attack. E.g: LSR = SUM_i{ S(i)xA(i) }i=1,5 where S is Shooting and A(i) is Attacking of player i in the given line. In which case it would be still beneficial to have a shooting defenseman in each line, but the advantage would be so significantly smaller than in the case of forwards, that the cost for defensive rating of the line would be higher.

I have trained to 115% before, and he did have a superior s% over the course of a season or two. But the gains are minimal, as noted in the mag article. Hence all my forwards are typically 75-90% and my D are 0-30% depending on Q.

I think the important thing to keep in mind here, is to be aware of the training percentages of each of the players attributes. With a little tweaking of the numbers, and without straying very far from the recommended breakdowns, (like 2:1:1), you can maximize your player's development. I have players training from 4-18 points higher than their average training percentage, without jeopardizing their overall performance. The average increase is about 7 points higher. The training percentages of those attributes you are not training, will raise or lower your average training percentage. This puts it in the category of being unreliable since no player is trained on all of his attributes.