BuzzerBeater Forums

Hello all,

I’d really appreciate some honest and constructive feedback on why public opinion of our National Teams seems to be rated so poorly. I’d like to believe it’s not just a case of negativity for its own sake, but that there are genuine concerns we can address. This forum should be a space for open dialogue and improvement, and both of our national team managers are fully committed to the cause.

We also have an open National Discord to discuss all matters related to the game:
(https://discord.gg/hTpHuz8V)

We’re a small nation of BuzzerBeater managers, and it’s important we support each other rather than quietly disapproving without communication. Your voice matters, and we’re listening.

U21 National Team
This is the team I manage, and I was surprised to see a 50% approval rating (10 votes). I’d love to hear what I can do better.

When I took over, the U21s had been neglected and were essentially inactive. Since then, we’ve climbed from 95th to 54th in the world rankings and have started producing strong players again. The squad is regularly updated with the best available talent, and I actively reach out to coaches and get responses.

What improvements would you like to see? Any specific areas where we can do more?

Senior National Team
Our current coach, DublinMan, is ranked as the 4th best coach in our history (record: 20–31). He’s taken the team from 93rd to 69th, with expected fluctuations along the way. He’s done a full overhaul, is constantly reviewing players, and is highly engaged.

Despite this, the approval rating is just 33%, which feels disheartening. If there are concerns, please share them. We want to understand and improve. Having a committed coach like this is a huge asset, and we want to make the most of it.

Let’s Work Together
If you vote in elections or popularity polls, we encourage you to join the Discord and share your thoughts. We’re here to listen, learn, and grow together as a community.

I agree with the sentiment in your post. I think both the NT managers are doing well in difficult situations and its strange to see their backing so low. I'll start by giving a summary of what the NT managers have done in my view, from the point where they have picked them up, to now, and then I'll give my opinion on what I think is the biggest issue in Irish NT basketball on BB.

U21 NT

Previous NTs at this age group were badly managed in my view, with the manager before the current one abandoning his post which lead to a massive fall in the U21 NT rankings - that made the draws for groups in subsequent years far more difficult than it should have been. Its taken a while to get the rankings back up to being inside the top 60 like they are now.

Senior NT

Again, this NT was abandoned and left to fall in the rankings. We haven't won more than 4 competitive games in a season since season 54, and considering where our rankings had fell to and where they are now, winning 4 competitive games this season is a good achievment.

What Both Managers Have Done For The Community

Both managers have been instrumental in creating a vibrant and very active discord community for Irish managers and are very helpful to new players and those that want to train players for NTs. I'm also pretty sure they are very active in monitoring the progress of NT players and sending messages to those not in the discord server.

The Biggest Problem I see

The biggest problem I see is that we do not have enough Irish managers producing players for our NTs.

Take Malaysia who beat our NT this season. They are ranked 39th in world, and ended with 5 competitive wins this season. They have 15 teams total - 9 in their top division with 7 producing at least 1 player for a NT and many producing multiple players.

Ireland has 36 in total and 15 in the Super League, and about 3-4 teams in the Super League that have produced players for either NT.

Let that sink in for a minute - a country with less than half the active managers we have, has twice as many teams in their top division producing players for NTs, compared to what teams in our top division do.

Fair play to the countries like Malaysia who's organization and commitment to their NTs is showing tremendous fruit and is an example of what can be done with a small nation. But realistically, giving out about our managers who are pretty successful with what they have got is not going to change anything.

If all our teams produced 1 player for our NTs I have no doubt we would have strong NTs, but that is not looking like its gonna happen is it? In fact, only 10 of the 18 in the current senior squad will be under 30 at the start of next season. Indeed stalwart stars such as James Cummins and Stephen Farquharson will be 34 and soon starting to decline in skills.

You want a competitive NT? Well start producing players for the NTs then.

I have to say I agree with what Rigol Rockets pointed out recently. There’s clearly a long-standing issue when it comes to domestic player development. It’s honestly frustrating how often you see a talented player being drafted, and then just… nothing. No training, no game time, no transfer either. They just disappear into limbo. It’s a waste of potential and hurts the whole ecosystem in the long run.
Also, there have been a few strange decisions around the national team squad both in terms of who gets called up and who actually gets minutes.
Maybe it’s time to shake things up a bit. A bit of fresh blood in the management or a new approach could do the team good. There’s no denying the effort that’s gone into things so far, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a hard look at what could be improved.

anything is particular you disagreed with?

Hello, nice that you replied and shared your vision! It’s sad that this discussion only pops up when the elections starts, and not during the season when it is actually most important. At the moment we have 4, maximum 5 active members in our discord (which by the way to create one doesn’t even take more than few minutes), who actively participate in community discussions, not only about NT activities but also about general things. This is the main problem of our whole community — when there is no communication, there is no progress, because we all live in “our own worlds” instead of moving together, towards goals. As long as these things are missing, I can guarantee that we can’t even dream or talk about some serious victories or becoming a strong NT team.

This is a long discussion, so I invite everyone to join our discord and discuss.

Also, it would be really nice to talk deeper about your insights, what exactly mistakes and calling to national team you are talking about.

...
By the way, 10 managers expressed their opinion in the popularity voting, those 6 negative voted managers didn’t say their opinion at all, maybe you are scared? There will be no bullying about such topics and no one will laugh at your opinion, we just need to communicate..

First off, thanks for joining the discussion, and your welcome to join the discord community.

I do have a couple of things to comment on what you said.

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Maybe it’s time to shake things up a bit. A bit of fresh blood in the management or a new approach could do the team good. There’s no denying the effort that’s gone into things so far, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a hard look at what could be improved.

Unfortunately, this can also have a massive negative effect, and this has happened to both NTs very recently, where newer managers took over the NTs and probably got overwhelmed, then just abandoned the team. An NT job is not to be taken lightly, and I would first suggest things to the current NT bosses, either in DMs, the forum, or discord. Each time it happens it sets the NTs back about 6 or 7 seasons, and makes the next 3-5 seasons far more difficult in terms of the the teams they draw the in NT tournaments. I'm very skeptical about managers with little or no experience being put in to the role when we've only really just recovered from the NT being abandoned a few season ago.

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Also, there have been a few strange decisions around the national team squad both in terms of who gets called up and who actually gets minutes.

The first thing to know is that the Irish NT team seems to have a lot of C/PF compared to any other position. The Guard positions are something of a problem for the NT an has been for a while. Again, if you have questions over why a player isn't playing, it can be good to ask the NT. There may be a reason for it, like a weakness in a players game, or the coach using a specific tactic that plays away from a players strengths - there is no point in using them in that situation if they could be exploited or are gonna underperform.

I know the current NT selection is an experimental one to have a look at new players as the NT manager said he was gonna do it on the discord.

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The first thing I recommend to anyone is to join the discord, the more people we can have there, the more ideas we can have to help each other and our NTs.

Where could I find a discord link? I would love to join it

I'll DM you with it.

Edit: The reason we use DMs is to make sure we don't have people impersonating others on the board.

Last edited by Rockets at 7/10/2025 9:02:57 AM

Hi all,
Apologies for not responding sooner – there was a death in the family and it took my attention away. I had requested a discord invite earlier, but by the time I got around to joining, the link had expired.
Anyway, I want to make it absolutely clear that I have no intention of harming our current coach, Dublinman. I fully respect the fact that he's dedicating his time and doing his best for the team – that’s commendable.
One of the reasons I started thinking about a possible coaching change (and I want to stress again, this is not meant as a personal attack) is that his club team hasn't had much success either. They barely made it past the Top 32 in the Cup – which is basically the number of active teams – and haven’t made much of a mark in the Super League either. Ideally, the NT coach should have some kind of winning pedigree. (For context: I’ve played before, and in my first full season back I’ve already reached the Top 4 in the cup.) But I won’t ignore the fact that he has brought one important thing to the national team: stability.
That said, there have been quite a few puzzling decisions around squad selection. There are several players who should’ve been included but weren’t – and others who were picked without merit. The same goes for lineup choices. I’m familiar with many players’ skills, and I also look at ratings. But let’s forget about past seasons and talk about this one.
We’ve played two matches so far – both against much stronger teams. One of them we gave a scare, so on paper it might look like we did well. But in my opinion, this season has been a disaster so far – from almost every perspective.
Israel – Let’s be honest, even their weakest players are arguably better than our best. And yet, we still tried to push for a result? Why? We had zero chance of anything, and all it did was hurt our team spirit from the very start. That was the only “achievement.”
Then came Latvia, and the poor decision against Israel came back to haunt us. Latvia is also a much stronger team. But with just a bit of tactical thinking, it was obvious they would rest against us – a much weaker side – after their opening match against Slovenia, which looked like a full vs. full or normal vs. normal clash. They were always going to take it easier against us to recover for tougher games ahead. As a result, they didn’t push hard and we almost pulled off a win. Maybe we even could have won – had we not blown everything in the Israel match. A massive tactical blunder.
One of my biggest issues over the past few years has been the complete lack of imagination in the rotation. We have several multi-skilled players, yet everyone’s played the same position every game – no variation at all. It feels like there’s no opponent scouting, no creativity. This season we’ve seen the exact same rotation every match, and I honestly started wondering if the squad was just set on auto-pilot after the election. Or is that actually the tactic? What’s the point of friendlies if we don’t use them to test different setups? But instead we just do the same thing.
Speaking of rotation: I don’t know the skillsets of Bradley or Haverty, but I did see O’Rourke when he was transferred and I’m convinced he’s the best C in Ireland (unless we’re specifically going for a close-range offence). C is clearly his best position. Yet he’s being played as a PF regularly – and underperforms there. The engine doesn’t favour him at PF. Has nobody noticed this?? Again, there’s zero experimentation here, which I don’t understand.
Now we have Alexey Lyons in the rotation (also as PF), and based on his skills he shouldn’t even be near the court – maybe only if we’re really desperate for rebounds.

And the most baffling thing: our highest-paid player, Cummins, isn’t just not starting – he hasn’t even been named for a match yet? This isn’t last season when he was being sold for $1,000 a week and in poor form. The U21 coach has managed him well. It makes no sense. If he had played, the Latvia game could have gone differently again.
The squad composition is also poor. McGee and O’Hagan are not ready yet. Keeping “mascot” players like Costello last season was also questionable. Holmes has no place in the squad based on skills – he should never be on the court in a competitive match. I assume he’s there just because he plays for the coach’s club, which isn’t ideal. In fact, it might be better to leave the last roster spot empty at the start of the season in case of injuries or form drops. The end of the roster should be made up of specialists – someone like Sylvester Cooney, who could come in for specific scenarios as a backup for O’Rourke and shut down opposing centers. That would be a much more useful option than Holmes.
Players like Magauran, Castle, and McEvoy are already strong and developing well – they deserve a place in the squad now and even more so going forward.
Finally, let’s talk about the future. Building for the future should absolutely be part of the NT coach’s responsibilities. The U21 coach’s job ends once a player ages out –while post-U21 tracking could be done, it isn’t. I personally manage several NT-calibre young talents, and there’s been no communication about coordinating training plans with the NT setup (which, to be fair, Dublinman may not have much experience with). But without that kind of cooperation, we’re building on sand. Just picking whoever is available and hoping for the best won’t work long term.
Maybe I’ve worded things a bit harshly – if so, I apologise, it’s not meant to offend anyone. But honestly, these first three weeks have been below zero in terms of performance. I’m really struggling to understand what’s going on.