I'm unashamed to say the only reason for choosing what I did is because of Steve's post the other day ??

At least you read it Craig :-)

Happy to share my ignorance 

Craig = shameless?  ?

Yep, completely shameless.

As Harry Enfield once said when taking off a Yorkshireman

'I say what I like and I like what I say'

Here's a link for it on YouTube but it comes with a strong warning....it is NOT politically correct...not by a long way so please don't view if there's any chance of upset - it's from the early 90's and is British humour from that period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY4tD2Hbg_A

The setter is hugely important, but the setter often can't make up for a bad, bad pass. So I've chosen libero, as a capable libero gets a strong pass to the setter to do it's work.

From the stats involved, the OH's use more stats than another position, so in theory, if you drop your top one, you're really going to suffer.

I went with OH - but was 50/50 with setter.

The manager. 

I want to say MB, because I find myself building my roster around this position. I like to have 4 strong MB's. But Rob is probably right, in this game the OH is the key. By the way, my top OH is Rob Boston. Coincidence? I think not...

It has to be Setter. The following assumes all A ratings apart from.your bad player at D.

Serving - makes no difference who is bad - just play him at #6

Blocking - for a single blocker it's pretty much a 1% chance of a block no matter how good or bad he is. For 2 or 3 blockers the MB is always involved and you can probably assume it's roughly 50/50 on the 2nd of 2 blockers. And your bad blocker will be at the net half the time. At worst a bad MB will spoil your chances 50% of the time there's a 2 or 3 man block and even then it probably only lowers the block chance by 5%(assumes a drop from 16 to 10). If your chance of a block drops from 25% to 20% half the time then it's only a 10% reduction of blocks.

Digging - digging is complicated and it's really only a bad libero that affects this a lot. He will nearly always be on court and a good libero will read the situation and attempt to make the play. A poor libero will be less effective but that means a better defender might make the attempt.

Attacking - a lot of the time the setter picks between two players. For instance on an excellent set it's a high chance it's between the MB and better OH/RS - the chance of a weak attacker is not high because of this. On a good or poor set it's often the choice between the RS and OH with the better being favoured. The worst situation is a poor set with a front row setter and weak OH as he gets the shot 60% of the time. But that's only when you have that exact situation and excellent sets occur about 50% of the time anyway (anecdotal).

Receiving- your poor receiver will get the ball around 50% of the time with decent servers. However he'll sti make an excellent pass 50% of the time. Yes he'll get aced more and make more poor passes but a good Setter can handle these.

Setting - your Setter will receive 90% or more passes from the receiver. A good Setter will convert poor passes to excellent sets whereas a poor setter will convert excellent passes to poor sets. Excellent sets are rarely blocked. Good and poor sets are blocked - with 2 half decent blockers you lose 25% of your attacks, with 3 it's 33%

Last season we lost to Cincinnati due to playing a poor Setter in an otherwise T7 lineup because we kept getting blocked. You can't hide a poor Setter like you can poor servers, attackers, blockers, receivers and defenders.

Wow that was longer than expected.