How to win at D2 and D3 Topic

Bump.
8/30/2012 7:53 PM
Bump
9/22/2012 5:51 AM
Bump, please pin.
10/6/2012 1:27 PM
bump again
11/1/2012 3:36 PM
I know how to win at D3, just recruit guys that grow 148 points in one season
11/1/2012 3:37 PM
Is that bump in honor of #16 tonight? 
11/2/2012 2:50 AM
How's your return to D3 Wooden going so far?  Just curious.
11/2/2012 12:10 PM
Posted by disasteruss on 11/2/2012 12:10:00 PM (view original):
How's your return to D3 Wooden going so far?  Just curious.
Not great. I tried press/fastbreak and am in my fourth season. Now that I finally have a lot of upperclassmen, I will enjoy my first winning season since being there with my own seniors. My RPI after 12 games is 25 (11-1), which I think is relatively accurate to my team's skill set. We will dominate younger teams with weak stamina and guards who can't take care of the ball, but we don't match up well with other talented teams. I know I had bad prestige, but I felt like looking for all players who will get to 80+ stamina (and preferring them to get to 90) is really, really difficult in D3. 

I recruited a very strong freshman big who has poor stamina (~50 I think) but he's so good I think I'm just going to go to M2M. 

Worth noting: In Knight I have had a really strong D3 program in what was once the strongest D3 program of all time. Despite probably a half dozen trips to the title game, I have 0 NCs there. Most of it is just variance I think, but I definitely struggled at points within the conference since there was so much good competition for talent. However, I finally just got really tired of losing and not knowing why (basically, I had what I thought was always ~S16 talent but I had a bunch of years where I didn't make the tournament or would get upset in the first round). Soo... I switched from Zone to M2M, and I started winning IMMEDIATELY. In fact, after practicing it all year, I switched to it in the PI a few seasons ago and immediately dominated the competition in the PI on my way to winning it (I probably had the most talented team and certainly could have been the favorite without switching, but the change was significant). 

I believe I am not in the third or fourth season of M2M and enjoying a lot of success. I think I'll be competitive for the NC next year in fact.
11/4/2012 5:15 AM
Posted by aejones on 11/4/2012 5:15:00 AM (view original):
Posted by disasteruss on 11/2/2012 12:10:00 PM (view original):
How's your return to D3 Wooden going so far?  Just curious.
Not great. I tried press/fastbreak and am in my fourth season. Now that I finally have a lot of upperclassmen, I will enjoy my first winning season since being there with my own seniors. My RPI after 12 games is 25 (11-1), which I think is relatively accurate to my team's skill set. We will dominate younger teams with weak stamina and guards who can't take care of the ball, but we don't match up well with other talented teams. I know I had bad prestige, but I felt like looking for all players who will get to 80+ stamina (and preferring them to get to 90) is really, really difficult in D3. 

I recruited a very strong freshman big who has poor stamina (~50 I think) but he's so good I think I'm just going to go to M2M. 

Worth noting: In Knight I have had a really strong D3 program in what was once the strongest D3 program of all time. Despite probably a half dozen trips to the title game, I have 0 NCs there. Most of it is just variance I think, but I definitely struggled at points within the conference since there was so much good competition for talent. However, I finally just got really tired of losing and not knowing why (basically, I had what I thought was always ~S16 talent but I had a bunch of years where I didn't make the tournament or would get upset in the first round). Soo... I switched from Zone to M2M, and I started winning IMMEDIATELY. In fact, after practicing it all year, I switched to it in the PI a few seasons ago and immediately dominated the competition in the PI on my way to winning it (I probably had the most talented team and certainly could have been the favorite without switching, but the change was significant). 

I believe I am not in the third or fourth season of M2M and enjoying a lot of success. I think I'll be competitive for the NC next year in fact.

I think, without any shadow of a doubt, that M2M is the best defense in HD to coach.  You have more control over your defense and what they are doing than in any other set.  A FCP team that has the right players can play downright dominant defense, but it is harder to control them and it is a little easier to exploit if you run into a coach who knows what he is doing.  I would strongly encourage any new coach to find a M2M team to coach, and if you have a FCP or Zone team and you are struggling, switch defenses and within 1 season your team will be dramatically better (assuming your players DE ratings don't stink).

When I took over Wilkes in Naismith it was a zone team.  I switched to M2M.  About halfway through the season we started playing M2M and we wound up making it all the way to the final in the CT in a very, very difficult conference.  In season 2 we went to the Sweet 16.  M2M is a superior defense.

11/4/2012 7:40 AM
Something else that was probably hindering me at Zone was that I constantly recruited good defensive players. Years ago in Wooden I played against a dominate D2 team that had a team defense average of over 70. From there I learned that no matter the defense, you really need high defense ratings... so I still concentrated on getting good defenders at D3 CMHMS. In hindsight I should have been more willing to take defenders in the 30s with good offense instead of making sure everyone got to 50+ because I kept having zeros offensively (something I'm okay with if I'm playing M2M).
11/4/2012 4:03 PM
Bump, needs a sticky
11/10/2012 8:44 PM
jonesy... i am honestly questioning if i ever read this thread, which is strange, because prior to looking at it today, ive told a bunch of people to read it due to the quality of your advice. but having read your opening... lol - you are crazy man, why would you put in all the effort to write this, but open with "im writing this because everyone sucks at this game". i remember a couple months after you wrote this, you took out an add for the MIAA conference (which, it should be noted, still gets seasonal beat downs from the GLV). anyway, nobody joined and you posted after, this sucks, i wrote this long thread helping people and a lot of people liked it, you'd think i could have at least gotten one person. i thought it was strange too, but now, not so much :) take some friendly advice - not everyone plays poker or grew up on the east coast - a lot of people actually care if a person is an ******* - not a vindictive *******, but the hey, its easier/more fun to be a dick, so why not? sort of way. it doesnt bother me, and im sure plenty of others dont care - but what do you gain? id change that opening tone a bit, im sure its costing you some of your well-earned brownie points for the effort it takes to put a long helpful thread like this together.
11/12/2012 12:03 AM
on the defense subject, i think the zone defense has its place. i think most coaches try to play it like you would man, and that is plain wrong. defenses are a LOT more different than the 3 major offenses. you can generally play them all the same and it wont kill you - although they are definitely not as similar as many think (and fb is a lot different). but with defenses, it is critical to tailor your play to the set.

i do agree that zone is an inferior offense in some situations, especially in d2/d3 at the championship level of competition. but in most cases, it is as viable as anything else. the biggest the disparity in the quality of your players, the better zone is - and the converse is true, too. you can't just build a team of equally talented guys who are all great at defense and expect zone to be effective. the goal is to focus on getting some REALLY good players, with a couple REALLY good offensive players - and then leaning on those guys, hard. you don't need the depth, and you get less minutes to your young players.
 
in the press, and to a significant but lesser extent, in man, one major goal is to get great depth. sign all your spots every season, and try to maximize the quality of your backups, because they play a lot. in zone, you can play 5 guys at 30-35mpg each without trouble, and only need 2-3 guys to make up the 25-50 minutes left. in press, you might have 5 starers averaging 22, for 90 minutes left, and in man, maybe its 24 avg, for 80 minutes left. that reality is the single greatest advantage in the zone defense. you can focus more on your stars, so your best players are better, and then you play them more, so you are REALLY getting a lot out of them. its important for this reason, to pair zone with something other than motion offense, IMO, particularly in d2/d3 - because you want an offense that is as efficient as possible when you lean hard on a couple exceptional players.

if you are not doing everything you can to exploit the above in the zone defense, you will simply never be as successful as you would be in another defense. but i strongly feel its incorrect to say that if you struggle with zone, you should switch and you will automatically do massively better. its very possibly you will do better, because you are building the right kind of team for (like in jonesy's case) man, so if you play man, you might do better. but another option is to learn to play zone.

mduncan - i think its unfair to say man defense is clearly the best defense, the press is damn good. in high level d1, the shape of players makes man defense the predominant choice, but pressing teams are VERY effective in most contexts. it is still the defense most likely to give an underdog a chance, that will naturally make the better team ***** about how the press is broken (which, i strongly feel, is not the case - but its definitely not holding you back, at least in d2/d3). and i think zone is pretty damn good too, but like fastbreak, the reality is people don't like it because they just aren't very good at playing it. if you look at the conventional wisdom in HD, it really tailors to teams who play triangle/motion/flex paired with man or press. most of the discussions on this forum have some generally pretty good advice in them - but so often, it really pertains to one of the "big 3" offenses or man/press, and people just dont really talk about the right way to play something for fb or zone teams. i played fb/zone not long ago (maybe 1.5 years ago) in d1, previously i was not very familiar with either, and it was a lot of fun - both are perfectly viable, and i actually would be quite comfortable arguing that fb/zone is THE premier set for low to mid level d1 teams.
11/12/2012 1:02 AM (edited)
eh, i think most people can realize that i many things in the post in jest. if they cannot take the "everyone sucks" in jest, then it's likely they won't appreciate the humor in the rest of the post or feel like being in the same conference as me anyways. that said, i got dozens of PMs after this post but still haven't found one strong "student" who read this and tried to mirror it and then join the MIAA for their conquering of the GLV (funngunn kinda did this at central oklahoma and has gotten pretty good at player evaluation for sure). i am pretty disappointed by that, but i can't imagine it's because my sense of humor is brash, it's probably just general apathy, which you probably know by how impossible it is to recruit a single person to join the conference. since we only have like 8 or 9 this year i might put some effort in to getting ppl from my other conferences to join it in the next few years.

about zone, i tend to agree, but honestly i very rarely find someone with super low defense who is awesome in other areas. it's possible it's because i don't look particularly hard, i have no idea. i think i just gravitate towards people who are good for man.
11/12/2012 1:52 AM
At least from some experiments with zone it almost seems like speed isn't quite as important in a zone as in other defenses and that you can get away with being a bit slower all around ... But on the other hand, I have only limited experience with it. Mainly because none of my current main teams played it and I didn't want to switch when I took over. I did like the added strategic flexibility of having the choice of 2-3 and 3-2.
11/12/2012 7:46 AM
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How to win at D2 and D3 Topic

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