carl3298
Game Rating: Veteran
Forum Rating: Prospect
Posts: 43 (0)
I am late coming to this thread... I am not as experienced as aejones but have had some success. I agree with almost everything he has said, with just one major disagreement and one minor disagreement.
The most important thing I agree with him on is the importance of SPD and ATH. I can have the best defensive fundamentals in the world and it won't matter if the guy I am guarding is twice as fast, twice as strong, and twice as coordinated as me. I envision these D3 big men with 12 ATH getting tossed around like ragdolls when they try to guard a guy with a 50+ ATH. Even if the high-ATH guy has limited LP skills, he should get to the basket enough to do some damage.
The big disagreement is about tempo. He advised against running uptempo in almost all cases. I don't remember a bunch from my prob/stats course in college, but we were beaten over the head with the law of large numbers. So when I gameplan, if I think either my starters have an edge over his starters or my bench is better than his bench, or both, then I turn up the tempo to get as many possessions as possible. If my team is truly stronger than this should help me win, right? I also run uptempo most of the time against the press to try to get my opponent into foul trouble, esp. if I have a good LP threat on my team. You should never run uptempo if you think you are the weaker team, but if you are obviously the stronger team then you should definitely do it.
My minor disagreement is about WE. I agree that WE is important but will frequently take players with WE in the 30's or 40's, where aejones recommended a minimum of 50. So I agree that it is important and would never take a really low WE player (it amazes me when human coaches sign single-digit WE players), but I have had a lot of successful players who started with WE in the low 40's. Keep in mind that their WE rises as they play, so that by the end of their soph years they should have a good enough WE to have a decent rate of improvement.