nobody is talking about set, and set is all-important in shot blocking, possibly more than any other rating in the game. stewdog ignores sb, i did that for years - but he also presses, just like i did in all my early days. shot blocking is substantially less important in press than in man or zone. also, shot blocking is tightly correlated to rebounding, because both are tightly correlated to height. so, if you build great teams, with great reb, and ignore sb, you usually get pretty good sb anyway. this was more the case when i was a young coach, totally ignoring sb, before potential existed. also, per scoring was even more important then, making sb less important. but today, its still fairly true, press teams could ignore sb and not get hurt much. i wouldn't recommend it - you can always skip things and be really successful - but i am convinced that me getting away with totally ignoring sb back in the day, was not really a result of it being 100% useless.
on the other extreme, shot blocking is a core in zone. i have even contemplated sb out ranking defense for your center in the 2-3. shot blocking is hard to gauge - i used to just simply look at blocks, like oldwarriors math there, and concluded it wasn't that relevant. but shot blocking also impacts fg%, it alters shots, i think the impact of sb on fg defense is a very important part of the sb rating. it might be more important than the actual blocks, but roughly, i put the two on par.
anyway, in press, sb is way less important than the top cores, its more along the lines of passing in your bigs. i wouldn't say its right to ignore it, but you can definitely get away without it, its more of the kind of thing elite teams would like to have in their quest for championships, than something teams trying to make S16s and stuff should be focusing on. its probably less than a third as important as the top tier cores, more like a quarter, maybe.
in man, sb moves up decently, its still not half as important as the top tier of cores, but its probably getting close. i roughly value sb in man defense half way between sb in press and sb in zone, just because i haven't really gotten to study sb in man since i realized it was more important than i had realized in zone.
in zone, sb actually becomes pretty darn important. i've seen strong correlations between sb and fg defense of my teams, and i think sb in your bigs is getting close to defense importance levels. i think it does matter if its a 2-3 or 3-2, and which player you are talking about. a center in a 2-3, i put sb roughly on par with defense, and wouldn't be surprised if it was slightly more important. a sf/pf in a 2-3, i put sb around half as important as defense, which may be selling it a little short. in the 3-2, i would probably put sb in the 75% ballpark compared to defense. the longer i played zone, the more closely i looked at things, the more i valued shot blocking. it also definitely depends on the other team, defense is critical in defending all kinds of shots, while sb i put roughly 0 value on, in defending per shots. in defending shots in the paint, in zone, its very possibly the most important rating.
TL/DR: all in all, i would not consider myself a zone expert, but i am very confident that sb is way more important in zone than in press. it was a very substantial difference to the naked eye. how it exactly ranks compared to defense and other cores, that i am not that firm on, but i do definitely consider sb a core in my zone big men. the press side, its absolutely not a core, i have extremely little doubt about that. m2m falls somewhere in between press and zone.
1/28/2016 8:12 PM (edited)