Posted by iwanturmind2 on 9/18/2014 3:29:00 PM (view original):
gillispie thanks for being there for me. The team is playing way much better than before. I'm studing the pbp. You should charge for your advise but appreciate all the help in this matter.
no problem. i couldnt tell if i came off harsh from your original reply, but that was definitely not the intention! i only mentioned recruiting because it goes hand in hand with team setup and team planning, i know most of the guys aren't yours.
anyway, what you should be studying isn't really the pbp... this is the point i was trying to make in the first place. most people don't use strictly defined terms for things like "game planning", but i do, because the distinctions are important. heres how i see it. game planning is merely the opponent-specific changes you make off your base team setup. team setup is how you play the players you have, the base setup you use as a starting point. team planning is the strategic part of recruiting and recruiting planning where you are trying to decide what players you will need. team planning comes from the information you have about the players you will have next year and the couple years after, as well as your understanding of what it takes to make a team good, all combined with what is actually available to you in recruiting based on your situation. team planning is the single most important part of the game, but to team plan right, you have to have a good understanding of how you would play a certain team if you had them, and how they would perform - which is really something you acquire when you are working on your team setup and reviewing how your team setup is performing. game planning can be part of that too, it really all fits together, but game planning is more the details of your opponent, not the big picture about how different players and different abilities fit together.
i think its clear you need to zoom out a level. you are focusing on game planning and play by play, but those are details, you need a firm base to start with. what you need to study is your team setup and mine, what is different, and why does mine work better (and how can you continue to improve on it). if you notice, i never talked about your players ratings. i only talked about their abilities. most coaches look at players and teams by ratings, which is a mistake. it takes some time to transition but its worth it if you are feeling somewhat stuck (and even if you aren't). what im saying is, don't look at a guard and go "i don't like him because his speed is too low", look at him and go "i don't like him because hes not a high quality scorer or defender, and i can't build a team around players who are good at neither offense nor defense". the general rule of thumb is this - for any player, of the 4 general abilities (offense, defense, rebounding, and guard skills), you need 2 clear strengths. the trick to this game is understanding what makes players good in a certain way - a guy can have some pretty good looking ratings on an individual basis, and either suck or be great, based on which ratings it is - because they play into different abilities. what does it take to be a good scorer (really, offense is sort of sub divided into per and interior offense, and you want some balance on your team - but just looking at it from the high level of offense gets you far), or a good rebounder, or a good defender? those are questions you must ponder. then, building on that, what do various combinations of player abilities translate to, in terms of team abilities?
for example, a team with 2 great scorers on the starting lineup, with say 1 other guy who is pretty solid, that team is going to be really dangerous on offense. adding a 3rd, 4th, or 5th great scorer to the starting lineup - its simply a waste of talent, unless you are already loaded up on everything else, too (applies to high d1 only, generally speaking - nobody else can load up on everything and have talent to spare). but going from 0 great scorers to 1, that is all the differnce in the world. what you need to start doing is looking at your players in terms of abilities and considering how those abilities complement each other when you put 5 players together to form a lineup or squad or whatever you want to call it (not really a team because a team is more than 5 guys, but looking at sets of 5 gets you far, you only ever have 5 together anyway). so when you look at your team, go back and try to think, what abilities do the guys i suggested you play have, versus the abilities your lineup guys had, and how do those fit into the team? consider why your 20ppg scorer and your 10ppg scorer are flipped in my version, with the 10 guy going to 20 and the 20 guy dropping, maybe not all the way to 10, but close enough. is your understanding of what it takes to make an individual a strong scorer flawed?
the transition to ability thinking will assist you in team planning (the most important part of the game). they go hand in hand. take some time to think about what the perfect team you can build on b- prestige in d1 looks like. have you considered what that even is? most coaches who i mentor, this is always my first real question, and the answers are usually not very deep at all. and, most people start with like, "well, i like a point gaurd who is a good passer, i can live with per or without" - i stop them right there. what does that mean? 10 ratings is too much, you cant parse 5 players * 10 ratings in real time, its too much noise, and the actual sim engine works off aggregates anyway, it works off abilities, not ratings (abilities being aggregates of ratings). so why should you over complicate it? thinking of abilities is a struggle because you have to interpret and analyze on the fly - but its the exact same analysis that is critical to being able to construct a quality team. its way easier to say, well, i require my point guard to have great guard skills (you can refer to passing specifically, its kind of special, because passing has a unique role in bringing up team mates' fg% - but usually you want to stick to abilities). offense in my pg is optional, but my championship teams, i always want 2/3 strong scorers at the 1-3. it can be any 2, and in any case of the 2, i can tell you exactly what i want that 3rd guy to be. its much easier to understand why a team is good when i say, i need my starting lineup to have a strong passing pg, 2 strong scorers from the 1-3, 1 other guy who can half *** score, strong rebounding (the ability) at the 4 and 5, and then as much defense as i can get - than if you start to go on about speed here and shot blocking there and all that crap.
that may not be true so much now - but it will be, if you work at it, and working at it is very valuable in getting to the next level. its hard now because when i say i like a reb/def type big, you might have to convert that on the fly. what that means is different in different systems, but just focus on the system you run. but once you get used to it and know things like reb is just comprised of reb, ath, iq, and sta, with reb being say 2-3x as important as reb, and that is automatic - you can understand a team by abilities *way* faster than you can by ratings, and *way* better. in the beginning, like my first 2 years, i would have never said to think by abilities. but when i look back, all i was really doing in those 2 years (when i was obsessed with understanding the game, until i was kililng it everywhere and had nowhere really to go and cut back), it was converting ratings to abilities, and individual abilities to team abilities. i was just trying to craft the perfect team and study the current version, to see how things played out, to refine my understanding of stuff like, what it took to be a good individual rebounder and what it took to make a good rebounding team. looking back at posts even then, i usually talked in ratings but all the ratings were grouped into the abilities the same way i see them now (less game changes over the last 5 years). i thought of it in terms of abilities but didn't call it that. its easier to just call it what it is, its made it way easier for me to mentor the guys i mentor (although i always task them with switching to the ability model from the get go and then kind of give them some time to catch up before we really dig in).
ill leave you with a final note. that rule of thumb, 2 strengths per player out of the 3 core strengths (sfs are sort of an exception with all 4 core abilities applying to them), that isn't that hard to achieve. i mean, low BCS yeah, but in general, not as much. to get a big who is good at 2 out of 3 things, thats a lot easier than a guy who is great at all of them. with 5 starers, 2 strengths each, you get 10 strengths. if 2 are guard skills, 2 are rebounding, 2 are offense, and 4 are defense, and those guys are in the right spots (1/2 for the guard skills, 4/5 for the reb, etc) - you are basically a small delta away from being a championship team. generally those teams can already compete for championships, and that is without a single player who is a truly elite player with great ratings all over. give me a couple bigs with good ath/def/reb (and sb depending on the set and position), and i don't really care if you have those same guys with 90 lp, 50 per, 50 bh, 50 pass - my guys can compete just fine, as long as i got the offense somewhere else. i mean obviously, all else equal, the 90 lp etc guys are better - but you don't need them. you don't need killer players to build a really good team. you just need guys who do some stuff well, and to arrange those guys properly. all of that builds up from the understanding of individual and team abilities, including how diminishing returns apply, like, how much value you get for your 1st, 2nd, 3rd great rebounder/defender/scorer/whatever. note than the two common areas it is acceptable to break the rule of thumb are 1) certain small forwards and especially 2) really strong scorers in situations where those players are at a premium. low bcs and mid majors is exactly where #2 applies most importantly. its hard to get a killer scorer, so if he doesn't have a 2nd key strength, you still take him (it goes back to the law of diminishing reutrns, that 1st key scorer does more for you than anyone, so sure, sacrifice other stuff to get more offense in your key offensive guy(s)).
that is the kind of stuff you need to be really thinking about. game planning and pbp, you are zoomed too far in. analyze those details after you get a better understanding of what you are missing in the big picture. good luck!