Being fairly new to FCP...I feel that it's more magic than the other 2

I can only speak to it's effectiveness in D2 but over the past 2 seasons in Rupp I've had 2 #1 seeded teams and both seasons my team has encountered troubles beating the press in regular season and NT. I understand the press is meant to force turnovers but both my teams had upperclassmen guards with high IQs and high BH/P and yet there is still games I turn the ball over 20+ times and fail to get off enough shots to win, even though I shoot 5-10% higher than opponent. I'm not trying to be a bitter loser, but I most definently see a disparity in playing press teams opposed to other defenses.

Posted by llamanunts on 6/4/2014 3:50:00 PM (view original):

DEF is overvalued in the game.

I'm sorry, that's an opinion that you didn't support with any evidence.  I guess it works as a thesis statement.  For the record, individual player defense matters less in Press than Man.

Therefore Press, being the most aggressive defense setting, is overvalued.

I'm sorry, that's an opinion that is only supported by the previous sentence... which was just another opinion.

In real life the best defense in college basketball, against a really bad team will force 25-30 TOs a night.

Okay, a comparison.  Well, a glance at Knight shows a fair number of teams causing an average of over 20 turnovers per game.  They're not all playing really bad teams every night.  When they do face really bad teams, why yes, they force more than 25 turnovers quite often.

Typically a great defense will force about 16 TOs a night and a bad defense will force about 12 a night.  There simply isn't the amount of variation we regularly see in HD.

Where are you getting those figures from?  I'm using the actual statistics from Knight.  Those actual statistics show exactly the amount of variation you describe in real life.

This leads the experienced players to load up on ATH DEF and not give a flip about anything offense.

Please provide evidence - an example or two.  I think you will only find a couple of outliers, mainly coaches who are experimenting.

DEF and ATH will beat SPD, PASS and BH every time in this sim but almost never in reality.

That's another assertion without evidence.  I wish you'd support your opinions and assertions.  This actually isn't coherent, the way you put it.  Speed is a part of defensive effectiveness along with Athleticism, Defense, and Shot Blocking.  Passing helps your whole team score and avoid turnovers.  Athleticism, Speed, Low Post, Perimeter, and Ball Handling all help individual players score.  It's not a zero-sum game.

This exchange piqued my interest, so for the sake of providing some statistical comparison between turnovers in RL and HD I ran some analysis on the most recently completed Crum season (Season 67) and the 2013-2014 D1 season.  I did eliminate any games involving a RL D1 team playing a non-D1 team. My source for D1 stats is kenpom.com:

Average Turnovers Per Game and Standard Deviation:
                        HD                    RL
TO/gm          13.94               11.69     
StDev            3.54                 3.81

From that we can extrapolate that approximately 68% of the time TO's per game were between 10.4 and 17.5 in HD and were between 7.9 and 15.5 IRL; 95% of the time TO's/gm were between 6.9 and 21 in HD and between 4 and 19.4 IRL; and in almost every instance TO/gm were between 3.3 and 24.6 in HD and between 0 and 23.1 IRL.

There were 56 outliers IRL (games where TO/gm were 24 or more ... 28 was the highest outlier and occurred 3 times in approximately 11000 RL observations).  There were 92 outliers in HD (games where TO's were 25 or more ... 31 was the highest outlier and occurred 4 times in approximately 9200 RL observations).

Finally Here is a table of Turnovers occurring per game, the number of times it was observed and the % of time it occurred HD and IRL:

TO/G	OBS	HD %		OBS	RL %
0-5	9	0.1%		294	2.7%
6-10	1356	14.7%		3502	31.6%
11-15	5232	56.8%		5208	47.1%
16-20	2162	23.5%		1810	16.4%
21-25	379	4.1%		235	2.1%
26+	66	0.7%		17	0.2%

So there are about 15% more TO in HD than in RL?   More or less?

I was doing some searching and found 2 teams in IBA DII that run FCP and neither team has more than 2 defenders over 60 rating in Ath or Def. So if Ath and Def is so important how are these teams 8-3 and 9-2 with low standards in those catagories?

Great info possum. Without a doubt, this evidence is satisfactory to say that defense's are not accurately implemented in HD.

To be fair, it's kind of difficult to implement a full-time full court press accurately since there's really no such thing.

Posted by car_crazy_v2 on 6/6/2014 10:41:00 AM (view original):
Great info possum. Without a doubt, this evidence is satisfactory to say that defense's are not accurately implemented in HD.

That's pretty funny.   I looked at the info and thought, "Wow, that's pretty close!"

Can you explain why you think this is "without a doubt" proof that defense in implemented poorly?

Posted by Trentonjoe on 6/6/2014 10:56:00 AM (view original):

Posted by car_crazy_v2 on 6/6/2014 10:41:00 AM (view original):
Great info possum. Without a doubt, this evidence is satisfactory to say that defense's are not accurately implemented in HD.

That's pretty funny.   I looked at the info and thought, "Wow, that's pretty close!"

Can you explain why you think this is "without a doubt" proof that defense in implemented poorly?

2.25 additional turnovers per game can be pretty huge and when you take a closer look at the tables possum provided, teams turn the ball over between 11-20 times in more than 80 percent of HD games, compared to just 63.5 percent of RL games. For a game dedicated to providing a simulation of reality, that's a significant difference.

Teams consistently turn the ball over more in HD and I believe that's a direct result of the dominance of the FCP, which doesn't really even exist in RL college basketball. If the FCP were eliminated, I believe HD stats would fall very closely in line with RL. This would obviously have to be tested in beta, but I think it's the direction that a "reality simulator" should head.

Posted by llamanunts on 6/6/2014 10:48:00 AM (view original):
To be fair, it's kind of difficult to implement a full-time full court press accurately since there's really no such thing.

I agree. You need to change the terminology. VCU runs a FCP, but in the half court run a half court trap out of their fullcourt press.  UNLV in the 90's did the same thing. Once the FCP is broken they either go to man or HC trap.

I purposely didn't comment initially because I think the data is subject to interpretation and open for debate.  Afterall, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics ... So while I think it's pretty close I also think it's skewed a little too heavily towards more turnovers than is realisitic by about 2 per team per game.  The fact that there are double the amount of outliers in HD with less observations is also meaningful - particularly when all of them come at the high end.  As is the fact that games with very few turnovers just don't happen in HD.

But whether or not this is the result of defense not being accurately implemented or whether it's a product of the offense not being accurate enough is subject to debate and there are probably many more explanations that could be hypothisized.  Really I think the question is how much deviation from Real Life do we accept in the game? 

My sense is that it looks pretty close, but it could probably be skewed downwards a little bit better than it is.

Posted by car_crazy_v2 on 6/6/2014 11:19:00 AM (view original):

Posted by Trentonjoe on 6/6/2014 10:56:00 AM (view original):

Posted by car_crazy_v2 on 6/6/2014 10:41:00 AM (view original):
Great info possum. Without a doubt, this evidence is satisfactory to say that defense's are not accurately implemented in HD.

That's pretty funny.   I looked at the info and thought, "Wow, that's pretty close!"

Can you explain why you think this is "without a doubt" proof that defense in implemented poorly?

2.25 additional turnovers per game can be pretty huge and when you take a closer look at the tables possum provided, teams turn the ball over between 11-20 times in more than 80 percent of HD games, compared to just 63.5 percent of RL games. For a game dedicated to providing a simulation of reality, that's a significant difference.

Teams consistently turn the ball over more in HD and I believe that's a direct result of the dominance of the FCP, which doesn't really even exist in RL college basketball. If the FCP were eliminated, I believe HD stats would fall very closely in line with RL. This would obviously have to be tested in beta, but I think it's the direction that a "reality simulator" should head.

I agree with number not like RL, but FCP does exsist in RL just not as a half court defense set. VCU, Arkansas run it, but don't force the amount of TO's like in HD.

one thing that makes comparing RL stats to HD tricky, is that coaches here play their teams differently than real coaches. for example, at one point, old admin did a study of the 3pt% in HD, after some complaints that it was too high. he found HD was showing 2-3% higher (i think, been a LONG time), but in games where people played a 0 defensive setting, HD matched reality almost perfectly. further, substantially more coaches were using - defenses than + defenses, which accounted for the difference in the 3pt%.

to me, there is nothing wrong there, in terms of the 3pt%. maybe the + benefits vs - benefits need to be examined, to make sure they are balanced - but its definitely possible more coaches would go - even if they were perfectly balanced, just because users found something like a boost on rebounding to be more important to them than the 3pt impact, even though there may be no basis in reality for that point of view.

back to the turnover numbers, they are pretty far apart, but also, the teams who play press in HD vastly outnumbers the teams who play press in real life. we all know that, although some of us will argue there are 0 teams in real life who play a full court press and some might argue its 2 or 4 or whatever... but that doesn't really make much of a difference when you might have 150 teams in d3 playing press here. because of this, the turnover numbers in HD are all but guaranteed to be significantly higher than in RL - so i don't know that this data proves anything. one can argue that the FCP is obviously more attractive in HD than in real life, and it shouldn't be that way, but the developers wouldn't have 3 defenses with the intention of 0-5 people per world playing one of those defenses. to me, if that is your stance, that is still a design flaw, which is very different than a flaw in the sim engine implementation, such as the TO rate being too high.

if we could view real life man vs man teams, and get the # of TOs, and compare that to HD man vs man teams, that would be much more telling, in terms of how accurately the engine assigns turnovers. i'm not sure if that kind of information is available in real life or not, i think you guys would know better than me...

Posted by gillispie1 on 6/6/2014 11:50:00 AM (view original):
one thing that makes comparing RL stats to HD tricky, is that coaches here play their teams differently than real coaches. for example, at one point, old admin did a study of the 3pt% in HD, after some complaints that it was too high. he found HD was showing 2-3% higher (i think, been a LONG time), but in games where people played a 0 defensive setting, HD matched reality almost perfectly. further, substantially more coaches were using - defenses than + defenses, which accounted for the difference in the 3pt%.

to me, there is nothing wrong there, in terms of the 3pt%. maybe the + benefits vs - benefits need to be examined, to make sure they are balanced - but its definitely possible more coaches would go - even if they were perfectly balanced, just because users found something like a boost on rebounding to be more important to them than the 3pt impact, even though there may be no basis in reality for that point of view.

back to the turnover numbers, they are pretty far apart, but also, the teams who play press in HD vastly outnumbers the teams who play press in real life. we all know that, although some of us will argue there are 0 teams in real life who play a full court press and some might argue its 2 or 4 or whatever... but that doesn't really make much of a difference when you might have 150 teams in d3 playing press here. because of this, the turnover numbers in HD are all but guaranteed to be significantly higher than in RL - so i don't know that this data proves anything. one can argue that the FCP is obviously more attractive in HD than in real life, and it shouldn't be that way, but the developers wouldn't have 3 defenses with the intention of 0-5 people per world playing one of those defenses. to me, if that is your stance, that is still a design flaw, which is very different than a flaw in the sim engine implementation, such as the TO rate being too high.

if we could view real life man vs man teams, and get the # of TOs, and compare that to HD man vs man teams, that would be much more telling, in terms of how accurately the engine assigns turnovers. i'm not sure if that kind of information is available in real life or not, i think you guys would know better than me...

I should have also made clear that my data above is for D1 only in HD.  I don't keep gamelogs for D2 or D3 so those numbers could also paint a different picture.  I probably could go back and extrapolate the man v. man data in both RL and HD but I'm not sure it would do a great job in drilling down to anything meaningful because IRL very few teams play a set defense 100%of the time.  Some teams play Man almost entirely, some lean towards Man but play some zone, some are split pretty evenly, some lean towards Zone but play some Man, and some play Zone almost entirely.  There are also hybrid defenses to consider like the box and 1 and triangle and 2 which HD doesn't allow but which some teams do run IRL. 

i've thought the press was brokenly overpowered for years, but the only anecdotal evidence i can give:

my N Alabama team is not incredible, but i'll have 9+ wins in one of the best d2 conferences around. sitting at 8-3, 8-0 against non press teams.

in the 3 losses i'm averaging 23.6 turnovers against FCP. not a number i would ever take exception with in this game....until taking a closer look and realizing the 3 teams COMBINED have TWO players above 70 defense rating. just seems silly.