If you were coaching a bad team with much room for improvement... and you were facing a fastbreak offense at home (a conference team that turned you over a crap load and blew you out by almost 30 points off of transition points when you played at their place)... what would you do?

I don't expect to beat them, but how can I gameplan to not be blown out by 30 again?

Slow the hell down. Get your best ball-handlers and fastest players on the floor as much as possible. If you have a 75 SPD, 70 BH, 60 P guy and your other guys are all terrible, put him on "getting tired." (although I guess if you have that guy and your other guys are terrible, he should probably be on "getting tired" anyways). I definitely switch up my starting line-up sometimes for press teams vs non-press teams to get some more ball control. 

I agree.

What you generally want to do is to play slow down when you are the underdog to create less possessions and increase the "randomness" so you have a better chance. If you are the favorite, you want to play faster, but maybe not at high speed especially against a good defensive squad because running fast can lead to turnovers and that's a good way to get upset.

theres not really a heck of a lot to do to plan against a specific offense set. you generally focus more on the shots the offense likes to take - lot of 3s, you want to play a +, few 3s, a - (it can be more complicated than that, but thats step 1)

i agree with slowdown, but thats just a general statement about being an underdog, and has nothing to do with fastbreak offense. really any time you expect to get beaten badly, slowdown is the way to go. 

Posted by tarvolon on 4/9/2013 7:58:00 AM (view original):
Slow the hell down. Get your best ball-handlers and fastest players on the floor as much as possible. If you have a 75 SPD, 70 BH, 60 P guy and your other guys are all terrible, put him on "getting tired." (although I guess if you have that guy and your other guys are terrible, he should probably be on "getting tired" anyways). I definitely switch up my starting line-up sometimes for press teams vs non-press teams to get some more ball control. 

this sounds like a press comment, but i thought the OP was only facing FB... is it press also? i didnt really look. good comment for press, either way. just dont over do it, the biggest mistake coaches make is take a decently well set up team, and dramatically over compensate for the opponent. you can cause MUCH more damage in game planning than you can cause good, especially in the first 25 or 50 seasons of coaching. so just keep moderation in mind. coming from a guy who puts more faith in game planning than just about any veteran coach... actually ive been labelled a little crazy at times, for the intensity with which i defend game planning. everyone should game plan, just dont go too far, 98% of coaches who make fairly drastic game planning changes are hurting themselves (fairly drastic would be regularly making significant lineup changes, outside just a 2 man rotation based on who is the better defender, to guard the better scorer, type of thing, or to change your team distro more than a couple points from game to game. taking a guy at a baseline of 8 distro to 4 or 15 is almost always bad, assuming the 8 was about right to start. taking your two primary scorers from 12 and 12 to 11 and 13, that is a good kind of change). note that extreme game plans can work out when your base setup is poor, because you might need a major adjustment just to get where you should be - so game planning is a great tool to use to try to find out if your base setup is good, or not. game planning for younger coaches is more about learning than actually putting together quality game to game adjustments. 

Yeah, I think the team he's talking about is FB/FCP. Although do some FCP principles apply to FB also (i.e. limiting turnovers becomes a huge priority)? 

And when I say I change my lineup when I play press teams, I'm talking about subbing in a better passer for a better shooter when they're pretty equal at all other attributes. That kind of thing. Nothing crazy drastic. Most of that advice I gave is really just general advice for coaching a bad team. 

Posted by tarvolon on 4/9/2013 12:23:00 PM (view original):
Yeah, I think the team he's talking about is FB/FCP. Although do some FCP principles apply to FB also (i.e. limiting turnovers becomes a huge priority)? 

And when I say I change my lineup when I play press teams, I'm talking about subbing in a better passer for a better shooter when they're pretty equal at all other attributes. That kind of thing. Nothing crazy drastic. Most of that advice I gave is really just general advice for coaching a bad team. 

sadly, the correlation between FB and steals just isnt really there, in my experience. theoretically, if you are getting steals, your FB should be cooking - but it seems to me, the FB performs about the same with 10 steals as 20. just one of those things where you hit the limit of the detail in the sim engine, i think. i definitely have not found an uptempo advantage off steals, which makes me feel stronger about FB (weird that you would do one and not the other). finally, in the sim engine's simplified TSF model with no real half court offense, it seems to me to be pretty reasonable that including something like "run offense off steal" would complicate the model, i can very much believe leaving it out. in playing with a sim engine myself, properly dealing with steals is one of the more pain in the *** elements...

Oh no, I'm not implying that there's a correlation between FB and steals, I was just guessing that there's a correlation between FB and points per steal. That could be wrong though. 

Posted by gillispie on 4/9/2013 12:19:00 PM (view original):

Posted by tarvolon on 4/9/2013 7:58:00 AM (view original):
Slow the hell down. Get your best ball-handlers and fastest players on the floor as much as possible. If you have a 75 SPD, 70 BH, 60 P guy and your other guys are all terrible, put him on "getting tired." (although I guess if you have that guy and your other guys are terrible, he should probably be on "getting tired" anyways). I definitely switch up my starting line-up sometimes for press teams vs non-press teams to get some more ball control. 

this sounds like a press comment, but i thought the OP was only facing FB... is it press also? i didnt really look. good comment for press, either way. just dont over do it, the biggest mistake coaches make is take a decently well set up team, and dramatically over compensate for the opponent. you can cause MUCH more damage in game planning than you can cause good, especially in the first 25 or 50 seasons of coaching. so just keep moderation in mind. coming from a guy who puts more faith in game planning than just about any veteran coach... actually ive been labelled a little crazy at times, for the intensity with which i defend game planning. everyone should game plan, just dont go too far, 98% of coaches who make fairly drastic game planning changes are hurting themselves (fairly drastic would be regularly making significant lineup changes, outside just a 2 man rotation based on who is the better defender, to guard the better scorer, type of thing, or to change your team distro more than a couple points from game to game. taking a guy at a baseline of 8 distro to 4 or 15 is almost always bad, assuming the 8 was about right to start. taking your two primary scorers from 12 and 12 to 11 and 13, that is a good kind of change). note that extreme game plans can work out when your base setup is poor, because you might need a major adjustment just to get where you should be - so game planning is a great tool to use to try to find out if your base setup is good, or not. game planning for younger coaches is more about learning than actually putting together quality game to game adjustments. 

Thanks Gillepsie. This comment really helped. I have been messing with distro a lot... no 4s to 8s but lots of 10s to 11s. The biggest problem with my team is that nobody has stepped up on offense. A player will score 15 pts one game and then with the same distro, he wont get over 8 in the next two. Mostly, my team just sucks... but here I am in the second half of the season still tinkering with distro frequently to try and find the team's base potential. I mean, they have to reach 60 points before the season is over... right? Haha.