Unseld in the fifth - dang what a steal. I know his D isn't great but this guy should be a late 2nd/early 3rd pick. To tell you the truth I didn't even realize he was still around or I probably would have taken him at the 4/5 turn, even though he didn't particularly fit what I needed.

I was ready to pull the trigger on him in round 4 before taking Pierce. Was definitely going to take him in 5th if still around.

Taking Swen was genius. The Admiral's and Ibaka's defense up front pretty much cover for Swen's weakness. This team is one of the ones to beat that's for sure.

Couldn't pass him up and my thought exactly. I have two guys that can cover for his weak D. Needed the rebs.

Curious to see the route you take in this round. There are a couple of directions you can go and I can think of two or three guys I like for you here. I like your front court a lot. I'd like a few more minutes out of Emeka but you'll be fine.

Vance, you are spot-on about the impact of the $52mill cap, the competition is filled by quality minutes, unlike the ODL where we all have to rely on 15-20 mpg of scrubs to help carry us.

Tar and Vance the ONE thing on WIS that tracks closer to RL than anything else is fouls committed. Take it to the bank that virtually all leagues here aside from progressives with season specific player pools will produce between 18.8 and 19.5 fouls per team per game for the league as a whole. Individual teams see a lot more range, but the league as a whole will produce an outcome within that range. More about fouls in a bit.

Sly, I was all over the 11-12 Pierce ahead of West in the 4th had he lasted. I almost went Unseld in the 4th, very happy that he slipped until the 5th.

Tar, I did the exact same thing with my own draft board a few seasons back in the ODL, missed Buck Williams just sitting there when I took Zo's partial season at the end of the 3rd. Since that lesson I created a top-100 board for each league and I double-check before picking each round, nothing worse than overlooking a guy that "must be gone already" when he somehow is not.

Tar,

When I talk about winning the FTA battle I am assuming that my own foul rate is much lower than my opponents. IMO the engine utilizes both the RL FGA to FTA ratio of all players AND the individual foul rates of all players when deciding (1) will a foul be committed and (2) will a FTA take place.

Whether or not there is an FTA is highly dependent on the RL FGA/FTA ratio of the players on the court. This is hard to control but if you draft a team of guys that averaged around one FTA for every 2.5 FGA’s then IMO you will be ahead of most of the league (not an easy task btw). The league as a whole will generally average one FTA per every 3.6 to 3.8 FGA’s on WIS. Getting an FTA is tricky especially in a league filled with guys that took a ton of FTA’s in RL.

IMO WIS determines where the fouls go much like how they determine where the rebounds go in the sim. Individual games vary greatly, but IMO the engine approaches a game in general with the intent of assigning around 38 fouls total per game. Whether or not a foul results in an FTA is also dependent on the FGA to FTA ratios, some fouls are offensive and of course the first four non-shooting fouls each quarter do not result in an FTA.

IMO it works something like this: the engine approaches a game in general saying “I’m giving out about 38 fouls.”  The engine then compares the pf rate (total RL fouls divided by RL minutes played) of all of the players on the court as it assigns the fouls.  So, if my team has a pf rate of .06 and my opponents are at .09 then the engine is highly likely to assign my team 40% of the fouls (.6/.15) of any given game and assign my opponent 60% (.9/.15) of the fouls for a given game.  Late game settings can impact this as well, but in general IMO that is how it works.

So, when I talk about domination in the FTA battle I’m first talking about winning the fouls committed battle, and if you can field a team with a pf rate in the .06 range then there is little doubt you are WAY ahead of almost every team in the league, even if that advantage only results in say a 45% to 55% foul distribution that 10% edge will have a significant impact on a large majority of the individual games.

Nate - that all looks nice in theory, and honestly some of it goes over my head a little bit, but (1) I think you're overthinking it and (2) that seems to me to be based about 80% on theory and 20% on sim observation. I think you're making a lot of inferential leaps about how the SIM works. But I'll make two relatively simple points that hold true in my experience. First, PF/FTA are sometimes more effect than cause - for example, good teams will shoot more FT/foul less as a result of being ahead at the end of games more often, not necessarily because the team makeup causes those things. Second, I really don't think it's possible to push your number of FTA significantly higher by drafting lots of FTA. The main influence you have on PF/FTA is drafting as few fouls as possible for your own team, in my experience. In that sense I understand winning the "PF battle," but I don't think FTA impacts that much.

How about this: I'm pretty sure that teams' FTA:FGA rates don't vary a whole lot in the SIM - even if you draft lots of high FTA/low FGA players, you'll still end up pretty close to the average (and as a result your players will shoot significantly more FG and significantly fewer FT than in real life). I'll bet if you look at a recently completed league you will see teams clustered pretty close together in that measure, and you won't see a huge effect for teams that drafted a lot more FTA than others.

Just remember this: the numbers of free throws a player attempts is highly influenced by his usage. This is why low-usage guys with high FTA usually will fall far short of their RL totals (take Cedric Maxwell, for example, who I almost picked last round - he'll be lucky to shoot half of his real-life FTA in most seasons, but will usually far exceed his RL FGA). Conversely, guys who have usage that's a little higher with low FTA will usually have a very good chance of meeting/exceeding their FTA totals. So it's not just that everyone shoots less FT at a similar ratio to their RL totals - low-usage guys will usually see a bigger hit than high-usage guys, and the high-usage, low-fta guys will sometimes even exceed RL totals.

Here's three players from my current ODL team, to provide a case study:

Artis Gilmore: 19.6% usg, 559 RL FTA, on pace for 365 FTA (65% of RL total)
Tracy McGrady: 35.1% usg, 726 RL FTA, on pace for 656 FTA (90% of RL total)
Al Horford: 21.9% usg, 208 RL FTA, on pace for 225 FTA (108% of RL total)

So: Gilmore, who has pretty high FTA for his level of usage, will not get anywhere near RL FTA. McGrady, who has huge usage but also pretty big FTA, will get decently close to his RL total. And Horford, who has very low FTA for his usage, has a good shot of actually exceeding his RL total.


Remember, this will also be influenced by your total number of FTA, thanks to diminishing returns on FTA in the SIM (i.e., if you draft 5000 of them, you're not going to shoot anywhere near double everyone else in the league). So if you draft several high FTA guys, they'll probably all have trouble getting anywhere near RL. If you draft a team with really low total FTA, they might all significantly exceed RL. But I think trying to draft a bunch of FTA to significantly improve your own FTA rate, if that's what you intend to do, is not likely to pay off.

Tar, i agree with the high usage. Another case study: I used (undrafted) in the most recently competed ODL (29% usg) and he hit his RL ft Total which was over 500

Artis played in a era with a lot of PF. IMO, He misses his RL totals for the same reason Oscar can never reach his RL reb totals: context.
Without all those fouls on Artis or all those missed shots for Oscar, their rate stats will ever multiply out to match their RL numbers.

Smokeys 50-69 DDL should be a fun experiment. We should see some very high FTA and Reb totals in that one!

100	2.8	Dwyane Wade	08-09 Heat	SG	36.4	52.2	31.3	51.6	3.2	11.6	25.4	2.7	2.2
96	3.8	Scottie Pippen	94-95 Bulls	SF	26.3	51.9	34.3	52.2	6.5	17.6	16.9	3.5	1.8
100	5.8	Shawn Kemp	93-94 SuperSonics	PF	24.2	53.8	25.2	53.9	13.3	23.2	9.3	2.4	3.9
97	5.3	Elden Campbell	95-96 Lakers	PF	19.6	50.4	0.0	50.3	6.8	18.2	8.2	1.4	4.5
100	7.3	Tree Rollins	79-80 Hawks	C	13.7	55.6	0.0	55.8	14.0	24.5	4.3	1.1	6.6
90 def	7.7 fp48	Paul Millsap	06-07 Jazz	PF	18.1 usg	52.4	33.2	52.6 efg	14.6 oreb	19.4 dreb	5.5 ast	2.2 stl	3.3 blk
92	5.8	Larry Sanders	12-13 Bucks	PF	17.0	50.6	0.0	50.6	11.3	24.2	5.4	1.2	5.9

ok starting 5 has 
oreb  48.3
dreb 101.2
ast 61.3
team efg 52.2 
def 96.4
any thoughts on my team all i know is their is going to be some ugly looking boxscores

Tar,

I actually spent about 2 hours yesterday working on FTA / PF data for the ODL. I've completed the East and will work on the West tonight before sharing (now that football is over for the day.)

I think if we combine our observations we can close in on a better understanding of what is going on in the sim. To clarify, I agree 100% with you about "number" of RL FTA's, what matters is the ratio of RL FGA's when compared to RL FTA's, the actual total of FTA's means nothing. I also concur that the sim has a max and a min setting for the ratio it produces. IMO this is likely team based, the ave for the leagues I've looked at ranges from 3.6 to 3.8 to 1 for leagues as a whole. But individual teams can range from close to 3 to 1 to just over 4 to 1. May not sound like a huge range, but the teams at 3 to 1 are shooting 33% more FT's than the ones at 4 to 1.

Individual players also appear to have a cap and a floor. I often use a guy that had a RL ratio of about 10 to 1, but the sim usually brings him under 5 to 1, meaning he will almost always more than double his RL FTA's. It's also pretty hard to get a guy over 2.5 to 1 in the sim, even if they were under 2 to 1 IRL.

Steelers I'll look at the numbers later but it appears you will be fouling A LOT. I hope we can end up in the same division, our matchups will make for a very interesting case study.

Your D is off the charts, your rebounding matches what I had in season 2 of the PPL where I was something like +10 boards a game.

IMO you are very close to the assists floor and will be way below it when Wade is off of the court, but Wade/Kemp and the season before of Rollins were at the core of my 64-18 PPL squad that you took down last season in the finals. I'm guessing you will add another PG, efg is below average by just a tad for this league.

You will be a nightmare to play, but IMO without more assists you may suffer the same fate as jcred has in the current ODL.

It's interesting to me that draft after some of us always look to take some of the same players ie. scud loves Maurice Cheeks, I love Sabonis and nate loves Jerry West. Just a random thought. 

Cheeks is ultra elite clean for his D, would love to try him someday.

West also has some really clean play options with 90 D, he took me to the finals in my 2nd ODL so I tend to fall back on him, I've never missed the playoffs in a league with West.

We'll see what the 6th brings, but West has a few 70D seasons that I'm considering tapping into, they come with rebounding that I never realized he had, a great FGA/FTA ratio, but the efg drops and the fouls go from elite to just below average.

Sabonis did well for me when I used him here, solid dreb and near elite shooting.