Posted by mullycj on 7/26/2016 5:09:00 PM (view original):
You are all forgetting one important aspect.
How good is YOUR defense. You are talking like the assumption is your team defense is perfectly balanced at 0.
Well what if your guards suck and your LP defense rock? Maybe your "0" should really be a "+1", and all your analysis should add a +1 to it.
Class dismissed.
good post mully. my teams often have a "base" setting of -0.5 or +1, based on the situation - and i recommend even non-expert coaches try to think that way.
although sometimes, its worth considering that a multiplier on a strength is a bigger net than a multiplier on a weakness, and to double down, counter to the logic above. it depends on the situation and where you are in the curve so to speak, but i have at times followed the above logic, and other times, did the exact opposite (that is a general comment more so than just about +/-, although i've applied that logic to +/- in extreme cases).
really, what mully said is a bit of an oversimplification. you really want to figure out a base +/- situation for your team as a whole. your defense is one consideration, but so might be your depth, your set, and more. for example, on pressing teams, i am less likely to play a - defense than i am on a man team, because a - defense impacts foul trouble and that matters a LOT more if you are a press team - especially if you are a championship caliber press team, or a 10 man or less press team. for title teams, volatility is the main enemy, so a foul/fatigue outlier is one of the biggest concerns, which makes - largely unsuitable for all but your best opponents. for shorter press teams, foul trouble basically destroys you, its not just the outlier you are worried about, but even one single player being in foul trouble can do major damage. i had a 10 deep title press team a while back, i have to imagine i never played a - all season, although its possible if it was a top flight opponent who literally took no 3s, that i'd have played a -1 (normally i'd play a -3 or -5).
in general, you can get most of the way there by simply boiling it down to 1 thing - what % of fga are 3pta, for your opponent. the 33% number thrown out by emy IMO is too high, but mostly i press and mostly he plays man, which inherently is better vs 3s and doesn't have the fatigue trouble. i use a figure closer to 25%, but a spread of 5% for that figure might really be appropriate given the different in situation (see above). still, 33% is too high, but not by much - and maybe not at all, if your team is garbage and volatility is your friend.
anyway, my point is, for coaches trying to be consistent NT coaches, going off of 3pta/fga is literally enough. somewhere in the 25-33% range is where you should start playing a +1, and go +/- 1 for every 4-5% or so. that's probably a better approach just by itself, than the average HD coach takes. from there, you can get basically arbitrarily complex, but most of that complexity could be stated not knowing your opponent's stats - it would come down to who you are, and how likely you are to win (3s are a main source of volatility, and the importance of limiting volatility varies wildly depending on your situation). when game planning for the NT, all i really consider are 3pta/fga, 3pt%, 2pt% (to a much lesser extent than 3pt%, the variance among "real" opponents is much less, really you are just looking to evaluate how valuable 3pt shots are for this team), and either SOS or the actual ratings of the players. the last bit is to get a sense of where the team's performance would be on a standardized SOS of whatever you consider a standard SOS (to me, its basically a top 10 SOS, because i only care about top notch opponents, but to each their own) - or really, of how that team would perform against YOU (considering how they'd perform at a std level of competition is a good way to get there, though). and by SOS i mean true SOS, not the listed one. anyway, you could look at ratings and shots for their 3pt shooters to get a sense of where they should "really" be (trying to work SOS and randomness out of the result - which is less important in the NT when extreme randomness already had time to work its way out), but that is probably something most coaches cannot accurately assess. its far easier to look at SOS and adjust up or down a bit based on their SOS.
getting into stuff like how an opponent fared against various defenses, to me, you just lead yourself to drawing conclusions that aren't there. small sample size is more likely to bite you, if you do that - realistically, you should have a stronger understanding of how a team performs against various offenses than you can get by looking at a handful of game results. plus, frankly, how a defense guards the 3 is pretty straight forward and fairly well understood (i think), so there is no reason to over complicate and draw correlations that aren't there (besides, i don't think this could even realistically be assessed by anybody playing this game - to try to look at 3 point performance at one team, based on the defense of the other team, you'd have to adjust for a massive amount of stuff - the quality of the defense as a whole, of individual matchups, the +/- played, HCA, and more. frankly, i don't think i could even hope to make that assessment, so don't take it as an insult that I don't believe you/anyone else could, either - that is outside of the fact that any conclusion you drew on the subject, i would consider wrong, because i consider the impact a defense has on the offensive performance of a player to be fixed - maybe the D is better vs 3s, but its not going to be more the case for a high bh guard than a high spd guard, the game just isn't that complex - im 95% sure of that). another example, some people also like to look at the losses of the opponent, and see what they lost to. that's ok for newer / less experienced coaches, but it really makes me cringe. often an NT opponent might have like 4 losses, you can't draw conclusions from that sample and should be seeking a better understanding of the game than you could get off a few cherry picked games anyway. just because the team lost, doesn't mean they lost due to 3 pt shooting, and all that.
7/26/2016 8:34 PM (edited)