(Disclaimer: While I have played a couple seasons at HD, 2 on this account and 3 in my other account, I do understand I am fairly new to the game so I understand that I may be completely wrong in my thoughts.)
(Second Disclaimer: For the sake of discussion, I am ignoring IQ. I do understand it is important but it doesn't seem to affect recruiting unless there is a preference issue involved.)

This may be a fear that only I have but it appears to me that there is one way to build a team that will give you a disproportionate chance to be successful. This way is to focus on getting recruits with high Ath, Speed and Defense. It seems that if you don't get recruits with these attributes, your team suffers, even if you have high amounts in the other areas. I feel that if this is the case, this makes HD disconnected from how college basketball is played in reality. In reality, there are teams that aren't athletic but are able to win through different ways like 1) being physical, slowing the pace and turning the game into a grind, or 2) rely heavily on 3 point shooting resulting from a system of screens and passes. The way the game works makes it seem that without strong physical attributes, any system will have middling success. Am I wrong in this? I feel like college basketball teams like Virginia, John Beilein's WVU 3-pt shooting teams of old, and Bo Ryan's Wisconsin teams would struggle to exist under this system.
It may just be me, but I think adding a new attribute or two would be cool and could help address this issue (Assuming I am not wrong and it exists.) One such attribute that could be added is Strength. This attribute would affect boxouts (Defensive Rebounding), Back downs (Low Post Scoring), Screens (Spacing for players), and for guards, scoring in the paint. Any comments on this thread are appreciated, including those that say they agree, they disagree and those that say that not only am I wrong but at no point in my rambling, incoherent response was I even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read my post and I am awarded no points. May God have mercy on my soul.
Let me know what you think!

I don't hate it!

I did always think it's a little weird that there is a rating for just "defense". I get that ath, spd and blk (which doesn't matter to guards) impact defense but it does seem a little too 'all encompassing' when there are so many attributes that impact scoring ability (ath, spd, lp, per, bh).

wildcatfan, I think you'll have better luck if you divide the subject matters of your post into two posts, giving each part of your subject matter their own post. One is HD, the other is real life college basketball. They have less in common than you realize.

Lots of guys have tried to understand HD in terms of their perception of real life college basketball, and I haven't seen it done successfully yet. HD is 1's and 0's in a server in Cincinnati. Some of the terminology resembles RL basketball. As far as the connections go, that's about it.

If you get two discussions going, one about HD and one about RL college basketball, you will find that perceptions vary all over the map in both discussions, and there is very little consensus, certainly very little informed consensus.

As far as your perception that Ath, Spd and Def are the most important HD skills, you will find a lot of agreement. I think a lot of skilled coaches have learned to build successful teams that way, but it certainly isn't the only way.

Good luck. HD is a pretty cool game.

I mean I know it isn’t real-life basketball but isn’t part of the allure of the game is you get to be a college coach and manage a team so the closer to reality the game is (on some level) the better it is.
But ignoring the reality component, I think offering a wider range of diversity in building teams would make the game more interesting in game planning and recruitment. I do think there is some level of this already with passing being more important in flex offenses and speed being more valuable in fastbreak offenses. I think expanding on this concept would make team-building more diverse and recruiting the right players would matter more than just a guy with high on Ath, Speed and defense.

I think there's a selection bias involved in your analysis. There has long been a tendency towards teams focused on ATH/SPD/DEF, and after aejones posted his Guide to Winning at D2 and D3 it got much, much worse. Everybody is pretty convinced that this is the way to win. It's certainly an easy way to win a lot. Building a great, efficient offense requires a lot of parts that fit together and have to recycle at a steady rate (IE when your PG graduates, you need to have a new PG ready to step up). Maintaining a great defense is easy. There is the added benefit that ATH and SPD make guys reasonably effective interior scorers. So a great defensive team is generally at least a decent offensive team. The reverse is less certain to be true. And now, with most of the worlds at most levels experiencing all-time low human coach populations, it's pretty easy for everybody to adopt the same basic strategy. When there were 400+ human coaches in a world, everybody couldn't have a team with elite ATH/SPD. There wasn't enough to go around. With current populations, there generally is.

But it is still entirely possible to win with a team built on offensive efficiency and without elite defense. Look at my Methodist team. We just went to the title game. We have 0 walk-ons. Even so, my team is 24th in D3 in team ATH and 18th in DEF. And while those numbers sound good out of 384 D3 teams, consider that Tark has 48 human coaches. Without looking closely, I'd say that it's a good bet that fewer than 40 teams exist comprised entirely of human-recruited players. So by that standard, compared to comparable teams, my team is pretty middle-of-the-pack in athleticism and defense. What we are, however, was the clear-cut best shooting team in D3, with 4 players with 91+ PER. My team BH and Pass were 4th and 8th, respectively. We didn't turn the ball over. We shot efficiently. I also was in the discussion for best-rebounding team in D3 - not by REB rating, since we were only 4 deep in post players, but in terms of the guys on the floor at any given time we could compete on the boards with any other team in D3.

The problem, as I alluded to above, is that running a team like this is harder to maintain. I prefer to be opportunistic in recruiting and take the best available guys, but it's not always possible. Of my 4 posts, 1 is graduating now and 2 more go next year. The elite post I was recruiting wound up going to a Big 6 school (where he didn't belong, with a cap of low-70s ATH), so now I only am likely to replace the guy I'm losing. That means that next recruiting cycle I really need to bring in 2 post players. Doesn't matter if I find guys I really like. I need to fill those spots. I also had to recruit Barnoski, who is never going to be an adequate defender, because I need a PG starting next season, and he was the best available guy to fill that need. A solid passer at the 1 makes a real difference when your strategy for winning is dependent on efficient 3 point shooting. If you look at my team performance since the HD3 rollout, you'll note that my teams have not been very consistent.

But the key point here is that when the elements come together, it is entirely possible to win at this game in more than 1 way. It should be pointed out that a certain threshold of defensive proficiency has to always be met. You can't be deficient. But you can win with average defense and elite scoring.

The other thing that gets overlooked too often these days is FT%. I feel like more coaches used to pay attention to it during recruiting. This Methodist team was 3rd in D3 in FT%, with the same 75.5% as the teams ahead of it. When I won a title a Rochester in Knight a few months ago the team led the country in FT%. In close games between great teams, I'd rather be the team with the best FT% than the best ATH/DEF. You don't see that many steals in end-of-game PBPs. You see lots of free throws.

Posted by dahsdebater on 4/4/2019 6:21:00 PM (view original):
The other thing that gets overlooked too often these days is FT%. I feel like more coaches used to pay attention to it during recruiting. This Methodist team was 3rd in D3 in FT%, with the same 75.5% as the teams ahead of it. When I won a title a Rochester in Knight a few months ago the team led the country in FT%. In close games between great teams, I'd rather be the team with the best FT% than the best ATH/DEF. You don't see that many steals in end-of-game PBPs. You see lots of free throws.

This is why the coaching update I really want to see is multiple situational lineups.

I disagree because this, there’s a certain floor a player needs in A/S/D to be good in HD or real life. It obviously depends on the player, but in real life, a player that isn’t strong at all, and slow as a nail, can”t play college basketball. So I think of it as A/S/D limit the player pool (for good teams), and then there’s bad A/S/D within that pool and super elite in that pool. That’s when other attributes come in.

Posted by dahsdebater on 4/4/2019 6:21:00 PM (view original):
The other thing that gets overlooked too often these days is FT%. I feel like more coaches used to pay attention to it during recruiting. This Methodist team was 3rd in D3 in FT%, with the same 75.5% as the teams ahead of it. When I won a title a Rochester in Knight a few months ago the team led the country in FT%. In close games between great teams, I'd rather be the team with the best FT% than the best ATH/DEF. You don't see that many steals in end-of-game PBPs. You see lots of free throws.

I'll disagree.

FT% really only comes into play as a meaningful factor in close games, and only when there are a high number of FT situations. ATH/DEF comes into play in every game, throughout the entire game.

I have game by game stats from one of my teams for the past 5 full seasons that I grab via an embedded web query in Excel. I just went into each of those and modeled increasing my FT% for each game by 10% to see what difference it made. I would have won seven more games over five seasons. That's 1.4 wins per season. It may be a small sample size, but I like to think that recruiting while paying special attention to ATH/DEF has had more of an impact to my teams performance than FT shooting has.

ATH/DEF isn't the only way to win but it is the easiest.

At D2/D3 you can still win without top 10 ATH/DEF scores. Efficient offenses are still tough to stop, spd/per teams still can do well, and just well balanced teams are always good.

Don't believe the hype.

Chiming in that ATH/DEF is a great start, but the next step is getting the offense going. My teams at D2/3 are typically top ten in ATH/DEF, but my best teams have also been high in BH/Passing, or had 3-5 high LP/PER players to go with the physical attributes. Case in point is my Chico St. team this season. It's an ATH/DEF beast, but I don't have anyone developed yet who can score and as a result I am not getting the wins. I need to rebalance and git gud.

At DI you need elite ATH/DE we all agree on that correct?

There has to be a certain minimum level of Ath and Def average for your team to compete for the D1 title. Not every player has to be at those levels. The more players you have at or above those levels the more flexibility you have on who you can bring in to fill out your roster.

I built some awesome offensive juggernaut teams with low defense that were eaten up in the tourney. However in the regular season they were unstoppable. See the samething IRL. The offensive juggernaut teams fall short because they can't get the key stop in a close game.

Also think you are not factoring in the importance of stamina. I have had high Ath/speed/Def teams with low stamina get iced early in a tourney every time. Low stamina will get your teams in more trouble than low speed will.

Posted by cubcub113 on 4/5/2019 9:07:00 PM (view original):
At DI you need elite ATH/DE we all agree on that correct?

What do you mean by elite? 90+?

Posted by cubcub113 on 4/5/2019 9:07:00 PM (view original):
At DI you need elite ATH/DE we all agree on that correct?

To win national championships, sure. If you're at low D1 and working your way up, there are other ways to build a CC contender.