As I've started releasing analysis including team and player ratings in Iba, a few coaches have requested a sheet that allows them to do this analysis themselves for game-planning, team planning, or otherwise.

Here is my answer: HD Team Evaluator Tool 1.0

It is very much what I consider to be the lazy person's game-planning tool -- the only work required of you is to enter in a Team ID. I tried to be as transparent as possible with the explanation of how it works in the READ ME as there are certainly limitations to its computational ability and I by no means believe it's a total replacement for a more in-depth matchup tool such as CubCub's.

As such, I'm very open to feedback or requests in terms of what can be added/modified in the tool. Once you create a copy, you can also make modifications yourself if you so please (though it'd be hard to so without breaking the document in my opinion so tread carefully).

If you do have questions or feedback, feel free to either site-mail me or post directly in this thread so that the information is stored in this thread for future reference!

I love it Trail! Way easier from a time perspective than mine/Hughes' since you don't need to plug in depth charts for each team.

Very cool thank you!

Great work, trail! I've been trying to figure out how to extract potential in a spreadsheet automatically for a while to build something similar to Basketts' browser extension but in a spreadsheet. I have a semi-manual way of doing it but not sure if you or cub have found a way to pull potential in relation to ratings in automatically with importxml ??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SMMtZ8LEx8&ab_channel=AndrewLogan

Is this what you're talking about? I forget the coach name but this Andrew Logan guy made this a while ago.

great sheet Trail. quick question - if someone was using your sheet as their holy grail for gameplanning an opponent and trying to factor in positioning, would they be using your offense +/-, defense +/-, or an average of both?

Posted by digitalv on 1/13/2023 7:05:00 AM (view original):
great sheet Trail. quick question - if someone was using your sheet as their holy grail for gameplanning an opponent and trying to factor in positioning, would they be using your offense +/-, defense +/-, or an average of both?

great q - both are guidance based on your opponent's relative strengths & weaknesses (they do not factor in your own team's skills):

• The offense +/- is a recommendation (from a scale of -5 to +5; though there may be extreme edge cases that exceed these bounds) that suggests how much you should increase or decrease your 3-point shooting based on your opponent. So you should consider this recommendation as well as your specific player's skills to come to a middle-ground on what to set each player's 3-pt setting at.
• The defense +/- is a similar recommendation that suggests how to alter your positioning based on your opponent, but it currently does not factor in how your scheme and talent might already be oriented toward guarding 2 or 3s better. If you see a +3 according to the spreadsheet, but are running 3-2 zone with strong guard defenders, you might only want to run a 0 or +1 in reality.

I'm hoping to add some nuance to account for these factors over time, but these are the current limitations!

Posted by sol_phenom3 on 1/12/2023 10:34:00 PM (view original):
Great work, trail! I've been trying to figure out how to extract potential in a spreadsheet automatically for a while to build something similar to Basketts' browser extension but in a spreadsheet. I have a semi-manual way of doing it but not sure if you or cub have found a way to pull potential in relation to ratings in automatically with importxml ??

This seems like a fun venture. I'll add it to my list!

Thanks for the reference, RiddleFace!

So I tinkered with at least projections for max growth - this is the best I've got so far. I didn't add fancy instructions like trail - essentially plop your Team ID into cell B1 and adjust the dropdowns to manually input potential per skill for your players. You can adjust the sliders in the "Custom Sliders" tab and then you'll get the maximum projected ratings for all players at the bottom.

Going to keep iterating on this and have an idea for season-by-season growth but trying to minimize complexity... I think Basketts mentioned this previously but Potential seems impossible to extract without additional code due to the whole JS layer where you can't actually extract the Potential w/o verifying that you're logged in as the user in the world where the potential has been unlocked via FSS. I think his extension was able to get around this by operating in the browser itself while you're logged in in the particular world. I've got zero idea if that's remotely possible in Gsheets.

trail/cub, feel free to take this and transform it if you have any other ideas. I'm all about open source and collaboration...

came here to compliment trail. I think I'll be using both he and cub's sheets. I do love the quick convenience of not entering the depth, though that's a double edged sword bc I also like analyzing where the good players are. Both have so much info and are great. Nice work trail. leaving here complimenting not just the two of them but also sol_phenom3. That's freakin awesome. I was trying to decide whether to cut a player or not (was leaning yes but wasn't confident). Seeing his projected finishing ratings. HE GONE

Posted by trail on 1/13/2023 9:18:00 AM (view original):

Posted by digitalv on 1/13/2023 7:05:00 AM (view original):
great sheet Trail. quick question - if someone was using your sheet as their holy grail for gameplanning an opponent and trying to factor in positioning, would they be using your offense +/-, defense +/-, or an average of both?

great q - both are guidance based on your opponent's relative strengths & weaknesses (they do not factor in your own team's skills):

• The offense +/- is a recommendation (from a scale of -5 to +5; though there may be extreme edge cases that exceed these bounds) that suggests how much you should increase or decrease your 3-point shooting based on your opponent. So you should consider this recommendation as well as your specific player's skills to come to a middle-ground on what to set each player's 3-pt setting at.
• The defense +/- is a similar recommendation that suggests how to alter your positioning based on your opponent, but it currently does not factor in how your scheme and talent might already be oriented toward guarding 2 or 3s better. If you see a +3 according to the spreadsheet, but are running 3-2 zone with strong guard defenders, you might only want to run a 0 or +1 in reality.

I'm hoping to add some nuance to account for these factors over time, but these are the current limitations!

This looks like a great tool, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on whether or not I'm using the correct thought processes to get the most out of it. For tomorrow morning's game, it says that my offense should be about a -1 and my defense should be a +1. If I'm understanding correctly, that means that I should lower everyone's 3 point frequency by one and play a +2 rather than a +1, yes?

Posted by bruinsfan911 on 1/14/2023 9:16:00 PM (view original):

Posted by trail on 1/13/2023 9:18:00 AM (view original):

Posted by digitalv on 1/13/2023 7:05:00 AM (view original):
great sheet Trail. quick question - if someone was using your sheet as their holy grail for gameplanning an opponent and trying to factor in positioning, would they be using your offense +/-, defense +/-, or an average of both?

great q - both are guidance based on your opponent's relative strengths & weaknesses (they do not factor in your own team's skills):

• The offense +/- is a recommendation (from a scale of -5 to +5; though there may be extreme edge cases that exceed these bounds) that suggests how much you should increase or decrease your 3-point shooting based on your opponent. So you should consider this recommendation as well as your specific player's skills to come to a middle-ground on what to set each player's 3-pt setting at.
• The defense +/- is a similar recommendation that suggests how to alter your positioning based on your opponent, but it currently does not factor in how your scheme and talent might already be oriented toward guarding 2 or 3s better. If you see a +3 according to the spreadsheet, but are running 3-2 zone with strong guard defenders, you might only want to run a 0 or +1 in reality.

I'm hoping to add some nuance to account for these factors over time, but these are the current limitations!

This looks like a great tool, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on whether or not I'm using the correct thought processes to get the most out of it. For tomorrow morning's game, it says that my offense should be about a -1 and my defense should be a +1. If I'm understanding correctly, that means that I should lower everyone's 3 point frequency by one and play a +2 rather than a +1, yes?

that’s how i would recommend using it, yes (assuming that +1 is your default positioning regardless of opponent)

3pt setting is on a -5 to +5 scale so if you’re seeing -1 then i’d probably stick with your default for most players and maybe only shift down for certain players that are on the fringe. i’ll probably adjust this one to be more clear as i can see how it’d be confusing in its current state. i wouldn’t recommend shifting all players down by 1 unless you’re seeing at least -2 or -3 here

Trail can you walk me through some of these calculations? I am a bit confused why you are weighting the exponented (unsure that's a word) values of player ratings on things like G DEF for example: (Ath^1.1)*7.5+(Spd^1.3)*4+(Def^1.2)*7)/4451?

What is the advantage of this over using a simple weight?

Love the tool so far.

Posted by therewas47 on 1/25/2023 10:10:00 AM (view original):
Trail can you walk me through some of these calculations? I am a bit confused why you are weighting the exponented (unsure that's a word) values of player ratings on things like G DEF for example: (Ath^1.1)*7.5+(Spd^1.3)*4+(Def^1.2)*7)/4451?

What is the advantage of this over using a simple weight?

Love the tool so far.

it’s a good question and thank you for looking at the formulas.

i use exponents because i have found that performance in HD has a non-linear relationship to player ratings. i may be wrong in this assumption, something i hedged against by using very low exponents.

one example of this…if i told you that you could add 20 PER to either of these guards, which would you choose:

Player A: 80 ATH, 80 SPD, 20 PER, 80 BH
Player B: 60 ATH, 60 SPD, 80 PER, 60 BH

almost surely you’d add the 20 PER to player B, right? moving a player from 20 to 40 PER makes a nominal impact on scoring ability but moving a player from 80 to 100 PER makes an enormous difference on scoring ability. even with lower ath, spd, and BH, this player would be an effective 3-pt shooter even at D1. i’d argue that you’d have to increase Player A from 20 to perhaps as high as 70 to capture the same impact that is captured by increasing Player B from 80 to 100.

the reason for this is thresholds. there is a certain threshold point below which a player won’t be able to shoot 3-pointers with enough consistency to justify shooting them. getting above this threshold is the key and what i’m trying to capture here. unfortunately my mathematical skills are too limited to create a formula that captures this threshold effect perfectly, but what you see is my best attempt, molded over many years of fine-tuning against the performance i saw from various players i had and played against.

this threshold effect probably applies more to 3-pt shooting than to other skills, which i think you can see captured in these weights, but i think there’s an extent to which it applies to nearly all skills.

very open to feedback here though - i have no dogma about these weightings — it’s simply my best guess.

thank you for the positive feedback as well! glad you’re finding some utility in it :)

i used to be focused on whether the HD formulas behind the scenes were linear or non linear, i used to feel its definitely non-linear. back when i worked on formulas myself (11 years?) i addressed it by multiplying things like per and spd and bh as part of their weighting (with also a linear component). which is pretty similar to what you are doing.

at this point though, i kinda think its less about if the HD formulas themselves are linear or non-linear, as much as the curve for marginal value of the ratings which you'd plot for a single player. which is highly situational, highly dependent on the player's other ratings and the defense he is facing (the man defender or the overall zone defense, plus other key defensive factors). things like offense are also highly dependent on the offensive efficiency of the rest of the team. it usually doesn't or barely matters how good your 5th scorer on the floor is, for example, no matter where that player is in the spectrum from useless to pretty darn good.

anyway, i don't think there is a perfect or near-perfect way to capture this, even taking away all the situation stuff (rest of the team, opponent, etc), but the best i came up with for single players was similar to what you are doing (per * per as a factor or ath * ath as a factor).

i think what is really happening behind the scenes, if you considered something like 3pt scoring, that is being compared to the defense along with probably some other factors, and then the difference or ratio is used to pick the spot on the curve that says what 3pt% should result from the overall scenario. the performance of a 70 per, spd, bh player against a 70 ath, def, spd player is going to be fairly similar to what you see when all players are 90. what really matters to us though is the utility from the player's offense, and we operate in really tight margins. a 56% fg scorer might be great while a 50% fg scorer is passable at best. even if everything that happened behind this point was super simple and super linear - say, the player had a fg% rating that could range from 1 to 60 and that was their fg% no matter the defense etc - the actual utility we care about would still be incredibly non-linear. we'd effectively assign 0 value from 1 up to maybe 40, 45, depending on your team, maybe even a bit higher. the value would really pick up around 50 and would be crazy high all the way up to 60.

i guess all i'm getting at is, i used to be concerned about the behind the scenes way per scoring skill was calculated, that sort of thing. now i barely care because its basically irrelevant. what matters to us is utility and marginal utility (how much value does 1 point of extra per matter at a given point, similar to the +20 example in the last post). which is really situational in so many ways. not sure that helps address the question in any way... i guess i feel like its safe to say non-linear is probably in order though, because that is always going to be the reality, as a player transitions from very slightly useful on offense to highly useful. for example, there's going to be a massive spike in value around that 90 per/spd/bh mark for high d1 no matter what the base per skill formula is. and that is pretty darn hard to capture!