interesting thoughts on slowdown... my take is basically this. i think that i look at press differently that the folks who see slowdown as OP vs press. there's two ways to press, and the view on slowdown is going to be almost diametric.

so, two main aspects to press... on one side, you create a huge number of turnovers; this aspect of press is the most powerful tool in the game when it comes to trying to win the possession battle. on the second side, you have pace/fatigue/fouls. the first side, the steals/turnovers, is unambiguously great, with no downside. the pace/fatigue/foul situation is murkier.

in general, press pays extra fatigue on every defensive possession, and incurs more fouls - a pretty straight forward and substantial negative. you also get higher pace, which increases the fatigue for both teams, a mixed bag - and also, it leads to lower volatility (due to more possessions), which is also a mixed bag, but a clear and substantial advantage for the best teams.

ok, we all know this, but just framing what i am to say next. there's really two ways to play press. the traditional way, which pre-dates me but is my favorite system and was / is also sort of the main line for unreasonably dominant programs (virtually all of the 3peats in the game came from traditional press, all 4 of my programs with great title runs ran it too). the way you play traditional press is, you take the steal/TO advantage and milk it for all its worth, and you treat the fatigue situation as a negative to be managed. this means with 10 players or less, certainly, and probably with 11, you are running slowdown, but you are targeting 12 guys and solid stamina, which lets you manage normal tempo. pace becomes a big advantage for the absolute best teams - which can be further pushed with uptempo, i suppose. however, uptempo does less the higher your pace already is (you can only speed things up so much), and generally a quality stamina 12 deep team, still doesn't have the depth to handle uptempo's foul/fatigue situation well enough to be reliable enough for the best teams. with the traditional press, depth is the priority in general, but because you aren't needing outrageous depth (12 deep and 78 stamina being plenty, for example, not needing the 82-85 i prefer on a fb/pr), the better teams are really focusing on traditional talent, too, recruiting high ath/def like man teams and all.

if you play press like the above, you don't care if the opponent plays slowdown. there are fewer possessions, a negative if you are the favorite, but not if not - but the overall pace drops, fatigue drops, and your objective of managing fatigue is furthered. this is a worthwhile trade - i'll again mention, folks seem to underestimate the impact tempo has on both teams. its a lot. my opponent slowing down into my press has a relatively big impact on my fatigue.

the second way to press is to try to push the fatigue/pace angle even further, either with uptempo press, fb/pr, or uptempo fb/pr. although there is some difference to all of those, they all fundamentally approach the fatigue battle as a battle to perhaps be won, as opposed to a loss to be managed. prioritizing depth and stamina even further than press, putting less emphasis on traditional talents (per scoring, reb, bh/pass, mostly - fb tends to give you all the 2pt scoring you need, but for uptempo straight press, 2pt scoring too).

in 3.0, the depth of teams in mid to high d1 (top 50-75 programs) is the lowest it has ever been, for any division, at any point in the game. its not even close. this is a huge shift from 2.0, which had the highest depth. this provides a strong basis for a high pace press strategy, and it can in general terms, be pretty darn good. it seems to be REALLY powerful in low to mid d1, because you basically just recruiting ath/spd/def/sta, per if you can manage it, and you get out of the way and let press/fb do their thing - which is a lot!

the higher you get on the totem pole with high pace press, the more you end up needing to work on more traditional talents like scoring, reb, bh/pass. the reason for this is, at the higher end, there are more 10+ deep man/zone teams, who you can never hope to gain a fatigue advantage over, who may have a major fatigue/depth advantage on you! and there are some 12 deep straight press teams with a fatigue advantage on you, too. that used to describe the large majority of top 10 d1 teams, but not anymore. there'll still be plenty of top 10 and especially top 25 teams who you can beat on the fatigue battle, but there's plenty of near-draws and a good number of disadvantaged games, so you rationally start to hedge (by increasing more traditional skills).

its super common for fb/pr coaches to hit this sort of ceiling, where they are still focusing pace, working to convert their higher prestige and status to better and better depth, i mean - but you end up trying to milk more and more from a dry cow. if you are a fb/pr coach, and you are struggling to take that step from perennial NT team to perennial deep run threat, you should really consider if this is why.

anyway, if you are a pace press team, then sure - slowdown can be a threat. for my pace press teams, i don't overly mind slowdown, personally, but its definitely the right play for tons of teams and its certainly a counter of sorts! but i will say this. when i was co-coaching with chap 1-2 years back, we had two fb/pr teams. those teams got good enough that we were fighting for 1 seeds and championships, and by then we were having to focus pretty heavily on traditional stats. sure, we had a lot less - we had #1 competitive teams on B to C prestige, where we had killer depth and sacrificed traditional talents - and i actually think that strategy is quite possibly the best available, at least tied for it, for those lower prestige teams. but when we had A prestige, we were trying to get that traditional talent, and it actually makes depth harder - its harder to get 85 stamina for example, if you value traditional stats higher. with our best teams, i was actually back to appreciating it when other people ran slowdown. the pace with us being normal fb/pr, with them a slowdown motion/man or similar, was still quite high - and i found most of our losses and close games came with bad foul/fatigue rolls. their slowdown helped our fatigue, and i was grateful.

last thought - uptempo is a pretty valid counter to pace press teams, too. you have to have a depth advantage, but if i'm 12 deep man with say 78 stamina, heck yeah. no way in hell i am running slowdown into a fb/pr team in that situation! (an underdog without a depth advantage can also consider this)

anyway... i personally think slowdown is fine. its a good counter to press and pace press both, for low depth teams, but i don't think its unbalanced at all. my advice, if you are a press team who is annoyed at the slowdown counter, would be to play a more traditional press, where slowdown's effectiveness as a counter is greatly diminished. (uptempo by 12 deep man teams, also a counter reduced! this is perhaps why i am such a traditional press loyalist - taking away the ability for smart coaches to counter you is really valuable when you are huge favorites over all but a handful or perhaps dozen of teams, as elite press teams are)

Posted by Fregoe on 4/7/2022 1:00:00 PM (view original):

Posted by trojan4309 on 4/7/2022 10:02:00 AM (view original):
When teams want to pull upsets in real life, they run slowdown. You limit possessions and hope the percentages work in your favor. You’re also reducing your risk of foul trouble with slowdown as well. There are many indirect affects of slowing the game down that make it optimal to pull an upset.

I don’t believe it directly affects shooting percentage, turnover rate, etc. instead, I think it merely allows for fewer possessions and subsequently slows down the rate of fatigue as well. I think you are confusing indirect factors as being direct and I strongly doubt they are direct.

It also seems shoe only finds fault with the engine when he loses. Losses happen. They even happen when you’re the better team. It doesn’t mean the engine is broken.

Tell me you have never coached without telling me you have never coached in real life.

If I feel my team is deeper but not as talented on the top end( top 6-8) I try to run the other team out of the gym. I don't call any timeouts and I tire them out, and than try to keep tiring them out. I sub 5 in 5 out every whistle. In real life. I also want to get them in foul trouble so sometimes the right play is to tire out the starters and go at them early and often.

With some of these Stacked but only 6 deep DI teams FB/Press should be the answer not slowdown.

I meant to respond to this the other day. I still don’t understand why people feel the need to be rude for absolutely no reason. Why not just say what you said without adding the condescending first paragraph?

As far as your point, of course that’s a way to pull an upset. I use a deeper roster and uptempo with Mississippi St in Naismith. Perhaps my post sounded more generalized than I meant it, but you can also pull upsets by playing slowdown. I won my only championship as an 8 seed that way.

Posted by gillispie on 4/9/2022 5:35:00 PM (view original):
interesting thoughts on slowdown... my take is basically this. i think that i look at press differently that the folks who see slowdown as OP vs press. there's two ways to press, and the view on slowdown is going to be almost diametric.

so, two main aspects to press... on one side, you create a huge number of turnovers; this aspect of press is the most powerful tool in the game when it comes to trying to win the possession battle. on the second side, you have pace/fatigue/fouls. the first side, the steals/turnovers, is unambiguously great, with no downside. the pace/fatigue/foul situation is murkier.

in general, press pays extra fatigue on every defensive possession, and incurs more fouls - a pretty straight forward and substantial negative. you also get higher pace, which increases the fatigue for both teams, a mixed bag - and also, it leads to lower volatility (due to more possessions), which is also a mixed bag, but a clear and substantial advantage for the best teams.

ok, we all know this, but just framing what i am to say next. there's really two ways to play press. the traditional way, which pre-dates me but is my favorite system and was / is also sort of the main line for unreasonably dominant programs (virtually all of the 3peats in the game came from traditional press, all 4 of my programs with great title runs ran it too). the way you play traditional press is, you take the steal/TO advantage and milk it for all its worth, and you treat the fatigue situation as a negative to be managed. this means with 10 players or less, certainly, and probably with 11, you are running slowdown, but you are targeting 12 guys and solid stamina, which lets you manage normal tempo. pace becomes a big advantage for the absolute best teams - which can be further pushed with uptempo, i suppose. however, uptempo does less the higher your pace already is (you can only speed things up so much), and generally a quality stamina 12 deep team, still doesn't have the depth to handle uptempo's foul/fatigue situation well enough to be reliable enough for the best teams. with the traditional press, depth is the priority in general, but because you aren't needing outrageous depth (12 deep and 78 stamina being plenty, for example, not needing the 82-85 i prefer on a fb/pr), the better teams are really focusing on traditional talent, too, recruiting high ath/def like man teams and all.

if you play press like the above, you don't care if the opponent plays slowdown. there are fewer possessions, a negative if you are the favorite, but not if not - but the overall pace drops, fatigue drops, and your objective of managing fatigue is furthered. this is a worthwhile trade - i'll again mention, folks seem to underestimate the impact tempo has on both teams. its a lot. my opponent slowing down into my press has a relatively big impact on my fatigue.

the second way to press is to try to push the fatigue/pace angle even further, either with uptempo press, fb/pr, or uptempo fb/pr. although there is some difference to all of those, they all fundamentally approach the fatigue battle as a battle to perhaps be won, as opposed to a loss to be managed. prioritizing depth and stamina even further than press, putting less emphasis on traditional talents (per scoring, reb, bh/pass, mostly - fb tends to give you all the 2pt scoring you need, but for uptempo straight press, 2pt scoring too).

in 3.0, the depth of teams in mid to high d1 (top 50-75 programs) is the lowest it has ever been, for any division, at any point in the game. its not even close. this is a huge shift from 2.0, which had the highest depth. this provides a strong basis for a high pace press strategy, and it can in general terms, be pretty darn good. it seems to be REALLY powerful in low to mid d1, because you basically just recruiting ath/spd/def/sta, per if you can manage it, and you get out of the way and let press/fb do their thing - which is a lot!

the higher you get on the totem pole with high pace press, the more you end up needing to work on more traditional talents like scoring, reb, bh/pass. the reason for this is, at the higher end, there are more 10+ deep man/zone teams, who you can never hope to gain a fatigue advantage over, who may have a major fatigue/depth advantage on you! and there are some 12 deep straight press teams with a fatigue advantage on you, too. that used to describe the large majority of top 10 d1 teams, but not anymore. there'll still be plenty of top 10 and especially top 25 teams who you can beat on the fatigue battle, but there's plenty of near-draws and a good number of disadvantaged games, so you rationally start to hedge (by increasing more traditional skills).

its super common for fb/pr coaches to hit this sort of ceiling, where they are still focusing pace, working to convert their higher prestige and status to better and better depth, i mean - but you end up trying to milk more and more from a dry cow. if you are a fb/pr coach, and you are struggling to take that step from perennial NT team to perennial deep run threat, you should really consider if this is why.

anyway, if you are a pace press team, then sure - slowdown can be a threat. for my pace press teams, i don't overly mind slowdown, personally, but its definitely the right play for tons of teams and its certainly a counter of sorts! but i will say this. when i was co-coaching with chap 1-2 years back, we had two fb/pr teams. those teams got good enough that we were fighting for 1 seeds and championships, and by then we were having to focus pretty heavily on traditional stats. sure, we had a lot less - we had #1 competitive teams on B to C prestige, where we had killer depth and sacrificed traditional talents - and i actually think that strategy is quite possibly the best available, at least tied for it, for those lower prestige teams. but when we had A prestige, we were trying to get that traditional talent, and it actually makes depth harder - its harder to get 85 stamina for example, if you value traditional stats higher. with our best teams, i was actually back to appreciating it when other people ran slowdown. the pace with us being normal fb/pr, with them a slowdown motion/man or similar, was still quite high - and i found most of our losses and close games came with bad foul/fatigue rolls. their slowdown helped our fatigue, and i was grateful.

last thought - uptempo is a pretty valid counter to pace press teams, too. you have to have a depth advantage, but if i'm 12 deep man with say 78 stamina, heck yeah. no way in hell i am running slowdown into a fb/pr team in that situation! (an underdog without a depth advantage can also consider this)

anyway... i personally think slowdown is fine. its a good counter to press and pace press both, for low depth teams, but i don't think its unbalanced at all. my advice, if you are a press team who is annoyed at the slowdown counter, would be to play a more traditional press, where slowdown's effectiveness as a counter is greatly diminished. (uptempo by 12 deep man teams, also a counter reduced! this is perhaps why i am such a traditional press loyalist - taking away the ability for smart coaches to counter you is really valuable when you are huge favorites over all but a handful or perhaps dozen of teams, as elite press teams are)

This was incredibly helpful Gil, thank you. In previous posts you've made you've thrown out some of your own, I think you called them assumptions, such as uptempo punishes the team using it more then the opponent it is facing, or that you noticed a small fg% loss for teams who played a slowdown. Do those still hold true and do you have any more of these types of ideas, especially when it comes to coaching the press, because I am all ears if you do.

“last thought - uptempo is a pretty valid counter to pace press teams, too. you have to have a depth advantage, but if i'm 12 deep man with say 78 stamina, heck yeah. no way in hell i am running slowdown into a fb/pr team in that situation! (an underdog without a depth advantage can also consider this)”

This is huge. It’s something every coach should have in their back pocket at every division. Even if you’re 11
deep man with 78-80 stamina this can work really really well.

I think there is some great stuff here and I agree with a lot of what Gil said. I also agree quite a bit with Trojan about the indirect va direct impact being influenced by tempo/fatigue.

I think fundamentally, we all struggle a little with fatigue in HD. It's much different than in real life and the impact is not overtly obvious.

But ultimately I think it's somewhat simple. You need to know your team structure and your opponents team structure. Then you make a game plan to maximize your chances of winning. If your opponent is very deep, with great stamina and can force a lot of fouls (generating fouls is probably the most overlooked of the 3) then you'd be silly to play into their hands and go uptempo. Alternatively, if YOU are the one who benefits the most by uptempo then that's what you should be playing.

You can't complain if your opponent's gameplan is to mitigate your own strengths. That's the entire point of gameplanning!

I think where things like "magic" or "rigged" get thrown around is when you overestimate your own team's fundamental strengths over the opponent and THEN don't attempt to maximize your chances by choosing the optimal tempo for the game.

Tempo choice is the #1 most important day to day gameplan decision you can make and it shouldn't be ignored or written off as bad game design. It's a strategic gameplay tool that we all can use to increase (or decrease) the chances of winning.

i think balance is always a tricky subject, its completely normal for balance to be... a bit shaky, when something big like depth/fatigue/pace is pushed to its maximum or minimum. it makes sense that the 8 deep slowdown and the 12 deep fb/pr are both perhaps out of whack in some situations, or at least, pushing the envelope. there's always going to be circumstances where extreme strategies are stronger and weaker than main line ones, we have to expect at least a moderate amount of this - in any strategy game that offers a variety of strategic options, anyway (so, all the good ones!). it also makes sense to me that the tempo settings, which are pretty toothless in many cases, could be quite impactful when it comes to the extreme ends of the pace spectrum - and i think they are.

what i like is that in mid to high d1 today, it seems to me anyway, we have a really nice representation across the spectrum. you have a good number of short man/zone teams, you have lots of more traditional, 10 deep man/zone teams. there's a decent bit of traditional press teams, and there's a bunch of pace press teams.

what i also like - for most of HD, press has been considered overpowered by the vast majority of the community at large, and i personally find it refreshing to see this balance conversation here, where folks are not all beating the same side of the same drum. i see a nice diversity of opinions here - i don't think shoe's opinion or anyone's in this thread is invalid or even over the top, i think there's a lot of different, reasonable opinions here, in a time when the strategies employed are their most varied. to me, that is all real good stuff! i love that there's an 8 page thread debating if press is underpowered against the slowdown; not too long ago, you couldn't suggest press was underpowered against anything, ever, without getting laughed out of here!

i really set out to remark on the above - without taking a stand on anything - but for the folks who DO think press is getting a bit of the short end of the stick, compared to 8-10 deep man teams - i do at least partially agree. i think that the difficulty in filling spots in d1 right now is by a good margin the hardest ever, especially after the resume change, and that makes press tough, especially the talent-driven, traditional press. i suspect there will be a gradual softening there, and that is going to push things back in the direction of press. IMO, 10 deep man teams are the meta of d1, and i felt that prior to the resume change, which only made it more so. so i actually do feel like right now, the balance is somewhat meaningfully against press, at the very high end. but considering the history of HD, i can't call that a problem. press is still very viable at high d1, and is extremely effective for D to B prestige teams, with pace press probably the current meta at that level. i have to expect that the difficulty in getting backup options and stuff in d1, that it is much more likely to soften from here, rather than getting amped up even more. so i think any balance issue press faces in high d1, will self-correct over time as the extreme situation with recruiting softens.