Posted by topdogggbm on 1/4/2020 10:18:00 PM (view original):
Posted by gillispie1 on 1/3/2020 8:06:00 PM (view original):
its cool but its also too bad assists are window dressing
Explain please.
When I have teams that have great assist totals, i have great seasons. My Coker team that is the current defending champs from last season, had i think 11 games with 28+ assists.
My current Slippery Rock team was a #1 seed and #1 team in the country with 1 loss against a solid SOS. But we couldn't pass the ball worth a ****, and we just got upset in the S16 against an ab90 Amazon gift card team. Haha!
If you mean it as in, for the example above, I could've had 36 FG with only 5 assists and still won the game, sure that's accurate. But i could have 5 rebounds and win a game too.
I've always felt like elite passing teams get elite assist numbers which helps to have elite field goal percentage. All one big bundle of fun.
So what were you meaning by that?
Add on.... a game like the one above doesn't make me feel any better or any worse about my team. I just thought it was an interesting box score to share
so, let's start with how it worked 10 years ago, its a cleaner explanation back then. back then, there was no 'good passer gets team mates better open looks and increases fg%' thing. that simply didn't exist at all. passing helped reduce turnovers but otherwise had no impact on shooting, and had absolutely no impact on fg% whatsoever.
further, its where assists sit in the decision tree. there's a major decision in the sim engine when you are on offense, called the TSF function. basically, in the flow of offense, some stuff happens like getting the ball up the court or something, but then basically a player is chosen to 'lead the offensive possession'. this player then hits the TSF decision, which stands for turnover shot foul. the player might turn it over or there might be an offensive foul, but if not, the player gets to shoot.
anyway, in the TSF decision, if the player gets a shot, it moves on to essentially take a variety of factors and compute a defensive and offensive score, which are then compared to come up with a RNG cutoff (for if the shot goes in or not), the RNG is then rolled, and the shot goes in or not. after a shot goes in, and only after a shot goes in, the engine decides the assist part - 1) if an assist happens or not (another RNG roll in here), and 2) who the assist goes to (another RNG roll in here).
so, 10 years ago, basically after a shot went in, the game randomly picked who to assign an assist to. we know for a fact that this player did nothing to help the shot maker score; there was no such impact of any kind. its not like players passed around and a guy had a look and if it was more open, it was more likely the previous passer would get the assist - there's nothing like that. the sim engine is just trying to make up an assist figure that is roughly in line with real life. it was 100% absolutely meaningless garbage.
now, that isn't to say that the same things that lead to a guy and team getting a lot of assists, didn't loosely correlate with success. a team with **** bh/pass/iq would probably suck and probably get poor assists. so its not like in general, there was no correlation between assists and goodness. but correlation is not causation, and for it to be not window dressing, you need causation. even the correlation is weak, its actually more about teams who make a lot of shots tend to have a lot of assists, but its simply because there are more opportunities for an RNG on an assist, because that only happens after shots go in.
fast forward to after 2.0 came out, tarek got unceremoniously shitcanned, and seble took over. seble, IMO, did the best work of his life. HD was in a downward spiral unlike anything you newer coaches have seen. the initial potential rollout was an unmitigated disaster. it was so bad, we openly questioned if tarek knew he was getting fired and sabotaged on purpose, or if the powers that be thought he sabatoged because it was THAT bad, and that is why he got fired. probably all meaningless forum speculation without a grain of truth, but the bottom line was, it was a **** show unlike anything HD has seen before or after, at least in my understanding.
well, as part of seble's first release, his attempt to save the game and save potential (the clamor to 100% roll back and throw the whole thing was way louder than 3.0), he was doing really active outreach to the community, trying to figure out how to save the game. he did a really good job at this, and as a result, despite not really knowing **** about HD, he put out the best release HD has seen in the past dozen years, and basically saved the game. there were still significant issues and griping, but it was no longer in free fall. in short, he only attempted to fix 75% of what he should have attempted to fix - but the 75% he attempted to fix, he basically did a good job on.
one of the things i talked to him about was the impact of an elite pg on the rest of the team; i felt it was categorically insane to have an elite pg have no impact on the fg% of his team mates, nor on the turnover rate of his team mates, nor anything. seble agreed, and he bundled into his potential fix, the ability for players to get team mates better open looks. i actually wasn't sure if there was an impact or not, but i reached out and asked, and he said there wasn't, and we both were kind of in shock by that. i thought it was just too small of an impact or something, i didn't think it was nothing - i mean, we all knew assists were window dressing by then and had for years - but i assumed the concept of assists was like, worked in somehow earlier (like by the elite pg getting his guys open shots here and there, or what have you). i just assumed the concepts were disconnected, like a great pg helped but it just wasn't calculated right, something like that - but no - there was absolutely nothing.
at this time, no change was made to the logic about how assists were calculated, and to my knowledge, no change has happened to that since i got here. so even though there now is an effect where basically a better assister helps his team mates fg%, it is totally disconnected from the assist stats. there just happens to be some correlation, because assists are primarily doled out to the pg and to passers, and it also happens to be true that its passing + iq that drive the 'get team mates open looks' ability, and that the pg is the primary contributor to that team-wide ability (all 5 players contribute). so its like, there is some correlation there, but there is no causation - hence, window dressing.
because you mention it, rebounding is half window dressing, too. team rebounding is totally legit, it is 100% real and 0% window dressing, in my opinion. however, individual rebounding is not, individual rebound figures are in large part window dressing too.