I coached for many years and haven't coached for a few years. With COVID closures I decided to try the new HD 3.0 under a new ID. I have read some of the posts about new coach retention, so offering some reason of why I may not stick around. Just for info (and maybe just to therapeutically get my frustration out there), the following is one reason I quit the game and why I am leaning towards not renewing this time.

Hoops Dynasty – College Basketball Sim Games - Game Boxscore - Redlands vs. Rutgers at Camden

38-14 Foul disparity. 55-17 FT disparity. 5 guys including 4 starters fouled out. Opposing team scored more points on FT than from the field.

I feel you. I'll defer to some of the people who are smarter than I am when it comes to the game engine but FCP tends to generate a lot more fouls.

That and you were going up against an exceptionally athletic team. Particularly at D3 when there's a big ATH advantage it can lead to a substantial # of fouls. For example, Gelman has decent ATH but poor BLK so he was probably hacking away against those athletic big men with outstanding LP ratings trying to defend the low post.

To succeed with the press at D3 you genuinely need to have better ATH/SPD matchups than your opponent to bring fouls down. Higher DEF and IQ also play a substantial role but you live and you die by ATH/SPD and even stamina when you run the press.

Welcome back UDAL. Like you, i played for quite a few years, and only just came back a month ago, largely due to extra time with this virus going around. With that said, I have a team that runs a zone, and I'm am getting killed at the charity stripe. I'm playing my upperclassmen the high majority of the minutes, and despite that, my opponents HAVE MADE MORE FREE THROWS THAN I HAVE ATTEMPTED. Now i am no fool (at least i don't think I am) and had no grand illusions about any success this first year, but this has me scratching my head. I've dug a little deeper and one thing I've noticed is that before my opponent even gets to the bonus, the high majority of my fouls are on shot attempts, while mine are not. So no surprise here, they are shooting free throws on 3/4 of the fouls before the bonus and then at least one, then two (after 10). Ironically, its the opposite for me. When my team has been fouled, its "on the floor" the majority of the time. Bad luck, something that i'm not seeing, engine crap, who knows. Bottom line, its made my first year even worse than I anticipated.....so your not alone. With that said, i'm gonna give it a few more years to decide whether i'm back again for a while, or "just visiting"

FCP is still the most overpowered defense in the game. If you didn't risk getting into really bad foul problems it would be even worse.

Well in my game last night i ran a zone against a full court press, I played my upperclassmen the majority of the time. Final FTA attempts. Me running a zone gave up 35 free throw attempts.......the sim running a fcp gave up only 15...........

Athleticism, speed (for guards and SF) and defense are the core attribute components to FCP. Speed produces turnovers, athleticism and defense help you not to foul a ton. Throw in IQ and stamina as important secondary components, and if you’re solid in all 5, as long as you have a couple scorers, a couple rebounders, and a couple distributors, your press is going to beat most teams. Winning with press is pretty straightforward, and fairly easy. But you need the right personnel. If you’re giving up 10+ points in those cores to your opponent, you’re going to have a bad time. At D3, if you can get your team average ath/def to 60, your guards+SF speed to 70, and keep team stamina at or close to 80, you’ll be a perennial sweet 16 team, and challenging for titles when you have lots of upperclassmen.

Posted by ericbfor3 on 5/16/2020 11:11:00 AM (view original):
Well in my game last night i ran a zone against a full court press, I played my upperclassmen the majority of the time. Final FTA attempts. Me running a zone gave up 35 free throw attempts.......the sim running a fcp gave up only 15...........

IQ was a big factor in that game.

Colby-Sawyer has A 37 SPD 45 DE 33 and ST 75 averages which are pretty meh for D3. But they have an average press DEF IQ across their starters of a high A- (with three players with A+ press DEF ratings) and literally every player on their roster is at least an A- in the press besides their lone sophomore.

Your averages are A 30 SPD 48 DE 33 and ST 80. You have lower DEF IQ distribution across the board in Zone and have some frighteningly DEF players on your team (including three sub-20 DE players). While you're a decent matchup against them, the players who fouled a ton would have done so in literally any defense (Larry Gregory who fouled out at the 4 has a frighteningly awful ATH/DEF distro with 18 ATH and 39 DEF and was going up against bigs with much better ATH and solid BH/LP which would improve their offensive efficiency...couple that with high offensive IQ's and it's no surprise they were able to get to the line so often.

Also the foul disparity between the two teams wasn't that crazy (18 to 25) - the FT attempt generation was because in zone your fouls were occurring more in the frontcourt and thus more often on shot attempts. Simmy's fouls were more often in the backcourt running FCP so they generated fewer FT attempts.

If you want me to be honest, you're lucky that was an 8 point game. I would have guessed he'd win by 15-20. His team is just insanely better than yours.

Your team is sim recruited and his team is recruited by an elite DIII coach who has spent hours and hours crafting that team. As you get your own guys in, I'm sure you'll be more competitive against great coaches like davidcrone. Just my two cents....

Yeah, Campell, Turner, and Moore are just terrible. Johnson and Gelman are just decent (not even close to a stud like Jim Meuller). As you get your players in, you'll be much more competitive. It's unrealistic to expect to be remotely competitive with the best with a sim recruited team. If you want any help on how to build teams, please sitemail me and I can give you feedback on recruits. I'm doing that with 5-6 others guys right now and its going very well--they're bringing in great classes.

zone actually fouls the least. you are pretty much in a hard spot because your entire team is sim recruited garbage. this is where we all started - so you are in good company. other people have given you some advice for making this team a little better, but your major focus IMO should be understanding 1) why this team sucks and 2) what you should do better as you build your own. really focusing on how to make awful sim players slightly less awful is not a super rewarding exercise :)

quick question - how did you fall into fb/zone? there's exactly one defense and offense which are less generally understood and less favored by the community, and you've got the set. IMO its a hard way to start. i started with fb and i struggled significantly (and just fyi, later on i became really successful, so don't think early struggles preclude later success - most of us were garbage at this game in the beginning). i don't know about you, but i learned by looking at what the good coaches were doing and trying to emulate - and this was made significantly more difficult by the fact that roughly, the three other offenses are very similar, but fb is not - and just about nobody was playing fb back then. also, fb is probably the hardest scheme for a new coach to pick up, as it thrives so heavily on ath/spd which are just universally at a premium in this game - you don't want to walk in and make the thing you need most, the thing the top coaches are all fighting for. zone is also IMO by a significant defense the most difficult to feel comfortable with. i would seriously consider the easier road of triangle/motion/flex with man/press.

that said, as a new coach, you want to focus on the cores. here is a simple breakdown you can use to guide your thinking, which you can then improve on as you get a better feel. basically just split everyone into guards and bigs, and each gets 3 main abilities - guards can score, defend, and have ball skills (bh/pass). bigs can score, defend, and rebound. you want to shoot for players who have the cores to be good at 2/3 of those (3/3 is great, but much harder to find those guys, and you can easily be a s16 type team with just 2/3 strength caliber players).

here are the cores for each of the 3 abilities for each class. you just need players who can check all the boxes on any 2/3 of these. then try to make sure you get a variety. you don't want 5 bigs who can score and rebound, that would be a problem. the goal is to have specialized players but a balanced team. you don't have to be excellent at every core - but the combination of the cores for each ability has to be there. i'll specify which are 'top line' cores, the ones of extraordinary importance.

guards scoring - 3pt scoring is very efficient in this game, try to focus on 3pt scoring guards - per, bh, spd (per is significantly the #1 core, by about a factor of 2). you can alternatively tolerate some 2pt scoring guards, where ath, spd, lp, per, bh all come together to be cores. (fb relies less on per/lp across the board and more on ath/spd)

guards defense - def, ath, spd (def is clear and away #1 in man and def, but in press, spd and def are both extremely important)

guards ball skills - bh pass (emphasis on the pass for pg. small extra emphasis on the bh for motion and fb).

bigs scoring - bigs are generally only 2pt scorers in my worldview, but occasionally, you can get a small amount of 3s from them. however to keep it simple just think of them as 2pt scorers for now. cores lp and ath. emphasis on the lp.

bigs defense - def, ath are the cores for press and man, block is also a core for zone. def is basically the universal #1 defensive core but i do think blk gets close for zone, especially the in the 2-3 who is treated significantly differently than the sf/pf in the 2-3, and to a lesser extent the pf/c in the 3-2.

bigs reb - reb is almost the entire equation by itself, but ath also is a meaningfully contributor (reb is about 3-4 fold bigger factor - so ath probably isn't even a core here but im leaving it here because its so important in general)

quick note on ath in bigs - while its not close to lp or reb importance in their areas, and is still second (but a *much* closer second) to def in defense - its a universal big man core - no matter what role the big man is trying to play, ath is a core because its a substantial impact on so many things. its just not the most important thing for anything.

there is other stuff that helps, and stamina is a universal core for 1) high fatigue schemes (like press) and 2) really talented players (no matter the scheme). iq is important, freshman will suck at everything as a result, but generally end of year sophs are pretty solid while end of year juniors are completely capable of leading teams to title with their iq. seniors improve a bit but its not a major thing anymore by then. however, the rest of it is more or less noise until you get much, much higher up in the pecking order. you can consistently make the NT and win a game or two just by focusing on cores. good luck!

Great post Gill......thanks for sharing. FYI - to answer your question, the FB and Zone were the playbook I inherited from the SIM. I am thinking about changing them. Or at the very least, the offense.

Thanks for responding, all. Like I said, I was around for quite awhile, mostly D3, and I had no illusions that my team was better. Just expressing frustration with a result with excessive disparities.

"guards defense - def, ath, spd (def is clear and away #1 in man and def, but in press, spd and def are both extremely important)"

In my opinion, ath is SUPER important for guards in Press because of fouling. I consider fouling an aspect of defense. I avoid low ath guards like the plague when playing press.

Posted by Benis on 5/18/2020 1:53:00 PM (view original):
"guards defense - def, ath, spd (def is clear and away #1 in man and def, but in press, spd and def are both extremely important)"

In my opinion, ath is SUPER important for guards in Press because of fouling. I consider fouling an aspect of defense. I avoid low ath guards like the plague when playing press.

i'm going to give you this one, i have no idea why i used that language 'clear and away'. i consider ath an important core for defense in everything. i agree ath is important for fouling and that fouling is a major part of defense, and that this aspect takes particular importance in press. when you have something like reb its really not 1a and 1b type situation, its reb, then miles later, ath. for guard defense its a much closer game across the board for those 3 attributes. so for sure 'clear and away' was a bad word choice.

i do think all of ath, spd, def, iq play a meaningful role in fouls (you may be right about ath's particular importance there, i always attributed more of that to defense, but you made me question it and i came away at least thinking def was less oversized than i had in mind, with that value basically shifting to ath). but in press turnovers are just so essential to the whole point of running the scheme, and are so spd dependent (plus 3pt fg def does turn significantly on spd and less on ath, IMO), that i put spd on a bit of a pedestal. perhaps a hangover from the other days when ath/def were massively less important for press.

on the whole, i substantially value spd over ath for pressing guards, but when i take the time to really think about it, i can't really say that is because of defense. when i think about the players ive recruited, not hesitating to take those 95 ath/def 70s spd guards on the best of teams, i am not sure in reality i assign any extra value to speed defensively over ath, even though i do value guard spd defensively way more in press than in other scheme (i did list def, ath, spd in that order for a reason up front - and my main point was the value of spd goes way up in press, but i definitely agree the value of ath also goes up in press). my love of speed here is more that i am huge on press defense and 3pt scoring both, and spd is clutch in both, while ath is way less important on the offensive side. so i'll definitely amend the above statement to:

guards defense - def, ath, spd (def is about 2:1 the others in man and zone, with ath a little bit of a premium over speed. in press, all 3 are very valuable, and spd goes from the least important to roughly as important as anything because of TO generation. to get all this ath/spd/def, you will have to give up other stuff, but its worth it).