there's a bunch of good sounding, plausible things in this thread - but i think a lot of it doesn't really reflect the reality of HD. i'll say a few things:
1) a comment was made about pass helping break down the zone, bh helping more against the press, and bh/pass more shared against the man. i used to have theories like this when i was a young coach and had no better way to explain what i saw. unfortunately, none of this has any basis in hd-reality.
as far as passing goes, passing + iq works in a 'rising tide raises all boats' fashion, where the team's pass/iq (weighted most heavily at the 1) impacts the shooting of the individual. this did not exist for much of HD, and is a simple mechanism which can safely be considered in simple, objective terms. bh/pass improve the overall scoring efficiency of all players by reducing the odds they turn the ball over prior to getting their shot off, but this does not function materially differently based on the defense you are facing.
'fastbreak opportunities', 'breaking the press', etc - these are terms you should regard with significant skepticism. these things don't really exist in HD. i mean - they sort of do. but not in a the rich way our imagination would like for them to exist. this is true even for (perhaps particularly for) fastbreak offense, uptempo, and vs-press. in all of these cases, we'd like to think of players streaking down the floor getting behind the defense for easy baskets. HD has this in the pbp, but the game does not richly implement this kind of logic. its basically window dressing.
you can perhaps convince yourself of this by studying the vs-press scenario (facing a press defense). we all know the turnover battle is key. however, if 'breaking the press' was a thing, a high bh team, or a high speed one perhaps, would not just do well on turnovers - they would experience a substantial fg% boost from all those easy buckets they are getting. however, this very much does not appear to be true. m2m and press are very similar in 2pt and 3pt% defense, with m2m perhaps getting a 1% edge in both. if 'breaks' were a thing, you'd expect higher end offenses against weaker presses (especially in terms of the 'press breaking' ratings, whatever those would be) to especially dominate on fg% - more than they would against man. conversely, you'd expect mediocre offenses against weaker presses to get destroyed, for the lack of fg% raising break opportunities. however, this really does not seem to exist in the game in any capacity. the curve seems flat, and the experience seems adequately captured by considering 1) the turnover battle, and 2) the fg%/3pt% battle (core off vs def ratings), with roughly zero complex interaction between the two items.
2) PF and Cs are really about the same in this game in roughly every way. the only meaningful exception is the defense of a PF vs a C in the 2-3 zone where the SF/PF are evaluated by a different, less block-intensive equation than the C. other than that, there is absolutely nothing in this game where the PF and C deviate from each other more than slightly. essentially, even the most competitive coaches would do fine treating the PF and C as 100% identical.
3) the situation with bh/pass on bigs is non trivial. there are a couple things going on that impact the perspective of the coach. first is the amount of big man offense - for any player at any position, filling any role - the more distro they have, the more their bh/pass matters for turnover avoidance. necessarily, a 0-3 distro lifetime big vs a big who will be the #2 scorer, are going to have different values on bh/pass. the second is the rest of your team - the guards do matter. the better job you do minding your bh/pass with the guards, the less the bigs matter.
when i comment on the relative value of certain things, i generally strike from a consistent perspective - excellence. i'm assuming you are doing your team planning job right and you have covered your bh/pass in your guards. i'm also assuming you are running a primarily guard driven offense (1-3 really), because that is where the game's most efficient offense comes from, and there is relatively no comparison between the number of elite teams with guard driven offenses and those without (guard driven offenses are the meta).
under those circumstances, big man bh/pass is just not that important at all. it is totally different than rebounding, you get *way* more value from wing rebounding than from big man bh/pass.
anyway, here's a couple things to consider. first off, let me link an example. https://www.whatifsports.com/hd/TeamProfile/Stats.aspx?tid=8083
this is the only team i have a hand in coaching these days, so it is not a very cherry picked example. we start a young lineup in general, one that has none of our best 3 point guards starting. we also start 2 freshman bigs of real garbageness (freshman iq + garbage all around + bad bh/pass). however, this is a typical good but not great gillispie team which makes them an easy comparison. we are a press team, 12 deep, and one of the title favorites. we are playing a #1 sos, that is a little bit of a padded, not-actually-that-difficult #1 sos, while running a young lineup, but we are still fielding a real enough team to expect a 1 seed come NT time. the team itself is basically unremarkable in every way, they are just a well rounded, solid club, that fits a familiar mold (#1 sos, press team, roughly title favorite, roughly playing too young of a team for that to show in the stats).
in my long history, i have had a ton of teams in a similar boat. some of those teams - a good number - have wound up favored over the entire NT field and are easily some of the greatest of all time. but even from the best teams of the group, as best i can remember, i have never in my life cracked the 12 turnover a game mark. against a 50 sos, sure - but against a #1 sos - i really don't think so. i consider that 12 TO mark to be perfect - for the circumstances (press team, #1 sos). by perfect i only mean the best team in HD history, not some 100 in every rating at all 5 positions nonsense.
what is the mark for this team, that starts 0 of its 3 legit point guards, that starts 2 garbage freshman bigs? 12.5 turnovers. now, that #1 sos is really a pretty weak one, chap did a good job with scheduling manipulation if you will, so its probably not really good to think of it as a TRUE #1 sos, its a little less than that. however, it shows my point. 12.5 TOs is near elite with a far from elite starting line, on the turnover front. for a thought experiment, make my 2 starting bigs 60 bh/pass juniors instead of 20 bh/pass freshman. what happens to the team turnovers? effectively, nothing - without question, less than 1/2 of a turnover for adding approx 150 points of bh/pass. there is no way in hell this team is under 12 TOs with this 2 bigs upgraded. also, if you split the turnovers and minutes by lineup, the 2nd lineup - which is almost infinitely better bh/pass wise on paper - is marginally better, facing weaker competition (the backup line). why isn't there a bigger difference there? why is a good but not ridiculous bh/pass lineup, with **** bigs, putting up basically elite TO numbers?
why is this happening? there's a raw floor of turnovers you experience no matter what. if i ran 5 point guards on both lineups, how low would my turnovers be? they'd be lower, sure - i'm not saying its literally 0 difference - but it would still be double digits. maybe i drop from 12.5 TOs to 10.5 TOs - maybe even a tad lower - but for having 5 point guards, this would be a pretty damn small reward. the only teams who materially beat the 12.5 turnover figure this team has now against good schedules, are teams running much slower paces, where the 10-20% slower pace allows them to be down in the 11 turnover range, even 10.6 or so i've seen on slowdown teams. really, that 12.5 is almost as good as it gets for a team in these shoes. also, on the why is this happening front, i do not have my garbage freshman bigs taking much distro - the 3 garbage freshman bigs are 3-0-0, so this minimizes the burn. if i was letting those horrible freshman bigs score, obviously the team TOs would be higher.
so, the bottom line is this. once you have your house in order, like just about everything else in this game, you roughly cap out. there are small gains to be had, but they are very low bang for the buck, especially in offense and bh/pass (defense and reb have more latitude). perhaps if your bh/pass at the 1-3 is unacceptably ******, then your 4-5 bh/pass matters more - maybe you can dig out of it a bit. not a lot - but a little. from the above example - a WAY less than elite starting lineup bh/pass wise is basically doing marginally worse than the best team out there in the game today. they'd be meaningfully worse than a 5 PG lineup, but not hugely so. so my question is this - if this is true, and i'm starting 0/3 of my pgs, and 2 garbage freshman bigs - then how much do you think a bunch more big man bh, pass, and iq could really help me? the answer is - very, very little.
now, one might say - sure, but you ARE the press team, that is different than playing AGAINST the press team. maybe the team is as good as they need to be vs non-press, but what about vs press? sure, that's fair. if i played more press teams, we'd give up more TOs as well. that is probably partly why we have such a good 12.5 TOs as a press team (high pace and fatigue make my D relevant to my TOs) on a #1 sos. we just don't play many press teams.
but still, what happens when you play a press team? the half court defense roughly is the same thing you face any other time. the difference is the fullcourt press, and that battle is waged on simple terms - turnovers, and fatigue. that's pretty much it.
what happens there is effectively the guards, the 1-3, wage a battle in terms of trying to trap, versus trying to bring the ball down the floor. this is what drives the press, and its not really that close - the defensive importance of a guard skyrockets on a press team, because now they have double duty - generate those turnovers, and do the regular defense thing. the importance of bh/pass in the scorers goes up a lot in the vs-press, but really, the press specific TO battle is mostly about the guards - they are the ones bringing the ball up the court. this is something that becomes fairly apparent if you do significant macro experimentation, team level experimentation.
however, it is extremely hard for folks to see this without doing substantial team level comparisons that give the necessary macro level contrast. this happens because of a twist of individual stats. when most folks think of a turnover, they think - player X has the ball, and is going to shoot if they can - but instead they turn the ball over. this is the lion's share of turnovers, and the game actually is simulating this with player X in mind - it knows player X has the ball - and when the turnover happens - it is easy to draw a straight line back to player X.
however, there are also more like, 'team' turnovers. when the FCP is getting simulated, and the guards are trapping while the offense guards are trying to bring it down the court - the game, like at all other points - does not simulate passing. it does not designate this guard or that guard as the receiver of the first pass and weight things accordingly, nothing like that. its a fairly simple team-level comparison that is weighted very heavily on the guards.
what happens then, when a turnover is generated? who is assigned it? this is much less clear than in the earlier example. this is effectively a team turnover, and the game assigns it in a way *that makes the stats look reasonable*. the way the game tends to do that is based on distro and position - higher distro, more turnovers - but also more for the pg and other guards, less for bigs. what happens is, these press-specific turnovers tend to get allocated more broadly. a high distro big will get a bunch of them, even though they aren't really responsible for those. what you guys see is, oh man these bigs are committing a bunch of turnovers against press. but this isn't really an accurate reflection of what happens. what is really happening is the team turnovers are being distributed in a way that is inconsistent with their generation. the press specific turnover battle is almost entirely waged from the 1-3, and so what happens is all bigs facing a press get inflated TO numbers - but it is especially bad for the higher distro bigs.
this is why you can compare a few 1bh/pass bigs to a few 50s bh/pass bigs and sometimes walk away thinking, wow, there might even be a whole turnover difference there - which would be massive! but if you look at high end teams, who have comparable bh/pass at the 1-3, but one has higher end bh/pass at the bigs, you tend to see very little difference. this is why i say macro, team level comparisons are absolutely required to investigate this issue - you cannot compare two individual bigs and try to make sense of it. our UCLA team linked above could drop those two 50-60s bh/pass good bigs to 1bh/pass each -lets just say we make the entire squad of 5 bigs being exactly 1 bh and 1 pass - and due to their limited offensive role, i suspect team turnovers would increase by perhaps half a turnover, up to around 13/game. then take all 5 bigs and give them +50bh/pass each - +500 ratings for the team - and we are what, 12 turnovers? at absolute most, i could see an argument for a 1.5 turnover spread, for those 500 ratings for this specific team. what is 10 rebounding per big going to cost me, 50 ratings - that is going to swing at least 1-1.5 reb per game against my team, and probably more. most likely, the impact of -10 reb from each big would be bigger than the impact of -100 total bh/pass from each big. for a higher scoring big lineup, this could swing the other way - but even then, converting a team full of 50 bh/pass bigs to 1 bh/pass bigs is almost always going to hurt a lot less than taking 20 reb away from each (which would peg reb as at least 5:1 more valuable). at these levels, its reasonable to consider bh/pass nice to have, a low level moderate concern, for your scoring bigs - but for non scoring type bigs - you can safely ignore it.