Posted by mullycj on 6/30/2020 12:50:00 PM (view original):
You on edge this morning or what? holy christ ...

yeah... i guess i must be. sorry about that. no objection to the different take on the 3pt scoring stuff - but i guess that 'see what cs would say' - when that can only go one way - just triggered something. lot of 'willful ignorance' bouncing around our society right now, kind of hitting my limits a bit, i think i need a little break from other humans. anyway, that CS comment of yours falls in that willful ignorance bucket. you've been around too long. still no excuse for being a dick - my apologies.

Well, like benis, I did my own experiment with the settings and saw little difference in results. So I asked CS if settings made a difference and they said they did. So then I showed them my data and they walked it back and said it really affected the amount of attempts and at DI you wouldn't see much of a difference in %. Theory being defenders at D1 are already good and the + bonus wouldn't affect them much.

Well, even though my original question pertained to non-shooting effects of the +/-, I'm glad I asked. I definitely didn't know that about 3pt%, although I have seen the difference in shot attempts.

Posted by oldave on 6/29/2020 9:58:00 PM (view original):
i think i have forgotten more about this game than i ever knew.

ponder that.

You must have forgotten some things, relearned them, and then forgotten again.

People suck, but life without people would suck even more.

We love you Gil and appreciate everything you've done for the community. Sending some good vibes your way. Without getting political (seriously lets please keep this a safe space) all this stuff is so crazy. I find myself getting triggered over random stuff too. As a friendly reminder to all, get outside a little bit, we aren't meant to be inside all day. Bonus suggestion, do something kind for somebody else, especially without expecting anything back. You'll be amazed at how great it is to make somebody else's day better. Alright I'll get off my soap box.

For what its worth. I'm pretty meticulous in how I choose my +/- defensive settings because I typically don't have a ton of 3pt shooting and thus I know the line can really seperate me from other teams if I'm not careful. I'd say I keep teams under their season avg roughly 70-80% of the time. This is anecdotal based on 25 seasons of skimming every single pbp and box score. I did not compile it into a Google sheet, but its one of the first things I look for so im fairly confident in this. As a caveat, its possible that my teams typically very high defense is what contributes to this and not actually the +/- settings. Also possible that some of that data is just lucky in the sense that 1 or 2 shots, one way or the other, really skews %s in these low rep ranges and thus its possible that its luck. But thats too many years of playing this game imo to call this luck, but i suppose it's possible.

Posted by mullycj on 6/30/2020 7:23:00 PM (view original):
Well, like benis, I did my own experiment with the settings and saw little difference in results. So I asked CS if settings made a difference and they said they did. So then I showed them my data and they walked it back and said it really affected the amount of attempts and at DI you wouldn't see much of a difference in %. Theory being defenders at D1 are already good and the + bonus wouldn't affect them much.

i definitely agree about the quality of the defense (and offense - as someone said earlier) affecting the impact on +/- on 3pt%, there are certainly diminishing returns in the + settings at the high end because they are basically a modifier on perimeter defense in a couple different ways, and therefore are exposed to the same context-driven variations in diminishing returns as so many other ratings and modifiers in this game (for a settings analogue, i consider this sort of like how i basically never DT a guy who is m2m defended by a beast). i started getting into that after your first post before bailing, because i feel like i've went on about this enough lately, but from a different angle - from the angle of, the problem is sufficiently complex and context-driven that there is no simple answer. there is no reasonable question i can imagine whereby you can get a simple and meaningful answer out of CS. you clearly understand its a non trivial question, so i'm struggling to understand - what question are you asking them that can be both simply answered and answered in a way that isn't devoid of context and therefore value? its not like they could (or should) tell you how many % of 3pt you can expect, on average, to reduce by going from say 0 to +1.

you could ask something very simple like 'does +/- have any impact on 3pt%' which would be a yes (whether 'meaningful' or not - kinda sounds like that's the first answer you got from CS yourself - but weren't a fan of it). but i struggle to see getting beyond that. if you disagree, i'd be curious to hear your assessment. if you look at your wording and mine, its all littered with 'meaningful' and 'significant' and so forth - your CS response paraphrase says it didn't affect 'much'. what does that even mean? there's no absolute answer, and the range of reasonable interpretations on 'significant' impact on 3pt% scoring alone, even outside the range of circumstances, is relatively vast when compared to the effect itself - my argument is therefore, these types of CS exchanges - while occasionally useful - are generally doomed to fail. but worse, they have on a number of occasions created mass confusion. sometimes an individual can have a quality back and forth exchange, but it is then really dangerous to apply that answer to a universal or even broader context. this is the same CS who decided to adjust the imbalance between lp scoring and per by buffing big men so severely random garbage bigs started breaking 60%. this is the same CS who answered one of 2.0 d1 recruiting's central questions, whether HV or CV were better at relatively close distances, by telling us it more or less didn't matter - even though it is essentially mathematical fact that it does, and quite significantly (hv and cv value was fixed, while the relative costs of cv:hv varied significantly).

but also, we are the same community who spent 3 years haggling over whether 7 minutes was really needed to maintain all ratings for all players, which is frankly far more baffling to me than the above. we are the same community who, in my rookie days, spent at least 30 threads parsing a 1 line answer from old admin (tarek) on the nature of tempo, carrying on for years. we are the same community who has on dozens of occasions, sat there parsing a few words or lines extracted from a CS response like we were the leads on the da vinci code reading an ancient scroll.

the combination can be a freaking mess, and that is really my point.

oh please, lets not even speak the word tempo lest a thread embark on a dead sea scrolls discussion of tempo, fatigue, my team, your team, markov chains and monte carlo iterations.....

What, besides “uptempo is almost always bad”, is the tempo talk summary?

Posted by jimmychino on 7/1/2020 9:14:00 AM (view original):
What, besides “uptempo is almost always bad”, is the tempo talk summary?

well, i'm not 100% what you are asking, but i will say if that is a summary of my tempo stance, i'd rephrase as "uptempo is almost always bad for good press teams". i am way more ok with it for everybody else.

the tempo talk i was talking about was really re: some admin 1 liner that went like 'the only impact of tempo is to increase the number of possessions', from old admin, tarek, and it was sort of endlessly debated what that meant. seems like in my first year, i saw that line posted around 20 times, and 20 different discussions ensued, with a variety of takes. i mostly listened in those days, but then i feel like i participated in that argument for years. some people thought that meant that each of the possessions in the uptempo order had the same properties as each of the possessions in the normal or slowdown order - for example, the foul rate per possession would be fixed, and thus a 15% increase in possessions would lead to a 15% increase in fouls. therefore, the uptempo choice was relatively simple, better teams with sufficient depth (and perhaps not some goofy situation like amazing starters and awful backups) should always run uptempo.

other people felt that was a bridge too far, that the stats aren't all linearly scaling with possessions and therefore, even if the only surface level change was the change in possession count, that this trickled through in ways that were less straight forward. some of these folks were anti-uptempo but i think some of them just felt uptempo had a more complex nature. in the end, i came down on the 'every uptempo possession is not the same as every normal tempo possession' side, as fouls in particular do not seem to linearly scale (i think TOs too, maybe some other stuff, been a decade since i actually watched the numbers closely for uptempo), and also someone (bobjoejim? jimjoebob? some combo of those 3) did a pretty good study that reached the same conclusion.

if you take the 2nd stance, then it roughly suggests... well, suppose you consider the game as a 2 parter, part 1 being the possessions game (who gets more, reb/stl/to/fouls whatever) and the 2nd being the off vs def fg% battle, if you will (both sides, team A off vs team B def, and reverse). then generally speaking, uptempo is probably minimizing the possession game, as turnovers and fouls are both a significant part of that. or maybe you count fouls as part of the fg% battle, i don't know... its complicated i guess. but the possession game is the game press teams are made to win, above all else, so perhaps this is one plausible explanation for why i am so uptempo adverse with press? or maybe its just the foul/fatigue trouble. i've never really been sure of why i hate uptempo press so much, i just know that i absolutely can't stand it and even with my best teams ever with full depth, it seems to hurt more than it helps every single time (not every game, but every time i go back to that well - which is a lot of times).