From the first exhibition game to the last game of the season, if a player improved 10 points in a skill from 15 minutes of individual practice. Assuming he's 20 points away from maxing out and has received about 15 minutes per game of playing time. How much more gains would a player get from 10 minutes of practice? 20 minuets? 25 minutes? 50 minutes?

Trying to decide how to balance my practice minutes, considering IQ will be extremely important this season and may want to "up" the individual practice minutes for some of my players. Although the laws of diminishing returns kicks in after 20, would there be a significant increase in development going from 20 minutes to 50 minutes?

Are the "diminishing returns" the same rate for IQ as they are for individual practice minutes?

Anyone have a short answer to the question?

I don't really have much of an answer to your question because I'm still a n00b, but I thought the "laws of diminishing returns" goes into effect with >25 minutes of practice in a skill area. I'm fairly certain that applies to time spent on IQ/offense-defense, too.

Generally, for individual practice minutes, I like to spend 20-25 minutes on skills that are still in the blue, 10-15 minutes on skills that are still in the black, and 5 minutes or less on skills that are in the red. This varies from player to player, of course, because some guys have a lot more potential left than others. If I have a guy that's in the red in every category, I just give that player a ton of minutes working on conditioning.

As for IQ, I go with 20-25 minutes. This season, for example, I've got my practices set so my guys spend 25 minutes on both defense and offense. Last season, it was 25 for offense and 20 for defense. I never go over 25 minutes for either category because of diminishing returns.

Obviously every player has different WEs, but you mentioned 10 points improvement in a skill from 15 minutes of practice; by that math, 25 minutes of practice would give you roughly 16 or 17 points of improvement in said skill. If a player has a high WE, then those 25 minutes of practice may very well lead to 20 points of improvement.

That's just my two cents. Hopefully it helps somewhat, but like I said, I'm still pretty new at this game and I'm still figuring things out.

there were long ago some threads with numerical answers on some of this - esp some good ones by iguana

I dont worry about the exact numbers

Over 20 minutes one experiences diminishing returns - meaning that adding one minute adds less improvement than the prior minute produced - so extra mins have nonlinear effects.  

One also should keep in mind that improvement is slower for skills in the 1-10 range and the 90-100 range than for skills in between - so no answer is generic

Practice allocation needs to consider two broad factors - the rate of possible improvement in a given skill and the importance of the skill.  For example, even if you knew with certainty that some number of minutes would boost a big man's REB by only 3 points while it would boost his PER by 4 points, the odds are that you would prefer the 3 points of REB