Hey everyone,

I was just theory crafting at work and had a thought, would a team of mostly guards (if not all guards) be successful if you ran a FB/FCP? My thought is you’d make up for the horrendous rebounding with significantly more turnovers and easy buckets. Thought it’d be a fun experiment to try but wanted to see if anyone else has tried this already lol

I tried it for a while at D3 Colorado in Crum. I had 10 or 11 guards and 1 or 2 big men, ran FB/FCP, and shot 30-40 threes per game even against +5 defenses. I got to the S16/E8 a few times but never felt like I had a chance against the elite teams - the rebounding disadvantage was too much to overcome. Maybe it would have worked better with slashing guards that could draw a bunch of fouls but I'm skeptical it would ever be enough to beat the really good balanced teams.

Dang, alright good to know! Makes sense that the rebounding disadvantage would be impossible to truly overcome, especially in higher divisions.

Thanks!

i agree, its just not really workable. the problem is the amount of ceiling you have left after you have 3 great guards from the 1-3 is almost nothing - so you are basically giving up a lot (major rebounding, post defense) for extremely little (a partial turnover and maybe a percent or two on fg?), to oversimplify a bit.

not to say its impossible - just that its clearly sub optimal and rather by a lot - an equally talented team with great rebounding bigs would be substantial favorites.

I've always been semi-successful with a 3 guard lineup and 2 big men. I've always had an issue with how SFs are generated because unless they're elite, they're going to either be average at everything or have a glaring hole at something. I usually have gone with 2 PGs, 1 SG and 2 big men in my lineup... unless I get a SF that just wows me.

I remember in the early days of hd somebody was having success with 12 SF I believe.

Posted by vegaskevin on 11/5/2019 9:24:00 PM (view original):
I remember in the early days of hd somebody was having success with 12 SF I believe.

Tangent question: what makes a “slashing” guard? Speed & Ball handling?

Posted by hypnotoad on 11/6/2019 5:38:00 AM (view original):
Tangent question: what makes a “slashing” guard? Speed & Ball handling?

ath spd lp and bh without great per (don't necessarily need to be great at all those things)

note ft% is important for those guys as they draw more fouls than anyone else

Posted by tdiddy3 on 11/5/2019 9:53:00 PM (view original):

Posted by vegaskevin on 11/5/2019 9:24:00 PM (view original):
I remember in the early days of hd somebody was having success with 12 SF I believe.

In the early days I used to recruit a ton of SFs. You can still get some really good SFs at every level, but they're much harder to find. They can be an X-factor to win a title if you get a SF who has strong potential in both PER and LP. Granted it's been a while since I played, but I never had much luck getting strong SFs on many of my teams, so I ended up going with a 3 guard lineup.

i agree with the first half. SFs got the shaft in d2/d3 when potential came out, i think, because it sure feels like they used to be viable and then they were garbage. you can find elite d1 SFs still who are stupidly amazing, but i feel like that is mostly unique to d1 (granted all of this is generalization).

the lp/per bit, that i disagree with significantly. the game appears to have no built in bonus for something along the lines of 'scoring versatility' or whatever - in short, a guy gets no inherent bonus for being able to take any kind of shot. what i find happens is these guys tend to take a wide range of shots - which almost by definition means you are not focusing them on their most efficient shot. i also think the defense molds itself a bit based on your offensive talent - so that high lp + per sf is going to draw a bit more defense. now that may help the rest of your team, but its not really helping him.

there's literally no archetype for players in this game i find less satisfying than high lp + high per sfs, and that is true in all divisions (but only for really hard competition - against garbage teams, those lp/per sfs look great - not that it matters). ill take 50 of one with 90 of the other (d1), but going up from there sucks.