In my review of how to play against the press, one of the key elements is whether your team has the stamina advantage. Can anyone share more insight into what exactly constitutes an advantage here? Do you simply average the stamina of the guys who will be playing? Do you put more weight into the stamina of starters vs subs? However you go about evaluating this component, would love to hear what would actually give you confidence in thinking your team has that advantage.

The stamina number matters, but you also need to take into account number of players a team has available. Most good press teams run 12 guys. Most teams that don't run press are running less than 12. You may have a walk-on who you can't justify playing, a redshirted player, or an ineligible. A lot of the time, you will have a hard time "out-pacing" a press team if you run any other style, because you won't have twelve guys. The best way to beat it is to just have better players. Press is so good in D2/D3 because the range of players available to these schools is much smaller than that of D1, where the top-top teams just have 9-10 studs, and the press doesn't matter. You should also probably take into account ATH/SPD. You can press all you want with high stamina, but unathletic slow dudes will foul a lot and get tired easily regardless.

Basically take into account what you mentioned, average stamina. Also consider how many bodies you have available, and whether or not you are just a better team.

Preciate the input Wales_. I understand the numbers game when it comes to the depth of the bench. Can anyone share any general rules of thumb to follow when it comes to ATH/SPD/ST? Here are the depth charts for my team and my opponents. Based on the averages I had a pretty sizable advantage from an ATH standpoint, he had a slight SPD advantage, and ST was pretty equal. What tempo would you have chosen in this case? I went with slow down since I thought I had an advantage with my starting 5 but not my bench. Would normal tempo be better due to ATH advantage? Thanks!

That result is definitely interesting. Unless I missed something, I would certainly favor your team to win more teams that not. Now, neither team really has very high stamina, but you have a considerable advantage in overall ath/spd. Can't discount the importance of stamina and having twelve guys though, I have gotten my doors blown off by Arfy enough times to learn that what looks like a small difference can make a large impact

This is not uncommon for me to have the line in my favor against a press team, but the outcome not panning out that way. That's why I feel like there's something relatively simple with game-planning that I am not doing against this type of defense.

Nothing really stands out to me in this game. Sometimes it’s just a bad sim. I think you played it fine, though it wouldn’t have hurt to go normal. You might say you bailed the opponent out a little with the slowdown, they were having fatigue issues as it was, and a quicker tempo may have exploited that. More times than not, slowdown helps you more than it helps the other team, though when you have the better team overall it probably makes less sense to slow down, unless you’re at an obvious stamina disadvantage.

I’d put this one up to home court advantage more than anything, though, and just a tough shooting night. Your guys weren’t tired, and you weren’t turning it over more than normal against the press. It was just some bad luck, I think.

Thanks for sharing, shoe! Better luck next time I guess.