So I've played this game for awhile and have reached that stage where I've forgotten things I used to know (or maybe thought I knew).

I understand how distribution works for having players get touches/shots, but what about guys who are true PGs, but not necessarily great scorers. Does keeping his distribution low mean he just won't take shots, but will still handle the ball a lot, or will it effectively reduce how often he touches the ball at all, therefore reducing his ability to create offense through assists?

Anyone ever work this out or can clarify for me?

The PG will always get the ball in his hands. The offense intends to run thru the PG. You can give him 0 distro and he can still have great games.

Only thing I wanna add...... I actually like when my PGs are not scorers by nature (high LP/PER). It always "seems" like they take more shots since they start with the ball in their hands for the most part. (Meaning..... if you give every starter the same distro, don't be surprised if the PG takes the most shots. And it may be inconsistent at times 3 shots one game, and 12 shots the next). The less distro a PG has, the more involved they will be on the facilitating side of the offense.

Posted by topdogggbm on 10/8/2021 8:26:00 PM (view original):
The PG will always get the ball in his hands. The offense intends to run thru the PG. You can give him 0 distro and he can still have great games.

Only thing I wanna add...... I actually like when my PGs are not scorers by nature (high LP/PER). It always "seems" like they take more shots since they start with the ball in their hands for the most part. (Meaning..... if you give every starter the same distro, don't be surprised if the PG takes the most shots. And it may be inconsistent at times 3 shots one game, and 12 shots the next). The less distro a PG has, the more involved they will be on the facilitating side of the offense.

Thanks. this is pretty much in line with what I was thinking but needed some confirmation. I do feel like that's similar to my experience with scoring pgs as well.

Posted by topdogggbm on 10/8/2021 8:26:00 PM (view original):
The PG will always get the ball in his hands. The offense intends to run thru the PG. You can give him 0 distro and he can still have great games.

Only thing I wanna add...... I actually like when my PGs are not scorers by nature (high LP/PER). It always "seems" like they take more shots since they start with the ball in their hands for the most part. (Meaning..... if you give every starter the same distro, don't be surprised if the PG takes the most shots. And it may be inconsistent at times 3 shots one game, and 12 shots the next). The less distro a PG has, the more involved they will be on the facilitating side of the offense.

This is confusing to me based on the long standing FAQ description of how distribution works. I always read it as the distributions settings determine "who the offense runs through". Every time a player gets the ball there are three things that can happen: a shot, a pass, or a turnover. The higher a players distribution setting relative to the other players on the court, the more frequently that player will have the ball in their hands for one of these events to occur. I interpreted that to mean if, for example your SF has significantly higher distribution, when you get into your halfcourt offense most of the time the ball will go into his hands. Therefor if you set your PG distribution very low relative to others because they are a "pure point", then they will have significantly fewer times the ball goes into their hands to either shoot, pass, or turnover. As such I have always set my distribution with my PG fairly high assuming if he was a pure point it would result in him dishing out more dimes, or if he was a scorer taking more shots.

Is there a source for the offense always running through the PG regardless of distribution? Because if so it will dramatically change how I game plan. (and may explain why I game plan so poorly and often feel like I am not getting the most out of my stronger teams).

also snafu, its shot, foul, or turnover. not pass. i forgot if the foul is offensive or defensive. i would have to think about that and hope my mind still has such info stashed somewhere. i would guess its defensive foul and the offensive fouls are wedged in a couple other places, like the turnover perhaps could be offensive foul based, and also there are offensive fouls i think, in the pre-step to the half court offense (which is more or less the TSF decision - turnover shot foul(ed) - before TSF a player with the ball is chosen, which is step 1 of the half court offense. TSF is step 2), like when a team brings the ball up against the press.

Posted by snafu4u on 10/9/2021 9:03:00 AM (view original):

Posted by topdogggbm on 10/8/2021 8:26:00 PM (view original):
The PG will always get the ball in his hands. The offense intends to run thru the PG. You can give him 0 distro and he can still have great games.

Only thing I wanna add...... I actually like when my PGs are not scorers by nature (high LP/PER). It always "seems" like they take more shots since they start with the ball in their hands for the most part. (Meaning..... if you give every starter the same distro, don't be surprised if the PG takes the most shots. And it may be inconsistent at times 3 shots one game, and 12 shots the next). The less distro a PG has, the more involved they will be on the facilitating side of the offense.

This is confusing to me based on the long standing FAQ description of how distribution works. I always read it as the distributions settings determine "who the offense runs through". Every time a player gets the ball there are three things that can happen: a shot, a pass, or a turnover. The higher a players distribution setting relative to the other players on the court, the more frequently that player will have the ball in their hands for one of these events to occur. I interpreted that to mean if, for example your SF has significantly higher distribution, when you get into your halfcourt offense most of the time the ball will go into his hands. Therefor if you set your PG distribution very low relative to others because they are a "pure point", then they will have significantly fewer times the ball goes into their hands to either shoot, pass, or turnover. As such I have always set my distribution with my PG fairly high assuming if he was a pure point it would result in him dishing out more dimes, or if he was a scorer taking more shots.

Is there a source for the offense always running through the PG regardless of distribution? Because if so it will dramatically change how I game plan. (and may explain why I game plan so poorly and often feel like I am not getting the most out of my stronger teams).

This was my hangup as well as I was recruiting a player and thinking about how I wanted to use him, got me thinking about the question again and I couldn't answer the question.

Posted by gillispie on 10/9/2021 6:06:00 PM (view original):
as i understand it, its neither. the easy one to tackle is snafu's. distro is about who has the ball at the end of an offensive possession, you definitely don't need to give your pg distro when he's a non scorer for his impact on the offense to be felt. giving a non-scoring pg solid distro just because he's your pg is definitely going to work against you, putting shots in the hands of a poor shooter. on that point, to the OP's question, dogg is generally correct. you don't need to give your pg distro to 'help him run the offense'.

on the other hand, dogg says... the less distro the pg has, the more they will be doing facilitating the offense. in general, there is no such thing, and a pg shooting has no bearing on how well he 'facilitates' the shots of the rest of the team.

you both seem to refer to a pg having assists as the pg having a good game. snafu with talk about setting pg distro high so he'd dish out more dimes. dogg talking about a non-scoring pg having a good game. a good game by what measure? i assume this means assists. bottom line, assists are window dressing. they loosely correlate with certain ratings but that doesn't mean anything. also, a pg will have fewer assists if he's shooting a lot, because that is how the assist window dressing works. but this is not meaningful.

in general the HD offenses don't 'run', there is no genuine 'facilitating' and assists mean nothing. which sort of means the rationale underpinning both perspectives is based on stuff that doesn't exist. it doesn't mean folks should throw away conclusions about offense/distro though. we often find things that occur and then try to come up with a reason they occur. just because the reasoning is wrong, doesn't mean the observation was wrong, or the conclusions we drew about the observation, in terms of how to coach our team.

dogg prefers his point guard not to be scorers. this tends to be a logical pathway for building a good team, because talent is finite, and a good 2 strength pg (defensive abilities, bh/pass, no offense) can still serve faithfully on a very good team, if there is enough offense from the 2-5 (especially the 2-3) - so if you are freed up to focus on offense in your other players, it can be a good thing, no doubt. i often go that route myself. however, 3-strength pgs (scorers, who can also defend and bh/pass) have the highest ceiling of any player in HD, and are hugely valuable in elevating teams to ridiculous heights. so definitely if an elite 3-strength pg could be acquired for anything close to the cost of an elite non-scoring pg, it would generally be hugely worth it (setting aside EE ramifications).

final note on the 'offense running' type of comments. the only thing along those lines is this. there is a superficial element to HD, added not too long ago in the HD timeline, that causes the pass/iq of your players, particularly the pg, to impact team shooting quality. its not a huge aspect, but it definitely exists, and i am glad it does - it was a needed addition. but this generally speaking has nothing to do with distribution. it just causes high pass/iq teams to shoot a little better overall, regardless of the underlying distro.

in conclusion - distro is about scoring, not about who runs the offense.

Your first paragraph ultimately answers the question. I think the term of success using facilitating or stats like assists are maybe for me just a way to describe kinda what I'm trying to accomplish, but my understanding has always been as you stated, mostly just cosmetic. Maybe the best way to ask is what is the best way to make a non-scoring PG most efficient or successful to the RNG in regards to the team success offensively.

The bottom line in the end though is that distribution does not need to be given to the PG if you don't intend to use him as a scorer, but he will still be successful in running the offense and his talents will not go to waste without the distribution.

yes, i am glad someone was able to get something concrete from that answer! i was not sure if that would happen or not. the way the offense runs is just so strange from like a human or basketball perspective (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), that i think mostly its like good to be aware of the weirdness, but mostly just go about your business, and perhaps to sort of come to terms with the offense running's stranger nature over time.

i do often avoid the topic because nobody likes it, like nobody enjoys thinking about their team offense where assists mean nothing and the first step of the half court offense is to pick the guy who ends the possession with the ball. it doesn't mean its bad, a few good formulas can do a good job abstracting complex, multi-step processes. but its hard / crummy for us as humans to think about things in such strange terms. so yeah, i think its totally fine to imagine the offense as running in a sort of normal basketball way. but doing so can obfuscate what works and what doesn't, especially with things like window dressing assists. so i kinda like to put it out there but mostly assume most folks ignore it completely and probably are best off doing so...

LOL this just reminds me of when I first started playing this game and thinking about things in a truer basketball sense. I decided zone was the way I wanted to go and something like FCP for an entire game made no sense, only to realize the game doesn't really work that way.