Brief question / topic here. I’m not sure there is an answer, but would like to know your philosophical approach to practice and allocation.

If you have a player skill that has turned “red” are you in jeopardy of losing skill if you set practice to 0? Or, do you simply maintain the skill level?

Also, do you bump your practice time up on a skill only based on the color or is it based on position and color.

Example, you have a Center who is green for passing and perimeter but yellow for rebounding. Are you going to keep pushing the yellow rebounding due to its importance and ignore the green skills that typically don’t dictate or measure a Center’s quality?

Thoughts please

I set red skills to 0. They don't decrease once they're red.

And I'll focus on my blues and greens because they grow faster, so that's where I'm getting the most improvement for my practice minutes (depending on the category... don't care too much if a PF has green BH for instance).

good advice from dw. just to clarify one thing. the rate of increase and decrease in ratings is linked, ratings that grow fast, drop fast, and vice versa. so just like if you put 20m into a red, and it might grow 0-1 points all season - i.e. very slowly - if you put 0m into a red, it will drop very slowly. for example a red that goes +1 with 20m, for a decent WE player playing decent minutes, might lose 0.1-0.2 on a 0m practice (some high work ethic players on lots of minutes actually grow in ratings, even at 0 minutes). usually, you won't see a red drop a point - but it will occasionally. sometimes it even happens right away, you see a red turn yellow and it happens in the first few practices. but this is just because of rounding and chance, it doesn't mean the guy is actually decreasing at a meaningful rate.

yellows grow pretty darn slowly and for not very important yellows, you should seriously consider 0'ing them out, too - if you have anything useful to do with your minutes, anyway!

on your second point, green per/passing in a center, for yellow rebounding, is tough. i wouldn't necessarily go all rebounding there, probably would be more balanced. for a scoring big that per is pretty valuable, but assuming non scoring, i'm probably at least putting a little in passing in that situation.

the important thing is to push cores with good growth - green or blue rebounding, for sure i'd be ok 0ing passing if that is what it took. maybe even black. but for a yellow reb, that is tougher. 10 extra minutes in reb might get you 1 reb, versus a handful of passing or more, it starts to become less obvious what the right call is there. what i would say is, don't hesitate to sacrifice just about anything to put at least 20 and perhaps even closer to 30, in a high potential area like reb or ath (conditioning), especially early in the player's career. if you are 0ing your reds and non critical yellows, and loading up your high value blues, greens, and even blacks, you'll be fine. its not super important how you prioritize the low priority stuff.

I was about to add that too. BH can help with scoring. I'm definitely pushing the green BH over a yellow/orange REB in a big. I push any and all development still left in a player.

Yellow/orange develops so slowly that it is hardly worth practicing at all. My opinions is that the goal is to get players TO that yellow/orange, and then let the off season handle it from there (assuming the player isn't a Sr). Off season improvements always seem to cap the yellow/orange to its red cap (or close to capping) a lot quicker than practice minutes does.

Agree with everything said - but want to emphasize the goal - maximizing the effectiveness of a player in his role on your team. The goal is not maximizing his point total - although more points are good.

Is a guy a defensive big with limited offensive upside - consider that role in practice. Etc.

Posted by dw172300 on 8/23/2021 4:19:00 PM (view original):
I set red skills to 0. They don't decrease once they're red.

And I'll focus on my blues and greens because they grow faster, so that's where I'm getting the most improvement for my practice minutes (depending on the category... don't care too much if a PF has green BH for instance).

10.3.1

Not really true ... especially if it has progressed to red ... it can backslide.

Posted by TRrrr on 8/29/2021 7:21:00 PM (view original):

Posted by dw172300 on 8/23/2021 4:19:00 PM (view original):
I set red skills to 0. They don't decrease once they're red.

And I'll focus on my blues and greens because they grow faster, so that's where I'm getting the most improvement for my practice minutes (depending on the category... don't care too much if a PF has green BH for instance).

10.3.1

Not really true ... especially if it has progressed to red ... it can backslide.

it can backslide but its usually like 0.1 or maybe 0.2 points lost. the rate of decrease is tied to the rate of increase, so if you can barely grow a rating, you can barely drop it, either. if its a normal guy where like 4-5 minutes is the break even point, a 0 will drop you at basically the same glacial pace an 8-10 will grow you.

It may be technically be a fraction, but it will drop a whole number. And if it only recently went red it will return to yellow if left on 0 minutes for a length of time.

right, a 88.05 might drop to a 87.95 and show a rating change. and a rating with 2.95 points of growth (red) could drop and have 3.05 points of growth (yellow). although dw's claim may have been arguably sloppy, because its not true that reds don't drop - only that the drop don't materially - that doesn't really undermine the point being made here (by dw and others). which is that when ratings are nearly capped, they barely grow or drop, so when you have meaningful stuff to practice, its usually best to 0 those reds (and non-core yellows) and to put the minutes in something else.

when i played a long time ago I feel like there was diminishing returns on anything you gave over 20 minutes to. Is this the case still? if you have a Green per of 36 for a SG can you put 35 min on that to get it moving faster? or does it make sense to keep it around 20 and work on other green/blues/blacks?

Posted by Fregoe on 11/4/2021 9:24:00 AM (view original):
when i played a long time ago I feel like there was diminishing returns on anything you gave over 20 minutes to. Is this the case still? if you have a Green per of 36 for a SG can you put 35 min on that to get it moving faster? or does it make sense to keep it around 20 and work on other green/blues/blacks?

There are diminishing returns everywhere, but for areas with more growth remaining, they hit less hard. And for LP and PER, since “maintenance” is basically half what it is for other categories (3 rather than 6-7), it is even more relaxed for the high-VeryHighs. So yes, there technically are diminishing returns, but I do feel comfortable going well above 20 on the scoring attributes when they’re green (and important). I’ve had seniors grow well over 30 points in those categories when I was really focused on them late in their careers (like 40+ minutes), which generally doesn’t happen anywhere else.

Posted by Fregoe on 11/4/2021 9:24:00 AM (view original):
when i played a long time ago I feel like there was diminishing returns on anything you gave over 20 minutes to. Is this the case still? if you have a Green per of 36 for a SG can you put 35 min on that to get it moving faster? or does it make sense to keep it around 20 and work on other green/blues/blacks?

agree w/ shoe. i don't think the diminishing returns have really changed since you were around. the concerns about diminishing returns over 20 were always a bit overblown, but the big change since the old days is the return on minutes invested... you used to get a fairly even amount from each rating practiced unless it was really low (below 10/20) or high (above 90 mostly). now you might get a 30x faster improvement off a green than a red, or 3-4x off a green compared to a black. so in the grand scheme of things, there are now factors at play that are much bigger than the diminishing returns. a green high value category can justify whatever minutes you can afford in it, you can still see a meaningful increase from going from like 40m to 50m in a category, so its not like the diminishing returns are making it negligible past a certain point.