So I’ve had a couple of really good 3/4 players that aren’t great scorers but are fast and can handle and pass the ball way above the average 3/4 players. They are good enough to lead my team in assists, but I cannot figure out how to put the ball in their hands and not force them to shoot. Ideas?

nope, you don't really have that kind of option. all players' passing and iq skills contribute to team fg by getting open looks, but the pg is the heavyweight there and there's not really anything you can do to reassign that duty. but at least, your high passing 3/4 should be contributing some to the team fg% already, as-is.

Does lowering the PF’s distribution not accomplish what he wants to do here? If the player leads the team in assists, that shouldn’t continue with a low distribution?

Also (this is maybe a preference thing) but if I have a guy leading my team in assists, I wouldn’t ever want him playing the 4. 1, 2, or 3.

well, i mean, sort of. assists will go down with lower distro, but i would NOT read into that.

its important to note that assist stats are incredibly irrelevant. its not that they don't correlate with success - they do - but the way assists are assigned, its basically garbage. if a shot goes in, then it decides if there was an assist, and who to assign it to, and that logic is basically disconnected from how the players actually contribute to team fg%. essentially, assists were put in place to make a box score that looks decent, and that is the ONLY reason. so good teams and good players tend to have more, but there's no meaningful info for coaches to glean from looking at assist figures.

There’s no meaningful info to glean from looking at assists figures??

I might need to visit a different doctor for a second opinion.

Nah, assists are assigned after the bucket is scored. Who gets the assist is based on position and passing.

that’s not to say passing isn’t important, it is, I value it more than almost anyone. Passing increases ofg%.

also to add, assists are also heavily based on the distro of the player. a mediocre pg on 0 distro could well out-assist the best pg who has ever existed, scoring 18-20ppg. just one sign of the quality of the assist stats...

there is something in this game today, that roughly correlates with an assist. its not an assist as you would think of it, and it doesn't lend itself to 'generating' assists in the way you would think of it. but at least it exists! and that is great. but seble added that like 10 years ago, and a little while before that, he told me there was nothing in the game whereby a team mate, under any means, impacted the fg% of another team mate. that was well after i'd started and pushed the theory about assists being window dressing. when i pushed that theory, i assumed something assist-like existed, just that the stats were window dressing. i mean, i knew nothing like an assist, like a normal person would think of, existed - but i thought that kind of effect was captured elsewhere, in formulas. but eventually i had so much trouble finding anything assist-like in the game, i was losing my freaking mind (because i didn't understand, i was winning a ton so it wasn't about that at all), and sent seble a ticket asking like, hey man, wtf is up with this game where <certain changes> have zero impact on <lots of stuff>. it wasn't just about assists, but assists were a big part of what i couldn't find, and he was like yeah, none of that even exists, that's why you can't find it. it really made me sad, i was like, not expecting that answer at all. i can't imagine that is why i sent the ticket originally, like i don't usually open tickets like that, but i do slip in questions when i have something important to report, a bug or something. so i wasn't even really expecting a straight response, i was just fishing, and it really made me sad because the actual HD didn't live up to the HD i had imagined. i really don't remember the details but i do remember feeling blindsided, even though what he said confirmed exactly what i was seeing. i just had refused to believe it, i guess.

anyway, assist stats worked the same way back then, as they do now. so if you imagine a game with no assists, with pure window dressing assist stats that aren't even good window dressing, and then imagine someone came along and added something assist-like, while leaving the assist stats alone... that is basically where we are. we have assist stats that aren't even good window dressing. they correlate somewhat with success, mostly because the way assists are built, the more you score, the more assists you get, so good teams get them. but they aren't a good indicator of anything relating to like, how you should coach a team or what is making your team successful, or anything along those lines.

Ummmmm…

The assist to turnover ratio?… Pure window dressing!?

Smith, D1 RPI:

1. Duke +7.9 (SOS 3)
2. UNC +7.2 (30)
3. Mich St +5.6 (13)
4. Oklahoma +3.7 (6)
5. Arizona +0.6 (9)
6. Illinois +2.6 (21)
7. Dayton +6.6 (57)
8. South Carolina +3.5 (36)
9. BC +2.2 (22)
10. Louisville +7.6 (10)
……………………………….
315. SMU -6.3 (221)
316. Norfolk St -2.9 (286)
317. Army -0.1 (277)
318. Miami Oh -3.7 (262)
319. Quinnipiac -4.4 (320)
320. Kent St -3.3 (309)
321. Jax St -4.3 (249)
322. Murray St -8.2 (311)
323. Detroit Mercy -2.3 (293)
324. Monmouth -1.8 (324)

But… there ain’t nothing to see here.

I think he’s talking about for individual players, not for a team. Obviously, the more you score, the more assists you will have as a team. Plus, he never said turnovers were window dressing. At least that’s my take on what he’s saying.

Yeah you’ve really just shown points to turnover ratio, which is incredibly important for being a good team.

right, just assists are window dressing. team-wide stats, for the most part, are extremely legitimate. individual stats get a bit dicey, because there is quite often a disconnect there... underneath the game is a lot of formulas, not the step-wise, cause and effect based flow we see in a real basketball game. a lot of the real life basketball effects still get captured, its just handled differently. so after something happens, like a turnover, its not as straight forward to assign it as in real life. individual player turnover stats are slightly compromised by this effect, i'm 100% positive about that, but in general, they are still pretty darn relevant. but team turnovers, those are basically pristine. assists is really an outlier, out there by itself, in the land of complete uselessness, while all the other team stats are at least really good.

the accuracy of individual stats and how to deal with it... probably one of the trickiest areas of the game. and not a super important one, i was able to be super successful without any of the understanding of the limits of individual stats i have now. so i really do not recommend folks worry about that side of it, about potential disconnects relating to the assignment of individual stats, like TOs. they are mostly slight distortions anyway. but i definitely recommend all coaches, no matter how new or experienced, to entirely ignore all assist stats, team and individual.

these kinds of things... they are hard to mentally absorb. how do you transition from a coach who thinks of HD as a game where players make passes and get assists when those passes leads to buckets... to one who recognizes assist stats are window dressing, and that there are no passes in HD? the key is to do it slowly. there is no need to upend your entire world view. for the most part, what we've all done is observe what happens, and then we come up with a little story that could plausibly explain those observations. just because the little story gets a big hole blown in it, does not mean the observations were wrong. and frankly, the story is often superfluous. as humans, we quite often do the right things for the wrong reasons (i mean technically, not morally). if you are focusing on good point guards, that's great, and you shouldn't stop just because the story behind it gets blown up. so mostly, i would just try to absorb this kind of info slowly, and without upending what you are actually doing. but certainly, a re-inspection of this area of the game is in order, over the medium to long term, and you do want to eventually incorporate this kind of stuff into your worldview, if you will.

Assists to turnover ratio… this is not window dressing. (But computed, in part, with team assist stats, and therefore individual assist stats.)

Individual assist stats… this is window dressing. Uhh, got it, got it.

you should not use assist to turnover ratios, either. i do not use them for anything. turnovers is important though, i would definitely look at those.

assist to turnover ratio is basically one part crap, and one part something real. the end result is not pure window dressing, but its not something good, either. its far better to look at turnovers than assist to turnover ratio.

Play him at the 1