Hard to tell with him since he got a 60-day DL injury in there and I don't have his detailed ratings progressions recorded anywhere. But the short answer to your question is, it probably had little if any impact. When doing that strategy it's more for the injury prevention aspect and any theoretical incremental ratings increase is just icing on the cake.

Longer answer: the game used to inadvertently allow you to see a players true ceiling if you knew where to look before I sent in a ticket to let them know about it. Before it was fixed though, I compared a bunch of players that had already reached full development and compared their current ratings to their true ceilings, (doing this across multiple leagues) and noticed that 1) almost all players hit their true non coachable ratings ceilings (DUR, POW, SPE, etc. - if they didn't I assume it's because they weren't running $20M training budgets) and 2) almost no players hit their true coachable ratings ceilings. I can't remember if I investigated this or not but I assume the ones that did hit their ceilings were probably injury bug guys.

The other thing I noticed was that ,while few players hit their coachable ratings ceiling, most players fell somewhere between 2-5 ratings short per rating category. Some a bit more. Those that were more than 2-5 ratings off were probably grossly mismanaged for development purposes - coaches that were coaching in the wrong role, players not playing a substantial portion of the regular season, not playing any games in preseason, things like that. These instances though were few and far between so I guess most owners tend to do a pretty decent job of developing their players.

What I took from this was that most players get within 4-5 ratings to their true ceiling as long as you put in the bare minimum prospect development effort. And people who did everything they could to maximize development only eeked out 2 or 3 more ratings points. Spread that out over 4 years of prospect development seasons and that's ~0.5 of a point difference. So even if you do make changes to a prospects development from one season to the next, you're unlikely to notice, and that's without even taking into consideration that development isn't linear and tapers off each season.

Why almost no players reached their true ceilings with coachable ratings is a head scratcher to me. The only thing I can come up with is that maybe a player has to reach the championship game of every season of development to squeeze out those last 2ish ratings. But that's just speculation.

Not sure if any of this helps but these are some of things I've noticed over my years of playing HBD. The lesson I learned is that extreme prospect development optimization is only worth a few ratings which is why I've probably gotten a bit lazier over the seasons in that area.

Great stuff Brian, I appreciate it, and I am sure others do too. Would love to have you in Rickey, which just rolled and has some good teams available.

What do you mean by "development isn't linear and tapers off each season"? Do you mean that each season sees less improvement than the previous one, or that within each season it tapers off? That there is a set progression for each season and you see more of it early in the season? Because I have noticed that with some players; they seem done growing in the last 1/4 of the season, but then they have a new, smaller growth progression the following season...

Appreciate the offer cal but I'm trying to cull teams not add more, hahaha.

Re: tapering development - yeah to both. There's def a logarithmic curve that's applicable to all player development that only changes player to player based on how much potential a player has. If someone was ambitious enough, they could start plotting player development trends and probably come up with a fairly accurate estimate of a players final ratings based on the first full season of development.