This thread is a little more specific than the title suggests, but I have a few questions for veterans about my Medgar Evers team. We are young, and we haven't been exactly terrible this year, but I've been very disappointed with the results and I think that I've lost games because of settings / distro. I've been coasting on 0 distro all around for a while, but I'd like to have a more informed gamepan. I'm open to any suggestions about line-ups, distro, or settings. Thanks!

Medgar Evers

Its not an absolute, but one tool I try using is the 'efficiency' rating applied to an individual player:

PTS/(fga+(.475*fta)-ORB+to)

THe ones that get a really high rating in that I tend to look at to see if I should bump up their distribution. If they are low in that, I tend to downgrade their distribution a little.

Usually I try to get at least significant distribution to both a perimeter and an inside scorer.

Yeah, I think 0 is not the way to go.

I use distro for all kinds of reasons, especially considering game matchups. I just try to find the amount that seems to maximize my players' shooting pct. and scoring, both in general and in particular games.

I have had guys that actually score more on lower distribution than they do on higher. It would drive me crazy. Some guys shooting % drop dramatically when you get their dist. too high. A guy who will go 5/9 on 8-10 dist. will go 3/13 on 16 dist. Of course, those numbers vary.

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Aside from game planning for specific opponents - which I try to do sometimes but usually think I accomplish little - I have a general approach to distro

The simplest way to do it is to start with all zeros. Wait 4 or 5 games. Then look at the efficiency of the players - you can use the formula or you can just eyeball their shooting percentages on 2pt and 3pt shots. If a guy is shooting a rotten percentage, I set his distro lower than what he got at zeros. If he is shooting a great percentage, I set his distro a bit higher.

Then, wait a few games, come back, repeat.

I think that this will tend to get guys to move toward an optimal distro

OF COURSE this excludes the effects of OTHER changes - like if things arent working maybe you switch a guy from PG to SG or change the rotation of your bigs etc etc.....but those are other concepts. Keep in mind, that all of this is imprecise because you are playing different teams, maybe changing other things and through it all the Random Number Generator is at work....

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//-->in a fastebreak uptempo offense would a 0 distro work? run and gun would seem to be stifled by getting the ball to a handfull of guys....

I won a National Title with a fastbreak offense and FCP. I had my distro set to 0 all season long. End result was the opponent never knew who was going to score. We were the highest scoring team in D3 that year (just under 100 ppg) and 8 of my players averaged between 8 and 12 points.

I'm w/kendrik,
FCP and 'Uptempo' is virtually all I've ever run and '0' can work very well.

Though I like to mix it up.

I used to run all 0's for a long time and had alot of success with it. But its just not as fun as either giving one or two players all the distro(I do this with my DIII team it works like a charm) or actually gameplanning. I think by changing my distro from game to game occasionally i have been seeing better results(especially come CT and NT time) than I did with the all 0 appraoch.

I'm in kendrik's camp as well. Even running normal/FB I noticed a significant increase in my team's offensive efficiency running all zeros. And it seemed to work really well when I had good scoring balance.

hmmm, i guess i stand corrected.

i was asked about the zero distro idea and i said i guess it was okay, as long as you are content to be just pretty good and as long as you are okay with the knowledge that you may lose a handful of games each year that you might have won with more effective distribution of scoring opportunities.

i guess its more effective than i thought. perhaps more effective than my current methods? hmmmm... maybe. ill have to think on this one... and maybe experiment a bit.

some folks seem to be forwarding the notion that "all zeroes" distro is especially effective for the fb offense. now, that may be true, or it may just "seem" like it is working. i would like to put forward a couple of notions here for your consideration. one of which i feel is something close to fact, and the other of which is absolutely no more than an opinion... and i cannot disagree that it is not even a particularly well-informed opinion:

1) i am going to suggest, rather strongly, that it is very difficult to judge the effectiveness of one distribution theory (such as "all zeroes") against another (such as "20ish to best three matchups") with out having done some kind of study which would involve lots of seasons with identical or at least very similar players, opponents, etc. i just cant believe that the differences are so large that one can see them with the "naked eye" by observing a season or two with no real controls in place. in order to see this for yourself, first look at your schedule and tell me how many games you played where you think your distro would have had any effect whatsoever on the outcome of the game. i rarely play more than 6 or 8 games per season that are close enough to matter. so, if you think you studied this thing for 90 or so games because you looked at three seasons, i suggest that your sample is really only 20 or 30 games. the next problem is that there are so many other moving parts, it really confuses the issue. so, you guys may be right that fastbreak is most effective when paired with allzeroes, but i would suggest that this would be really hard to know unless you guys are doing alot more in-depth study than i think.

2) if i understand you guys correctly, it seems that some of you feel that you want to be sure that any player (or at minimum "most players") is allowed to take a shot because often the shots that are available in the fb are random... and do we really want a kid to pass up an open layup because he has only 2dist, whilst the bigkid trailing the play has 20dist. i know that notion used to trouble me. but then i began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the fb offense works a bit different than that. perhaps in the fb offense the team is told to push the ball up the court at every opportunity and whilst pushing the ball up, anyone can take the shot if its an open layup. much the same as i would expect it would work when a player gets an offensive board. i would hope this kid is not passing up a wide open tip in because his dist is not high enogh. ive never seen any evidence of that. okay, then under this theory the dist would only come into play once the fb has broken down and the halfcourt offense is set up (a "sloppy motion" i believe is what we are told happens) . IF this later case is the way it works (i dont know that it is, but im just speculating) thn wouldnt you want to set your dist with your best players or best matchups getting a higher percentage of the shots?

think about it... you never know, oldavey could be right

I heard the same thing about distribution only mattering in a 'failed' fastbreak attempts as well.

I can't comment on fb specifically, because it's the one offense I've never used. But I've been un-impressed with the 0 distro otherwise.

I think there's a tendency here to think that if a team has some success employing a certain method/strategy, to just assume they've been successful because of that stategy, when sometimes they are successful in spite of that strategy.

And my boy ol' d makes some good points, especially #1 (again, can't comment as much on #2 due to my lack of fb experience).

I also think that you are missing out on some valuable things by going with all zeroes, the most significant of which is the ability to take advantage of particular matchups (or avoid matchups that aren't favorable).

And quite honestly, we're here to coach these teams, and setting distro is one of the few meaningful strategic options we have from game-to-game, it seems very sad and boring to let the computer play it out for you every night. At that point, you might as well just play computer mode on a video game.

I run FB in Knight and IMO adjusting distribution is the most important thing you can do in season to improve your team. Aside for the occasional +/- defensive setting adjustment its pretty much the only game planning I do. I'm not really talking about game to game changes to distribution in order to take advantage of match-ups. Its more about finding the optimal distribution settings for your team.

I know the arguements for using all zero's but I still want my best players (and best free throw shooters) taking the most shots.

matchups are only important if you're playing M2M, right? I don't really look at match-ups when I play press or zone.