Is there ever a good time to set the player distribution to all zeroes, e.g. against a man-to-man with a motion or flex offense?

If you don't have a clear best player or it's a throw away year in the rebuild process and you don't want to waste time

i once won a championship playing all 0s for the final 4 and championship both. it was a year early in my d2 triangle/press days, i think it was only my 2nd d2 title. i would definitely not recommend it. the reason i did it is that i just simply could not get my offense to perform as efficiently as i thought. i had 5 awesome offensive players on my starting lineup, and i felt i wasn't getting the most out of them all.

future learning taught me you just can't expect much, if anything, more out of 5 great offensive players than 4. or even than 3 with a decent guy... not in the triangle anyway. so my frustration was probably for nothing. coincidentally, it was also the only season i ever won running uptempo - i would run normal tempo with my set distro, uptempo with all 0s. went back and forth all season, played the the first 4 games normal/set distro, then finished things out uptempo/all 0s. i think i won all the games by at least 10 so i really don't know which performed better.

but anyway... yeah, i would not go with all 0s. the sim is going to pick the distro for you, essentially, and by definition, it can't be too smart - or it wouldn't be worth it for coaches to set distro. the reason it worked well for me is because the offense was so good, it didn't really matter how you set distro, within reason. and i also was unaware how unproductive having great lp and per in your sf was (my sf had aroudn 85 ath, spd, lp, per, and i expected more than a 85 ath/lp or 85 spd/per player, which is not really how it worked back then at least. i think when seble changed it for lp to matter for guards, it also affected sfs, but im not sure about that one).

on a final note, if you are REALLY frustrated and clueless - all 0s might not be terrible to play for a few games. if it works out decently, you can look at what the sim did and try to glean something valuable you could do to your own setup. its worth noting that back then, i tried 0 distro all the time, to see if it was ever worth anything - i probably played with it 10 times. 9 of them, it was horrible. 1 time, it was good.

As an experiment once I played an entire season with my St Scholastica team in Wooden on all 0's every game. We made the elite 8 that year.

Granted a lot of luck was involved, I was a 10 seed in the tournament and the 15 upset the 2 in the first round so I had an easy path to get to the sweet 16, then I think I wound up playing the 6 seed instead of the 3 in the sweet 16, but still the all 0s didnt work out terribly.

I've tried that experiment again with other rebuild projects and not fared nearly as well, but the all 0s is not always terrible, just not something to rely on to be a consistently good team.