My Allen D3 conference has been having a mini-discussion about the quality of Sim AI teams.  For giggles – and not wanting to do any real work this week – I took a look a look at the Player Rating Rankings to see how Sim AI faired in that.

I’m mostly presenting the results below without editorial comment.  I’m not exactly sure what to make of them so I don’t want to make any overly broad conclusions.  I will say that I was pretty surprised by the number of good to very good players that had been recruited by Sim AI.

I took a look at players who were in the top 25 for rankings in athleticism, speed, rebounding, defense, shot blocking, low post, perimeter, ball handling, passing, and total ranking.  (To state the obvious, I choose to ignore work ethic, stamina, durability, and free throw ranking.)  There were a total of 207 players in the 10 categories since some players were top 25 in more than one.

I then took the list of 207 and filtered only those that had been recruited by Sim AI.  And then after doing that I choose to weed out those that I think aren’t really productive players.  It’s pretty cool that Calving Gholston (http://www.whatifsports.com/hd/PlayerProfile/Ratings.aspx?tid=7678&pid=1686082) has a 97 rebound rating and a 98 shot blocking rating.  But with athleticism of 2, speed of 3, and defense of 3, he isn’t all that productive of a player.  So he doesn’t make my list.  When I had doubts over a player, I looked at his stats to make a determination if he is an impact player.

I was extremely surprised that of the original 207, 62 of them were players recruited by Sim AI that are talented enough in all categories to be impact players.  I wouldn’t have guessed that at all.

There are a number of faults with how I came up with the list, but at the same time I think it is pretty illustrative.  You don’t have to have a top 25 ranking in a category to be an impact player.  And the list that I have is very biased toward point guards.  31 of the 62 are point guards and there are only 3 small forwards and 5 power forwards in the mix.  Even if that means I’m not capturing a more balanced number, I do think it’s interesting that those positions don’t seem to lend themselves well to approaching the higher ends of category rankings.

Categories ranked in the top 25 are listed below in bold.

I am not exactly sure what to make of this, but I think I’m encouraged to see so many good players making it to Sim AI teams.  Thoughts?
 

very interesting kujay. i haven't had time to go through all the players, but i thought one of the most interesting pieces was the number of 90+ per shooters. i suppose that is somewhat realistic - in a 3 point shooting contest, i wouldn't really expect d1 players to blow the best of d3 out of the water. now, when they are actually being guarded, that is a whole different story... :)

and i do agree - nice to see simmy actually signing some solid guys. i honestly think d3 simmy is probably the most likely to do so, but still, nice to see nonetheless.

Posted by gillispie on 12/20/2010 4:15:00 PM (view original):
very interesting kujay. i haven't had time to go through all the players, but i thought one of the most interesting pieces was the number of 90+ per shooters. i suppose that is somewhat realistic - in a 3 point shooting contest, i wouldn't really expect d1 players to blow the best of d3 out of the water. now, when they are actually being guarded, that is a whole different story... :)

and i do agree - nice to see simmy actually signing some solid guys. i honestly think d3 simmy is probably the most likely to do so, but still, nice to see nonetheless.

Very true. I have a friend who was very talented but couldn't make it onto a D1 squad (partially due to injuring his shooting elbow, and switching from a righty to a lefty while in high school). He once made 100 free throws in a row in practice and can drain 3s nonstop when no one is on him. When you put a bigger athlete who might even be faster on him, his accuracy goes off. 

Interesting study and one that could provoke much debate. My first impression is that while many of these players are very good, I wonder how their skills match up with the O&D their team plays? For example, although not a lot of teams play M2M in DIII there are only 10 of the 62 players listed with a Defensive skill rating above 50 while there are 25 of the 62 who are below 20 in that skill. In addition, Athleticism seems very low across the board even for DIII. I also wonder how many of these players are playing at the position listed. For example, there are several PGs listed who have really poor Speed and/or Passing skills. I suspect some of them at least are being used as SGs.  

I don't believe that WIS has made any changes to how sim ai recruits. My gut feeling is that there are simply too few human coaches. This leaves more quality players for the sims. Also, A lot of the human coaches are not fighting the sims for many of these recruits. I'm not saying this is good or bad just that it is what it is. Anything that improves the sims overall ability to win is good in my opinion. I left an A prestige DIII team for a rebuild because 8 of the 10 sims in that conference had RPIs of 250 or worse including several at 300+.  That is not good for the game. 

Pretty sure it just means the guys the sim AIs get are low rated high potential guys that humans avoid because of low starting ratings only to see them improve a bunch under the sim controlled team.

Posted by tianyi7886 on 12/20/2010 4:18:00 PM (view original):

Posted by gillispie on 12/20/2010 4:15:00 PM (view original):
very interesting kujay. i haven't had time to go through all the players, but i thought one of the most interesting pieces was the number of 90+ per shooters. i suppose that is somewhat realistic - in a 3 point shooting contest, i wouldn't really expect d1 players to blow the best of d3 out of the water. now, when they are actually being guarded, that is a whole different story... :)

and i do agree - nice to see simmy actually signing some solid guys. i honestly think d3 simmy is probably the most likely to do so, but still, nice to see nonetheless.

Very true. I have a friend who was very talented but couldn't make it onto a D1 squad (partially due to injuring his shooting elbow, and switching from a righty to a lefty while in high school). He once made 100 free throws in a row in practice and can drain 3s nonstop when no one is on him. When you put a bigger athlete who might even be faster on him, his accuracy goes off. 

I guess we've all known guys like this... one of the best shooters I've ever seen (when open) was a guy who was on an intramural team with me for a few games.  Left alone, he could pop in three-pointers one after another.  Dude just never missed.  I never saw him lose a game of horse.

Unfortunately, he was about 5'8", hugely overweight, and he couldn't run, dribble, or defend.  To top it off, he had a low release point (it was kind of a push shot off of the chest instead of a jumper), so that anyone who was ambulatory and taller than, say, about 5'5" could block the shot every time he took it.  So we couldn't even use him, and he quit after two or three games of never playing.  Probably the closest I have ever seen to PE = 100 among casual players, but useless even in intramurals because SPD, DE, REB, BH, etc... were all 1.

Posted by davis on 12/20/2010 5:33:00 PM (view original):

Posted by tianyi7886 on 12/20/2010 4:18:00 PM (view original):

Posted by gillispie on 12/20/2010 4:15:00 PM (view original):
very interesting kujay. i haven't had time to go through all the players, but i thought one of the most interesting pieces was the number of 90+ per shooters. i suppose that is somewhat realistic - in a 3 point shooting contest, i wouldn't really expect d1 players to blow the best of d3 out of the water. now, when they are actually being guarded, that is a whole different story... :)

and i do agree - nice to see simmy actually signing some solid guys. i honestly think d3 simmy is probably the most likely to do so, but still, nice to see nonetheless.

Very true. I have a friend who was very talented but couldn't make it onto a D1 squad (partially due to injuring his shooting elbow, and switching from a righty to a lefty while in high school). He once made 100 free throws in a row in practice and can drain 3s nonstop when no one is on him. When you put a bigger athlete who might even be faster on him, his accuracy goes off. 

I guess we've all known guys like this... one of the best shooters I've ever seen (when open) was a guy who was on an intramural team with me for a few games.  Left alone, he could pop in three-pointers one after another.  Dude just never missed.  I never saw him lose a game of horse.

Unfortunately, he was about 5'8", hugely overweight, and he couldn't run, dribble, or defend.  To top it off, he had a low release point (it was kind of a push shot off of the chest instead of a jumper), so that anyone who was ambulatory and taller than, say, about 5'5" could block the shot every time he took it.  So we couldn't even use him, and he quit after two or three games of never playing.  Probably the closest I have ever seen to PE = 100 among casual players, but useless even in intramurals because SPD, DE, REB, BH, etc... were all 1.

My friend is a little different though, considering he did get 2 tryouts to make the team at Nova, and then had a shot at Rutgers. If he didn't hurt his elbow in Soph year and had to start shooting left handed, he might have been playing D1.