How do I best set my player distributions? I understand that you want your best players  playing the most, but is there more too it then that? Mine were all set at zero, but decided to change them best I could (we'll see how that goes)... Thanks again for taking the time...

Just remember it's the ratio of the numbers. On the court. So... It doesn't have to equal 100. I can't count above 4 so that's what I put my gunners at. 2 or 3 for solid players, and 0 for incoming frosh who don't know my offensive set (IQ = "F"). At various times during the season I'll adjust distro up or down 1 depending on the players success. For example, if a guy is shooting 59% after 7 games I would probably have him shoot a bit more. 

Posted by droxside on 3/27/2011 10:59:00 PM (view original):
 How do I best set my player distributions? I understand that you want your best players  playing the most, but is there more too it then that? Mine were all set at zero, but decided to change them best I could (we'll see how that goes)... Thanks again for taking the time...

Here is a suggestion, a method which you may find helpful. I'll tell you what I would do, if I had your team.  You are using 11 players in your rotation, correct?  So, start by setting everybody in the rotation to 9, and the redshirt to 0.  That will give you 99 total.  Then, pick whoever you think your best offensive player is, and set him to 10.  Now, you have used all 100 points.  From here on out, every time you want to add a point to some player, you have to take a point away from a different player (since you cannot exceed 100 total).  This is a useful restriction because it forces you to consider who you want to take shots away from.  It's a good mental discipline for honing your team offense.  Just keep tweaking until you get the balance you like the best.  If you set the distro very high for any particular player, they will start to suffer a loss of efficiency (miss more shots than usual and commit more turnovers) but in my experience I haven't noticed a dropoff until I got up around 25 (out of 100), so you can easily go up into the 20s and not worry about it, IMO.

Keep in mind also that players who get a lot of offensive rebounds will automatically get a few shots up without having any distro at all, since putbacks seem to be independent of distro.  And also remember that the longer the player is on the court, the more shots they take, so sometimes you might have an "instant offense" type of scorer you want to bring off the bench.  You may have to jack that player's distro way up to get them to take a higher rate of shots than normal since you want them to be shooting a lot as long as they are in the game.

One last idea:  you can analyze your offensive efficiency by looking a points-per shot.  That is taking the total points and dividing it by the total number of field goal attempts.  As a general rule of thumb, the higher the PPS, the more shots you want the player to take.  Anything above 1.4 is really good and if you can get to 1.5 and be taking a lot of shots, that is fantastic.  Anything below 1.0 is terrible.  1.2-1.3 is fairly average.  For example, you have Napier with 130 points on 91 FGA, so Napier's PPS is 130/91 = 1.43.  As your leading scorer, that is excellent.   As a team, you are 530/383 = 1.38.  That is very solid.  The fact that your main go-to guy is significantly better than the average of your team as a whole indicates that either (a) you might want to have Napier shoot even more, if it doesn't diminish his efficiency or (b) you could tweak the rest of your team to be a little better.  I would look at May as somebody to reduce.  I run a motion offense, too, so I can tell you that with a ballhandling of 8 and mediocre athleticism and low post, it is not suprising that his PPS is a low 23/32 = 0.71.  I would consider setting him to 0 and allocating his shots to more efficient players.  You might want to experiment with getting more shots for Loveless, but at the same time stop Loveless from shooting 3-pters by setting him to -2 on shot selection.  Loveless isn't very athletically gifted, but his combination of low post and perimeter is excellent (over 120 points total between them).  Even if Loveless stops shooting 3s, the perimeter still helps him to be a good midrange shooter.  He's shooting a terrible % on 3s and hes not getting to the free throw line as much as he could if you made him drive more. Loveless's PPS is 1.15 so far.  I would bet that you could get him up to 1.35 and also increase his # of shots.  If you just made that change and took May's shots away completely, your offense would instantly improve. That should get you started.

Thanks guys, been real busy so just seeing your posts (still have to digest them) I really appreciate your help. May take me a day or so but will use your advice. Thanks again for helping a newbie out...Tim

Posted by jkline on 3/28/2011 6:35:00 AM (view original):

Posted by droxside on 3/27/2011 10:59:00 PM (view original):
 How do I best set my player distributions? I understand that you want your best players  playing the most, but is there more too it then that? Mine were all set at zero, but decided to change them best I could (we'll see how that goes)... Thanks again for taking the time...

Here is a suggestion, a method which you may find helpful. I'll tell you what I would do, if I had your team.  You are using 11 players in your rotation, correct?  So, start by setting everybody in the rotation to 9, and the redshirt to 0.  That will give you 99 total.  Then, pick whoever you think your best offensive player is, and set him to 10.  Now, you have used all 100 points.  From here on out, every time you want to add a point to some player, you have to take a point away from a different player (since you cannot exceed 100 total).  This is a useful restriction because it forces you to consider who you want to take shots away from.  It's a good mental discipline for honing your team offense.  Just keep tweaking until you get the balance you like the best.  If you set the distro very high for any particular player, they will start to suffer a loss of efficiency (miss more shots than usual and commit more turnovers) but in my experience I haven't noticed a dropoff until I got up around 25 (out of 100), so you can easily go up into the 20s and not worry about it, IMO.

Keep in mind also that players who get a lot of offensive rebounds will automatically get a few shots up without having any distro at all, since putbacks seem to be independent of distro.  And also remember that the longer the player is on the court, the more shots they take, so sometimes you might have an "instant offense" type of scorer you want to bring off the bench.  You may have to jack that player's distro way up to get them to take a higher rate of shots than normal since you want them to be shooting a lot as long as they are in the game.

One last idea:  you can analyze your offensive efficiency by looking a points-per shot.  That is taking the total points and dividing it by the total number of field goal attempts.  As a general rule of thumb, the higher the PPS, the more shots you want the player to take.  Anything above 1.4 is really good and if you can get to 1.5 and be taking a lot of shots, that is fantastic.  Anything below 1.0 is terrible.  1.2-1.3 is fairly average.  For example, you have Napier with 130 points on 91 FGA, so Napier's PPS is 130/91 = 1.43.  As your leading scorer, that is excellent.   As a team, you are 530/383 = 1.38.  That is very solid.  The fact that your main go-to guy is significantly better than the average of your team as a whole indicates that either (a) you might want to have Napier shoot even more, if it doesn't diminish his efficiency or (b) you could tweak the rest of your team to be a little better.  I would look at May as somebody to reduce.  I run a motion offense, too, so I can tell you that with a ballhandling of 8 and mediocre athleticism and low post, it is not suprising that his PPS is a low 23/32 = 0.71.  I would consider setting him to 0 and allocating his shots to more efficient players.  You might want to experiment with getting more shots for Loveless, but at the same time stop Loveless from shooting 3-pters by setting him to -2 on shot selection.  Loveless isn't very athletically gifted, but his combination of low post and perimeter is excellent (over 120 points total between them).  Even if Loveless stops shooting 3s, the perimeter still helps him to be a good midrange shooter.  He's shooting a terrible % on 3s and hes not getting to the free throw line as much as he could if you made him drive more. Loveless's PPS is 1.15 so far.  I would bet that you could get him up to 1.35 and also increase his # of shots.  If you just made that change and took May's shots away completely, your offense would instantly improve. That should get you started.

I would tend to like points per posession better than points per shot, because points per shot doesn't penalize the efficiency loss of comitting allot of turnovers.   Haven't tried it, but perhaps if you added turnovers to field goals and used that as the divisor?

Myself, I like using the Points/(FGA+(.475*FTA)-ORB+TO) Formula.

Posted by 4green2 on 3/29/2011 10:57:00 PM (view original):

Posted by jkline on 3/28/2011 6:35:00 AM (view original):

Posted by droxside on 3/27/2011 10:59:00 PM (view original):
 How do I best set my player distributions? I understand that you want your best players  playing the most, but is there more too it then that? Mine were all set at zero, but decided to change them best I could (we'll see how that goes)... Thanks again for taking the time...

Here is a suggestion, a method which you may find helpful. I'll tell you what I would do, if I had your team.  You are using 11 players in your rotation, correct?  So, start by setting everybody in the rotation to 9, and the redshirt to 0.  That will give you 99 total.  Then, pick whoever you think your best offensive player is, and set him to 10.  Now, you have used all 100 points.  From here on out, every time you want to add a point to some player, you have to take a point away from a different player (since you cannot exceed 100 total).  This is a useful restriction because it forces you to consider who you want to take shots away from.  It's a good mental discipline for honing your team offense.  Just keep tweaking until you get the balance you like the best.  If you set the distro very high for any particular player, they will start to suffer a loss of efficiency (miss more shots than usual and commit more turnovers) but in my experience I haven't noticed a dropoff until I got up around 25 (out of 100), so you can easily go up into the 20s and not worry about it, IMO.

Keep in mind also that players who get a lot of offensive rebounds will automatically get a few shots up without having any distro at all, since putbacks seem to be independent of distro.  And also remember that the longer the player is on the court, the more shots they take, so sometimes you might have an "instant offense" type of scorer you want to bring off the bench.  You may have to jack that player's distro way up to get them to take a higher rate of shots than normal since you want them to be shooting a lot as long as they are in the game.

One last idea:  you can analyze your offensive efficiency by looking a points-per shot.  That is taking the total points and dividing it by the total number of field goal attempts.  As a general rule of thumb, the higher the PPS, the more shots you want the player to take.  Anything above 1.4 is really good and if you can get to 1.5 and be taking a lot of shots, that is fantastic.  Anything below 1.0 is terrible.  1.2-1.3 is fairly average.  For example, you have Napier with 130 points on 91 FGA, so Napier's PPS is 130/91 = 1.43.  As your leading scorer, that is excellent.   As a team, you are 530/383 = 1.38.  That is very solid.  The fact that your main go-to guy is significantly better than the average of your team as a whole indicates that either (a) you might want to have Napier shoot even more, if it doesn't diminish his efficiency or (b) you could tweak the rest of your team to be a little better.  I would look at May as somebody to reduce.  I run a motion offense, too, so I can tell you that with a ballhandling of 8 and mediocre athleticism and low post, it is not suprising that his PPS is a low 23/32 = 0.71.  I would consider setting him to 0 and allocating his shots to more efficient players.  You might want to experiment with getting more shots for Loveless, but at the same time stop Loveless from shooting 3-pters by setting him to -2 on shot selection.  Loveless isn't very athletically gifted, but his combination of low post and perimeter is excellent (over 120 points total between them).  Even if Loveless stops shooting 3s, the perimeter still helps him to be a good midrange shooter.  He's shooting a terrible % on 3s and hes not getting to the free throw line as much as he could if you made him drive more. Loveless's PPS is 1.15 so far.  I would bet that you could get him up to 1.35 and also increase his # of shots.  If you just made that change and took May's shots away completely, your offense would instantly improve. That should get you started.

I would tend to like points per posession better than points per shot, because points per shot doesn't penalize the efficiency loss of comitting allot of turnovers.   Haven't tried it, but perhaps if you added turnovers to field goals and used that as the divisor?

Myself, I like using the Points/(FGA+(.475*FTA)-ORB+TO) Formula.

this is really good advice, stuff in there I took note of, one small thing, I would tend to start closer to 6% per player rather than 9, that way you have more room to move things around without butting up into the 100 total number, some of my teams the total adds up to less than 50, on others I am in the 80's using this method, the total is not important at all, it is simply relatively speaking to each other on the court.

As many have stated, this is especially important with rotations, if you are not careful, a 4% guy on the bench may take more shots than a 12% starter, if you are not careful with who is on the court with who & esp how stamina affects rotations - hope that helps!

followup on the bench guy issue - watch out about the relative %  point made above

BUT, also watch out that you dont over-estimate the performance of your bench guys.  IF they are getting their minutes in garbage time or more against the other teams subs than starters, bench guys can have high shooting percentages and efficiency without actually being superior offensive players - tred carefully before you boost the distro of a bench guy with modest offensive IQ and ratings just because his performance numbers are good