Heading to my 3rd season I'm still relatively new. Still for inheriting a grade B prestige school that usually had losing records. I did pretty good with recruits my first year, heading to this season I'm prerank #22 with 3 of my top players are Juniors from my recruiting class and 5 of my top 6 players being juniors, next year I can very really be champ contender.

However I'm still trying to learn the whole strategy and what works best. I happened to play this preseason game and got demolished 50-109 to a team I'm arguable better than, here is the boxscore: http://www.whatifsports.com/hd/GameResults/BoxScore.aspx?gid=7228238, I attached in addition the player distrubition:

thats what I had for player distribution against them, including the foul trouble all set to normal. Potentially my mistake was with the doubleteam and maybe I had a misconception about it. I set it to all that I will double team them if they are lead scorers, maybe it did something silly that made me double team everyone and why I lost badly. But what I thought it would do, is only double team the one person that is leading scorer and usually just one of them at the time. Now i'm realizing of 4 players were lead scorers with 2 pts maybe it double team 4 guys which isn't good, so maybe I been missing something there.

These are my game plan settings, is it not perfect? perhaps. But i doubt its so flawed I get blown by 59 points:

Lastly I show my depth chart:


I have Carlos Smith set up for 29-33 minutes and Vernon Goodman to 9-13 minutes as part of my 10 minutes gurantee. You can see I got my PG, SG, SG, SF, C as my starters, I figured sometimes very perimeter schools like Vilanova or Michigan can play as much as 4 guards at a time, The starting lineup I have will work, considering those 4 smaller guys are my best players.

I know its pretty big post, but I figured everyone will ask about my settings to have them give me answers, so I provided everything. Being that I'm prerank #22 it would be a disgrace if my team plays like the one that got blew by 59 points. So please help me here, and yes I get it was preseason, but doesn't sound like losing by that much is normal for preseason either

drop the press and just run zone, run slowdown, and pray your opp run slowdown as well. with that stamina, your team will get blown out every time you go uptempo, and possibly even normal tempo. set your fouls to conservative on key players to prevent them fouling out. even with slowdown, if anyone fouls out, you are toast. 

Thanks alot, that really makes sense that the tempo was the real killer. That's the one area I wasn't paying attention to much is how exactly the tempo work, I noticed my stamina slightly above average if you average the starters only which is 77.8, that's why I had it at fast tempo but I underestimated the extremity of it.

I was thinking of changing my depth backup, with Simon looking more like SG than PF at the SF position, I set him to be primary backup SG as Thomas is better substituted than Googe, and freshman Jones is better than Garner, so instead of Garner as my primary SG backup, i'll just switch Simon to SG and Jones as my SF backup. With these settings, I'm thinking of with needing perhaps one of my top 4 guys to not be conservative so some good soul is on the court, have the crappiest of them 4 with Thomas being the only normal foul trouble guy, the other 3 keep conservative and everyone else on the team keep at normal.

So thank you tiyanyi, I happen to notice your Drew resume, only 14 losses in 8 seasons, very impressive, considering you can 14 losses in 1 season and still be above .500.

Look at the pbp, your entire team was playing at "very tired" by the end of each half. Very tired, your players perform something around 40% efficiency. 78 stamina for starters is not high, and definitely way too low for a team that uses the press. run slowdown zone is the only way your team can win games. 

Did you promise Goodman a start?  If not, use him as a backup, I would not start him.  I would use fatigue settings instead of minutes, but that's just me.  Also agree that you should run either press or zone -- pick one.  I don't agree with tianyi that you HAVE to run slowdown, even running press.  Average 73 stamina at the start of a season isn't bad -- I've had success running press in DIII with similar stamina numbers.  I would avoid uptempo though, if you choose to go with press.

I'm also not sure the 3 G/SF/C starting lineup is a good idea -- you're going to get massacred on the boards at either zone or press.  Knight's a perfectly adequate DIII center -- why not move him into the starting lineup?  A starting 5 of Smith, Googe, Wilhoit, Knight, Robert is pretty good.

ok I looked at the bpb, obviously that looked real bad.

No I didn't promise Goodman a start that would be really dumb, but he had like all green potenital except for the irrelevant skills for PG in SB, REB, & LP so I badly wanted him, I went as far as promision 10 minutes and thats it, obviously he's not a starter material right now.

I was new to the whole game, and the team I inherited, they said it runs motion & 2-3 zone/halfcourt press, I really didn't like the defense in the first place, but all my players IQ were on zone & halfcourt so I stuck with it. Snd I had no idea that splitting defense strategy like that was really like half the significance as running just zone, m2m, or halfcourt press on their own. I thought it was just as equal significance and if I knew it was really much less, I'd never set that up so thank you.

Regarding the choice of my starters, reason I have Robert as my starter is because of the 4 main skills a big man has, the only area that Knight seems to be superior is SB and that seems far least important skill anyways. Warren Robert is clearly better REB, LP, even bit better on Def and all are more important than SB, so figured with already sacrificing Reb by playing smaller, better to use more the reb in Warren Robert anyways. I could be wrong, but it seems that what SG Thomas can bring is much more than Warren Robert or Knight, so I try to stick with Thomas. But if you really think that starting those 5 is better I'll give it a try, maybe it is better.

in terms of tempo - before you even look at stamina, look at numbers of players who are (a) good and (b) have good IQ - if you have 6 guys who are good for your level and have B or better IQ and the other guy has 8 such guys, you have to go slow.

Second level of tempo thinking is stamina - as an adjustment to the number of guys analysis

My thinking is backwards from tianyi and johnsensing, but arrives at pretty much the same results.  

On balance, your team's IQ  is not good in any category.  I think you might be able manage to play a zone/press, but it is a lot easier to bring up IQs if you only devote practice minutes in 2, rather than 3, categories.  I would bump it up to 20 per category and might consider up to 25.   In my opinion, zone only may work better with your current roster, but you have to decide if you want to go that way in the long run.  A switch to only play zone (and adjusting tempo)  would fix your teams exhaustion issues.   I suggest playing one game with everyone at "fairly fresh" and incrementally adjusting the settings game-by-game until you get the minutes you want to see from each player, without seeing them go "tired" or "very tired" in the PBP.  If you choose to press, then you'll have to play slowdown.

Personally, I would start Peterson at 4 and have Knight as the 1st backup at both 4 & 5.   In the same way, I would try Thomas at 2 and bring Googe off the bench 1st at 1 & 2.  You just have to read the PBP to see if you like how the substitutions work or hate it.  However, if you think you have a stud freshmen, that just needs minutes to bring up WE and fulfill his big potential, then go ahead and get him minutes.  If he stinks for this season, then he stinks for this season.

I think Goodman is good enough to at least backup, for a PG to have:

Athleticism          44
Speed                 53
Perimeter            56
Ball Handling        55
Passing               35

which thou not great for backup, seems adequate. And yes He's got high potential in all the skills except the irrelevant REb, SB, & LP for point guard and with promised 10 minutes and unfortunately low WE, I like to bring the WE as much as possible.

Goodman definitely needs the minutes then.   He already knows motion & zone, but not press...so there you go.  In that case, I would suggest him as back up at the 2 or try to get him 10 minutes/game at 3rd on the depth chart at both guard positions.   Sometimes the substitutions work and sometimes they don't.