One of my favorite things about WIS HOOPS, is a secret 3 point shooter. What do I mean by this?

Having a kid be a 65 green at the beginning of the season, and by playoff time he is at 85 or above.

Your opponent looks at your stats and sees 8 3 point shots taken all season and plays you at -4 and then you just let your shooter go off.

Stats can be misleading. And this is how upsets happen.

Of course, I've been burned by this same strategy myself.

This is why experience matters so much in HD. Because there's a lot of situations, where I prepare for the coach, and not the team. Or as you said, preparing for the attributes and not the stats. I do the same thing with recruiting at times when you learn someone's strategy/style/methods.

And you can't learn that in a better way. Only with experience

Yep, I'll gameplan different against different coaches. Some coaches will just put one of their best shooters on -1 the whole season. I'm onto you guys.

You definitely want to prepare for a combo of attributes and stats. There are also coaches like mfnmyers who run the exact same gameplan for almost every single game...and when he has the right team it nets him a title. But otherwise he's usually pretty easy to gameplan against.

a lot of times the game plan is different for the post season for folks, whether guys changed, they played freshman for promises, their approach changed, or they just took a much closer look for the post season. i think there's much more of that, that intentionally misleading via crazy regular season schemes, that sort of thing - but its enough you want to be on guard for it.

what i find though is most folks have their 'revelations' going into the CT, more often than going into the NT. so usually by the NT you can look at the CT and have a good idea what is coming. sometimes it is the start of NT, but then usually you can tell by a couple games into the NT, during the more serious games - and its usually kind of obvious its coming, like the guy is still starting freshmen. my experience is its very rare to face major changes later in the NT, and on top of that, most of those times the other team ends up being a mess. so i think in general you can get by just taking a quick look to see if anything changed lately, and then if so, taking a deeper look. what i do is just that, take 30s to see if they are changing it up - if so, its messier - but if not, i mostly play the stats, play their setup - more than attributes.

Recruiting preferences also play a role in this. When I make my recruiting list early on in the season and notice most of the guards I would target don't have "perimeter" offense as a preference I'll cater more towards "paint offense" to get the "very good" preference for bigs.

Last season with Oregon I had one of those teams I love where I had the personnel to switch up from 2-3 to 3-2 pretty seamlessly from game to game. I used 2-3/press one time in exhibition, and then pretty much forgot about it until the end of the season, when I was chatting gameplanning with another coach, and realized I hadn’t gone back to it all year. I did use it again in the Elite 8 and it happened to work out for me. It wasn’t tactics. I just plain forgot to utilize it all year.

Moral of the story, try not to be predictable. On the flip side, negligence doesn’t really count as unpredictability.

I agree w/ Gil here ..

For me personally, I promise starts and switch to the better players at the start of CT .. so season stats are a bust for coaches like that. I also do reevaluate my teams at the start of the CT and modify the distro and 3pt shooting based on the current attributes.

WRT game planning .. I look specifically at post season games when playing in the post season, and do not normally look at full stats (other than to compare the post season games to the season avg). If they line up (meaning that the settings are likely similar) .. then i use full season. If they don't line up (way more {or less} 3 pt shots, different tempo, etc. .. I plan for the -post season stuff only).