Posted by jcred5 on 3/21/2022 11:55:00 PM (view original):
IRL teams this year average about 20 fouls per game. That's down from ~ 22 fpg in the mid 90's. Teams in this league are averaging 18.75 fpg. It's not uncommon for a player to match his IRL ppg while FT's are so much lower. One example that my experience tells me is typical without fact checking is Karl Malone. Averaging 27.4 ppg compared with 27 ppg IRL in one league. Yet IRL he attempted 836 FT and is on pace to attempt 575 FT. So how do players maintain their scoring with 68% of the FTA? The answer is more made field goals. But the real question is why does the sim maintain a pretty similar foul rate with a significantly lower FT rate due to non shooting fouls. But I wonder if it's deeper than that. Again the smallest of sample sizes. But same team Faried IRL was 288 FTA and is on pace for 280. And my instincts without fact checking history tell me the lower usage/lower IRL FTA guys tend to come much closer. So then is it guys with higher FTA IRL are adjusted to make FG rather than get to the line?
Random thoughts - curious if anyone has covered this.
I haven't sank too much thought into it. I have some individual player data, but it is a lot harder to collect at scale than team data because you have to crawl through team IDs instead of league IDs to scrape it.
A simple explanation could be that the sim results in a lower amount of shooting fouls but increased non shooting fouls... and non shooting fouls are seemingly more likely to be evenly distributed across the usage tree than shooting fouls, meaning higher usage guys could not scale as much in terms of FTAs. That is a pretty uninformed hypothesis though. I don't think I would put too much stock into it without a large data set to analyze.