good question there dogg. i will say, it sounds like you are talking a bit about real basketball - i like to think of HD as a simulation game loosely based on basketball, got to be careful not to mix it with the real thing! specifically, when you say you want all your players to be either a scorer or a passer - why? i don't know that one can answer that question without talking about basketball instead of HD, to be frank.
anyway, before i answer your question, let me add one thing to what i was saying - the 1 item i left out of my last post on the history of big men and passing or whatever - around ~7 or whatever (not sure) years ago seble did make that change to have passing impact team mates' open looks. but before that? a player's passing had literally no direct impact on a team mate (the only indirect aspect being, if 1 guy commits say 1 turnover less a game, some team mate will likely get 1 extra shot - but there was nothing where your great passer makes your scorer better in any way, or makes your other players commit fewer TOs, or any of the other sensible things like that). a player's passing served 1 purpose and 1 purpose only - reducing their rate of turnovers.
so, i had to only judge passing in terms of turnover reduction, and going down that vein of logic leads to my conclusion. the addition of pass/iq as a contributing factor to the shooting rate of team mates was a good addition, but its still very isolated and was a modest change - there is no broad stroke impact of team passing, no mystical ability to have hard-to-quantify benefits across the team. we know exactly the 'abilities' passing is contributing to, which are just TO reduction for the player in question, and the team mate shooting thing. the latter (shooting) one is primarily reliant on the passing of the pg, and to a lesser extent, the sg - the bigs are relatively limited.
anyway, i think you see where i'm going with this - all we have to do is walk step by step through the value of passing for those 2 minor abilities - TO prevention and improving team shooting %.
last digression, i just want to more clearly stake out my position before proceeding. its not that passing is worth nothing - its that cores are what people need to focus on for all players, and the forum sentiment is not nearly focused enough on cores these days, so i'm largely pushing back against that. also, you can easily win titles without worrying about the stats that are this low on the priority list, so i don't think i'm leading coaches astray. and one more thing - when i say you can ignore big man passing so you can focus on the 100 more important things - i'm assuming this means you focus on getting high reb/ath/def and whatnot - but that doesn't mean you are getting all 1 passing bigs. if you ignore it, you almost get 'random' passing, if you will - you'll randomly run into some here and there. so i think the penalty for ignoring passing is roughly maybe half of the penalty for great passing vs the worst passing - something like that.
alright, let's dive into why i value passing so low, the more concrete analysis part -
so, the first part is the impact on TOs. if you think back to that TSF decision post i made in response to your question about why assists are just window dressing, basically turnovers happen when a player is selected with the ball, before a shot would ever happen. who can commit that turnover? anybody on the offense - its not just the guy with the ball. however, we do have some insight into that process, of how turnovers are generated.
turnovers are assigned after a player is already selected as being the possible shooter, but every player has a base level of getting turnovers on every possession, no matter who has the ball (well, it has to be your team...) - let's say there is a base rate of turnovers for a player on average, even though this simplifies a bit - rate where every player has some automatic guaranteed change of getting assigned the turnover, if one happens (the game decides if a TO happens, then assigns it). we know this rate is vastly higher for guards than for bigs, you can tell from 0 distro players, its really straight forward at that point (you are just seeing the base rate). from there, what else impacts the rate of turnovers? well, its pretty much just taking shots. the bh/pass modify the rate at which a player accumulates turnovers, both on the base side, and on the marginal side (per shot). that's really all there is to it - would you agree?
anyway, what this means is very straight forward - before the impact to have pass/iq improve team mates shooting - bh/pass were more valuable the more shots you took. the base rate of turnovers for a big is pretty low - its somewhere in that half turnover per game range - and if good bh/pass causes a 20-40% difference in the base rate, thats only 0.1-0.2 turnovers per game. the real reason bh/pass is basically damn near useless in terms of reducing turnovers for a non-scoring big is because the value being modified is so low to start with. all you need to offset 1/10th of a turnover is swinging 1/10th of a rebound you lost your way, which doesn't take much, only a handful of rebounding could make up for that. that could mean 5 reb is the difference between say 1 bh + 1 pass and 50 bh + 50 pass - which would be a ratio of about 20:1, making 1 point of passing worth about 0.05 reb.
for a scoring big, the turnover rate on each marginal shot is probably still lower than a guard, but definitely the rate of scoring impacts the value of bh/pass in a significant way (you can look around and trivially convince yourself of this) - but in the direction im talking about, not the one you are talking about. i feel like a scoring big can very easily double the amount of turnovers they'd get on 0 distro, and a high scoring big (which rarely is a good thing in this game - guards are simply better) might triple it. this means the value of bh/pass on impacting turnovers is about 2-3x higher in a scoring big than a non scoring big. so that 1:20 ratio, where a point of passing is worth maybe 0.05 points of reb, could go up to 0.1 or even 0.15 (but the latter - you shouldn't be doing that, if you are building teams right, except in very rare cases - so i sort of throw that 3x figure out).
now part 2, the whole thing about increasing the scoring of team mates through better pass/iq. my take is, this is a small factor for bigs, and the size of the factor largely has nothing to do with whether that big scores or not. it might matter not at all - its unclear how this works, if only the 4 players who aren't the shooter boost the shooter, or more likely IMO if the 5 players simply have a pass+iq score calculated, which boosts the whole team. i am guessing its all 5 players factored in, but if not, that is not a huge swing - it would make passing maybe 30% more important for a scorer than a non scorer, which is significantly less than the double or more value a scoring big gets from passing, from turnover reduction.
i am on the high end of the spectrum who values pg passing really high and stuff, because i think the whole pass+iq getting better shots thing is important - so this really favors valuing passing in bigs, to be honest. i value passing in bigs way more now than in the old days before the pass+iq thing, but it just was SO unimportant back then. anyway, i think really good passing/iq vs mediocre/****** passing/iq can swing a team shooting by pretty much, a good 3-6%. this is partly pass and part iq - so the value of great vs crap passing is probably about 3%
3% higher shooting on 60 shots a game would be 1.8 more made shots per game, which is quite significant - about 4ppg . i consider the pg to be contributing a good half of that, so roughly i consider a big to be about 1/10th of that, which would be ballparking, around 0.4 ppg. that is definitely significant - like i said, i value passing way more now - but if you think about all the contributions of a big, 0.4 ppg compared to let's just say 8 ppg and 6 rpg and 2 combined blk/stl - its significant, but there are definitely bigger fish to fry in there. on that example big statline, you would see about a 5% increase in scoring if you assigned those extra 0.4ppg to the big (instead of his team mate), and what is scoring like half of his value at most? so maybe a 2.5% increase in player contribution, probably less? it just isn't headline-making stuff, if you know what i mean.
so, that's my take. i think the model i lay out - passing helping bigs in exactly 2 ways, turnover prevention (where the more you shoot the more this helps) and helping the team shooting % (where scorers and non scorers are probably equal) - is both simple and accurate. my question would be, do you agree with that model? because from there, all we'd be doing is haggling over the values that feed into the model (is a shooting big giving up 2x turnovers or 2.5, is a big 10% or 15% of the team pass+iq calculation, and so forth).
final comment - again, its not that big man passing is 100% **** useless - its that its so far down the list that very, very few coaches can justify focusing on it. its vastly more important to focus on roles for players and core abilities, which in turn mean focusing on core ratings - and its very valuable to eliminate distractions / increase focus, because frankly team planning is the #1 most important part of this game, yet almost nobody gives team planning its due.
1/18/2020 1:17 AM (edited)