Robert Peters or Edward Hoyt? I suppose in theory I could use Benjamin Mauldin at that spot as well. I've been starting Edward Wilson all season because I needed the growth bump from starting him and maxing his minutes. I might even keep starting him for now, he is the most talented offensive PG in the group. But eventually if I win a few games in the tournament I'm probably going to run into a team with a PG who scores 15+ PPG, at which point it's going to be very hard to justify starting a very mediocre defender against him when I have 5 other competent guards on the team who play better defensively, and 3 who are clearly above average. So who would you start at the 1?

it depends - who are your 2 and 3? or does that depend on the PG?

i feel like hoyt should start (in general, not necessarily at pg), but not (hoyt+peters+parrot), i think that is probably more important than the other haggling going on. whichever doesnt start should play 2 backup spots, ideally but not necessarily behind the other 2. that's how i'd do it. decent # of options within that i suppose.

wilson is acceptable across from crappier pgs, i do that kind of stuff all the time. i didn't catch he was already a-. i feel like mauldin is also a good scorer, and you are going to have plenty of offense regardless (i mean scoring). so in general your rotation needs to be more about defense and guard skills IMO, than about scoring. i would probably go with wilson against the lesser D and its a tough call from there?

im curious, i am unfamiliar with d3. are all 5 of your offensive guards basically considered elite 3pt scorers where their level of eliteness is relatively irrelevant, because they are all good enough already? or is hoyt meaningfully better than someone like wilson parrot or mauldin?

I think it's Peters > Hoyt ~ Parrot > Mauldin ~ Wilson

Hoyt is better than Parrot on a theoretical level, but it's probably the case that they're both so effective as 3 point shooters that the difference is relatively immaterial. I rate Peters above either of them because he's tangibly better at shooting a high volume without turning the ball over. One could argue that given his relatively poor free throw shooting he's close to their tier, but let's be honest, these aren't guys who are going to the line a whole heck of a lot. For what it's worth all 3 had similar offensive efficiency this season, albeit with a statistically significant excess of volume for Peters over the other 2. From that evidence it's not necessarily clear to what extent Peters actually performed better than the other 2 and to what extent he just got more shots because I expected him to be the best of the 3.

Mauldin and Wilson are nowhere near the level of the other 3 (as scorers). I wouldn't expect them to be and their performance bears that out. The underlying engine is the same at all levels, and it's very clear that at any level the tangible effects of 15+ points of PER at the top of the scale are significant.

It's clear you are quite out of touch with D3 under the new recruiting system. I would say that probably most D3 coaches wouldn't consider any of these guys to be truly elite scorers, and Wilson and Mauldin are extremely marginal. At best 3rd options in a starting lineup on a S16 or better caliber team.

As an aside for all the coaches who have lately been recommending not scouting D2 as a D3 school anymore, I would point out that all of these guys were (IIRC) D2 recruits. There are certainly plenty of good D2 prospects to be had. I pulled way back on my D1 scouting the past few seasons when I just got tired of leading on recruits until the 2nd-to-last day and then having ACC or SEC teams lose a major battle and default to my guy. Even if I've basically maxed out effort on a guy - which wouldn't be efficient when there's little to no competition - a big 6 school can still go from 0 to signed in 2 or 3 cycles. I guess the players were a little bit better in the D1 pool, but the wild swings in recruiting drove me nuts. Now I'll bargain hunt through the D1 pool late in the game if I have openings, but my primary focus has been on D2, and it's been work relatively adequately. Probably won't win any titles with it.

i am definitely VERY out of touch with today's d3. so out of touch that whenever i look at a d2/d3 team, within 5 minutes i forget its not d1 and start wondering why everyone is so terrible.

anyway, i will say this. i know the engine is the same across divisions, but defenses are not. in the olden day, you could easily get to a caliber of 3pt shooting where +15 per was negligible, and it wasn't that high of a number - by 70/70/70, you were almost there. even in d2 this was the case, but around the 80/80/80 mark. maybe defenses are a lot better now - it definitely seems like the stars of d2/d3 are better, and overall probably teams too? but i seriously doubt d3 is so good now that an 85/85/85 shooter is materially worse than 100/100/100, especially when in d1 its still only 90/90/90 where a guy 'maxes out' and any arbitrary amount of improvement is basically negligible.

the 3pt %s of your top guys are insane, but also your schedule is complete trash so i suppose that is meaningless. what i am struggling to square is this - you said wilson is your best offensive pg or something similar, but if hes not that good on offense then it seems like that would be more like a wash, and second, how is the difference between 3pt scoring of your top guys negligible because they are such good shooters, but they aren't elite? are you considering elite 3pt scoring insufficient to consider a guy an elite scorer?

anyway, i guess going back to fundamentals, it still looks to me like you have plenty of per offense and i would anticipate your lineup being more focused around quality of def and guard skills, not about trying to get the most per out there. i think hoyt has to start, regardless of how good the defenses are in d3 these days, he seems really good with the killer stamina which IMO forces him onto the starting line. if really your top guys aren't elite scorers, which i am struggling to accept, then maybe wilson - hoyt - peters? but in general, my gut would say you are looking at wilson-hoyt-parrott as your first line when you can swing wilson's crap D at the 1 (and possibly just moving him to the 2 with same starters when not) with peters and mauldin taking up the backup time from 1-3. and when your opponent offense is too good, going with hoyt-mauldin-parrot type thing for better D with wilson and peters taking up the backup time. if mauldin and wilson were pretty good 3pt scorers, which i would have assumed before your response, you could even have them both backing up and taking the bulk of the shots during that time - but i think its important to split your 3 top 3pt scorers, otherwise (and probably regardless?).

what is your plan re: bigs - start the 2 better ones (govan fluharty) or split them up for offensive balancing purposes? if you start both i think its hard mandatory to have one of your top 3 guards coming off the bench, playing 2 spots preferably.

I guess we may just have a semantic difference on what we were calling elite. I don't think any of my guards is in the running for best scoring guard in D3 right now, but the differences between these guys and the guys who are in the running is similar to the difference between Peters and Hoyt - similar shooting effectiveness, but there is a small but significant difference in the expected turnover rate. If you're willing to call "elite" a fairly broad tier - which for semantic reasons feels wrong to me, but is probably an accurate representation of a meaningful classification of players - then you could call the top 3 elite scorers. If that is the case, however, there are at least 20 or 25 D3 teams with at least one elite shooter on the roster in an average season.

Re: your 2nd paragraph, there is no doubt in my mind that the 85:85:85 is materially worse than the 100:100:100. I'm not sure there'd be a noticeable difference between 85:85:100 and 100:100:100, but the perimeter jump there is really a big deal.

Assuming I have at least 2 quality scorers in the starting lineup, I value minimizing TOs and bumping up everyone else's %s above personal scoring at the 1. There is clearly plenty of scoring on this team. It doesn't hurt my assessment that Wilson is my best offensive option to play the position that he can score reasonably efficiently, but the main factor in that statement is that he has the best ball skills of the group. I don't need my PG to score with any 2 of the top 3 guards starting at SG and SF, along with at least one scoring post. He's at most my 4th option, so who cares if he can score? We're playing triangle. I think the answer to your 2nd-post question is that I'm going to keep splitting up Govan and Fluharty. I had promised a start to Failla (I very nearly maxed out on Failla - had 16 HVs, CV, promised start, minutes, something like 77 AVG AP into him, and he has absolutely exploded this season, grew by 107 ratings points, almost all in cores, and as a bonus went from being an F to D+ FT shooter, still blue there) but for IQ reasons probably will be pulling him out of the lineup for the postseason. I think I start Govan and Henderson with Fluharty first off the bench. That makes me a little below-average rebounding the ball, but it gives me plenty of defense in the starting lineup and a 2nd quality scorer off the bench.

If I get deep enough to run into one of the teams that is more than marginally better than mine, I probably start Govan and Fluharty and run slowdown. At normal tempo I really don't like that arrangement, though.

ok, ill agree to call it semantics. actually, it appears a big part of it is the term 'offense'. there are multiple valid ways to break down abilities in this game - i do NOT consider guard skills to be part of offense, outside of their impact on shooting (bh only). i consider there to be 4 primary areas of abilities in this game - offense, defense, rebounding, and guard skills. i find it the breakdown that is most conducive to digestion and explanation, more than an excellent approximation / simplification of the underlying sim engine.

your way of looking at it is probably better, where turnovers are part of the offensive equation - its at least more in line with how the real sim engine works. still, even under that paradigm, i would struggle not to consider hoyt elite. my more english definition of elite as approximately 'what it takes to be a top tier starter on a championship team', in that respective area. or better yet, 'a player is elite at X if an assortment of players as good as this player make the team elite at X, from an ability standpoint'. in short, if you have an elite 3pt scoring team with 3 lead 3pt scorers, i probably consider them elite. elite is all you need not only to win titles, but to be massive favorites over other top teams. hoyt fits that description for offense, even using your definition of offense. it is kind of a wide swath - but that is because of how the game works - at the high end, its about composition, not talent.

i just want to hit this one more time, as it my central thesis of this game. what makes a player elite? its really calibrated against it what it takes to build an elite team, which in my definition means the kind of teams it takes to be even odds to win the title (you: 50%, other 63 teams combined: 50%). so, my 'elite' team definition at the team level is actually very high, very exclusive - most coaches with a handful or dozen titles never even have 1 such team. but the players you need to build elite teams? not so exclusive - this is my central thesis of this game. at the high end, teams have enough talent, more talent isnt the differentiator. its team planning, the composition, how well you are well-rounding your team abilities to make sure you are hitting the substantial returns part of the curve in all areas. once you have, what is left is severely diminishing returns - you just don't need those to be dominant.

so yeah, there are players WAY prettier than the guys i call elite. but that doesn't matter, you dont need them to build elite teams, which basically almost never happens. i don't think it is practical or constructive to define eliteness differently for teams, players, and whatever else - my definition is intentionally consistent - eliteness is all about what it takes to get to 50% (to win the title).

i really recommend you give that 85/85/85 vs 100/100/100 thing some serious review, attempt to re-prove it to yourself, essnetially. it is basically the core of how i approach this game. the reason i have more extreme dominance in this game than any other coach, its all because of that 1 sentence right there. the way i recruit, practice, EE plan, coach, and everything else, its all that (that same diminishing returns concept applied across the game, to be fair). in d1, the figure isn't 85/85/85, its 90/90/90 - but i am basically exceedingly confident in stating 90/90/90 and 100/100/100 are negligibly different in d1 (spd/per/bh for those who didn't read the last 8 posts).

when you say deep enough to run into... are you talking about uptempo? your team just really doesn't look like an uptempo team to me. i kinda think you have plenty of offense with those 5 guards and 2 bigs, and that you can probably afford to start both bigs with their stamina differential. maybe even doing so running slowdown, running an 8 man rotation - i would be going that direction long before i went the uptempo direction. i actually really like your top 8, they seem like a legit contender to me.

edit: except maybe because there are so many press teams who make that 8 man rotation tough... i did look around at some top ranked d3 teams, they look better, but not hugely better, than i'm used to seeing.

Posted by dahsdebater on 1/21/2020 4:20:00 PM (view original):
As an aside for all the coaches who have lately been recommending not scouting D2 as a D3 school anymore, I would point out that all of these guys were (IIRC) D2 recruits. There are certainly plenty of good D2 prospects to be had. I pulled way back on my D1 scouting the past few seasons when I just got tired of leading on recruits until the 2nd-to-last day and then having ACC or SEC teams lose a major battle and default to my guy. Even if I've basically maxed out effort on a guy - which wouldn't be efficient when there's little to no competition - a big 6 school can still go from 0 to signed in 2 or 3 cycles. I guess the players were a little bit better in the D1 pool, but the wild swings in recruiting drove me nuts. Now I'll bargain hunt through the D1 pool late in the game if I have openings, but my primary focus has been on D2, and it's been work relatively adequately. Probably won't win any titles with it.

I won a couple titles at d3 with d2 players in early days of 3.0. But there were double the number of d3 teams back then so talent was spread out more I guess. Maybe harder to do with only 40-50 d3 teams. Or maybe it's easier. Who tf knows.

Here are all the guys who have averaged at least 3 3 point attempts per game for my team over the past 20 seasons, in their senior seasons. Obviously it's a fairly small sample, but to expand it meaningfully I'd have to expand it A LOT to compensate for differences in eras, coaching and team building strategies, systems, etc.

SPD	PER	BH	Three%	PPG
71	100	60	0.497	24.9
84	100	100	0.537	22.6
99	99	82	0.482	22.5
87	99	100	0.513	18.3
77	98	56	0.497	13.9
83	98	85	0.486	17.7
75	97	97	0.467	13.6
57	96	53	0.5	15.1
81	96	78	0.472	13.9
72	95	88	0.488	16.8
72	94	72	0.463	17.9
72	94	72	0.463	17.9
64	92	72	0.452	13.6
74	92	42	0.464	16.6
70	92	73	0.449	17
60	91	81	0.463	18.2
84	91	56	0.459	11.6
82	91	60	0.433	17.5
63	87	75	0.437	14.7
87	71	74	0.394	10
64	70	75	0.37	11.2
79	62	75	0.381	8.3

If I only look at the guys with elite PER - basically dropping the bottom 3 guys from the list - the remaining 3% vs PER can be fit to a line with 3%=.0061PER-.0994 with an R^2 of .722. So basically, even ignoring all the variation on the list in SPD and BH, PER differentiation between 87 and 100 is still strongly correlated to 3 point shooting efficiency at better than half a percent per point of PER. FWIW, BH and SPD each contribute about .05%/point with R^2 of .04 and .02, respectively. So like I said, you might not notice a huge difference between 85 and 100 BH or SPD, but you sure as heck notice the difference from 15 points of PER.