asking for a friend.

Yes. They work mostly the same in man and zone. They give you a chance to somewhat suppress the scoring opportunities of an opposing scorer, and can decrease their effectiveness - results will vary, based on the quality of your defenders (you can't predict who you will have on the double, you only select the target), the quality of the target, and random dumb luck. You are also at risk of every else seeing slightly increased effectiveness. But again, results vary. It's a bit of a wildcard. Best used when you are confident you know where your opponents effective scoring is going to come from.

i use them frequently, north of 80% of matchups. only cases i don't are when a team is very distributed in their scoring across players and very balanced in terms of outside and inside scoring. even in those cases, i'll often use a double-team to force a team to be one-dimensional by double-teaming their shooters and running a negative +/-. this specific strategy i just described works best when you have strong interior defenders.

Posted by trail on 3/15/2023 12:21:00 PM (view original):
i use them frequently, north of 80% of matchups. only cases i don't are when a team is very distributed in their scoring across players and very balanced in terms of outside and inside scoring. even in those cases, i'll often use a double-team to force a team to be one-dimensional by double-teaming their shooters and running a negative +/-. this specific strategy i just described works best when you have strong interior defenders.

3-2 set at -4 doubling the shooters is a classic. With strong front court defenders (excellent blk and reb) your defense will be incredibly stout, in normal games. The only real concern is that when you get a bad sim, doubling can exacerbate it, which can lead to stupid outcomes sometimes.