Posted by trail on 5/25/2014 10:27:00 PM (view original):
Here's an example: 

The following two PF's are rated the same in your system, but I'm confident any veteran HD coach would choose Player B. 

                  A SPD REB DE BLK LP PE BH P
Player A: 70  40    70    80   70  70  50  20 20
Player B: 90  40    90    40   90  90    1  40 40

Here's the comparison for two centers who have the same overall rating. 
                  A SPD REB DE BLK LP PE BH P
Player A: 70  10    70    80   70  70  50  20 20
Player B: 90  10    90    40   90  90    1  43 43

As a M2M coach, I'd take Player A. It's close, but a 40 DEF score is a major drawback at any level. Player A, meanwhile, will still get his share of blocks and be a much, much better on-ball defender. (This also assumes I've got another big man who can really rebound.)

Perhaps I've been mislead then. I'm still relatively new and I recall reading that shot blocking is far more important to a big's ability to play post defense than is their defense rating. 

And about IQ, I don't think it's weighted far too heavily, but I think it could still come down a bit. There are plenty of transfers and JUCO's each season that are very successful in spite of their lack of IQ. 

I have heard that shot-blocking is very important when running zone, but I completely ignore it when running man or press. Not sure whether ignoring it has been to my detriment, but that's what I do. 

A portion of the motivation for my criticism of the ratings comes from the way my team is ranked. According to your ratings, we would be around the 90th to 100th best team in the world. Part of that comes from my team being very shot-blocking oriented, at least among my post players. I think this has made us pretty effective with our interior defense (42.6% opponent shooting percentage vs. 42 SOS). 

Perhaps certain players lack of defensive ability has gotten them into foul trouble, but against non-Fastbreak team, we are usually pretty adept at controlling our opponent's inside scorers. 

Trail, where are you on the projection report in your world? Will you make the NT this season? The Team scores are not really intended to be used as a projection report, but they do relate to each other. Your rpi and sos are not bad, looks like you compete against some good coaches. I see you run the motion/M2M sets, that helps me. Game planning ability is not considered for the rankings, it's meant as a score assigned to a "team with no coach" so to speak. If your team is doing better than the score suggests, it may come as a compliment to your skill. It may also mean the rankings are not perfect, or it may mean both :) I looked at your team and if it were a Rupp team, it looks like a 70-80 range team to me. Does that sound about right? I wish I played in Wooden, I don't know if the competition is easier or tougher in that world.

I would think DEF is a more important rating than BLK at every position and in every set. Tarvolon mentioned he's heard it's more important in a zone. I've never run the zone, myself. I'm going to begin monitoring just how blocking seems to affect player performance from here on. Recently, I had a discussion with two of the greats about that very topic. I'll also consider lowering the affect IQs have on player performance. The reason the IQ have as much weight as they do is because from what I have seen, a team with lower IQs never wins the championship, while teams with high IQ (even if the team doesn't have incredible ratings) have. After reaching an A-, IQ is not weighted as heavily. Thank you very much, trail, you've given me a lot to think about here.

What did you think of the rest of the website? Any suggestions for me?

Also, you had mentioned you are relatively new. If you are ever looking for advice, I know some coaches who are nice people, quick to help and legends in this game. I don't think they'd mind me sharing their IDs:

Spasticity
JsaJsa
PlatoIsek
Tarvolon

There are many more; these are the ones I know well enough to know they wouldn't mind me sharing their IDs. Anything they tell you and are certain about, you can be certain too. These guys are as good as they come at DIII.

*EDIT* I don't have any championships like these guys, but of course I'd be more than happy to help too if you ever have a question about anything.

I've been lucky enough to have some great vets in my conference that have helped me get adjusted quickly. The importance of shot blocking was just something that I never felt the need to ask about. Based on my experience, I would still prefer BLK to DEF in my bigs, especially at C, but I'm open to data that says otherwise. 

And after another look at your IQ weighting, I'm gonna go ahead and say that I'm happy with the way you have on it right now. It makes a lot of sense that the weighting should fall after A-. I've also seen several teams with inferior ratings who have been wildly successful due to a high concentration of upperclassmen with A and A+ IQs so I like your logic there. 

As far as my team's postseason projection, it's looking like my team will be one of the First Four Out. Maybe Next Four Out. 

Block is definitely more important in zone but I still think it's less than def. In man and press I think Defense and ath are more important in the post player defensive metric.
In zone, the three are similar in value. Block Is most important for centers in the 2-3 I think.

Posted by Trentonjoe on 5/26/2014 5:21:00 PM (view original):
Block is definitely more important in zone but I still think it's less than def. In man and press I think Defense and ath are more important in the post player defensive metric.
In zone, the three are similar in value. Block Is most important for centers in the 2-3 I think.

I believe that the source of my belief that BLK was more important than DEF was because it was listed as a core ratings for Bigs in the HD Player Guide. In hindsight, I wish I would have just asked you in the first place, but I'm not sure that it would have changed who I recruited. Most of my bigs have decent DEF, it's just that they have very good BLK. 

Thanks Trentonjoe, that's very helpful information.

Thanks trail, I might leave the IQs alone then for now. Yeah blocking is definitely more important for the bigs than other positions, that's probably why WIS listed it as core. And as trentonjoe mentioned, it seems like it's a core rating for the zone defense (and especially 2-3). I definitely think this is something I'm going to have to monitor, I really want to get the scores as close to accurate as I can.

You guys probably know the Starr Scores do not take into account the offensive or defensive sets for a team. Instead, I kind of averaged all of the sets together as best I could to find the best player across sets, if that makes sense. This was because I didn't feel comfortable enough in my knowledge of the other sets to get them perfectly and also because I didn't want to overwhelm myself with all the work and end up giving up on it. If it's something all the coaches wanted me to work on though, I'd try to find the time and put my mind to it.

What I'm currently working on is plugging in the rest of the teams in Rupp to get a coach score. If you are all interested, I can also make a tool where you can plug in your own team and find your own coach score. It won't mean much if you can't compare it against a list of other coaches but I have enough plugged in by now to tell you if you are above a 90, you're really good.

i have to ask... ringo fan?

hahaha, no it's not a Beatles reference. My brother and I used to have an imaginary basketball league when we were kids. He was only one player (Plato Isek) and I was literally every other player on the floor and on both teams. The league had 16 teams and 8 players on each team. I would play differently and talk differently for each player, even shooting right handed (I'm a lefty) for some of them. I am the older brother so I could afford to play however I wanted from where ever I wanted and be as bad or good as I wanted. Anyway, the most popular player who ended as the greatest of all time by the time we stopped playing was Ezekial Starr, although Plato had nearly caught him by that point. If we played another season he would have passed him, but we stopped. Those sure were some fun times, I used to print out a news letter after each game with the boxscore and a write up. It's ironic that over 15 years later, I'm still playing imaginary basketball :) When he convinced me to join, I saw his name was PlatoIsek so I felt compelled to pick EzekialStarr which was his biggest rival.

I'm going to use this chance to talk about as awesome thing that I did in the league as Starr and an awesome thing Plato did as Plato.

At the end of the game, Starr had been fouled and needed to sink FTs to win. I made the first and when I was about to take the 2nd, I turned to Plato and said "Check this out." Then I closed my eyes and bounced the ball off the ground and up into the hoop. "Starr" won the game on that shot. I was always able to play better in my Starr character than in real life, possibly because of my extreme confidence I exhibited in that character.

But Plato had an entire game of amazing shots. In a game I meant for him to lose, he made every single shot on every single possession throughout most of the game. I was playing my best defense on him with a character who was supposed to be a legend offensively and defensively and could not stop him. I was on the money too that game. In real life we are great defenders and decent shooters, but in this game we were going shot for shot with eachother until the buzzer when Plato sank a 3 in my face to win by 2. He scored 103 that game and the character I was using (Sur Ruse) scored 96... yeah it was intense.

I guess most kids were playing "house" and "school" but we played "basketball" ;)

Actually as we got older, we stumbled upon all the old information from the league and wondered about making a website much like WIS. We worked on it for a while, made a website and really came far with the formulas. In the end, there were obstacles in our way that we were trying to figure out how to get around and eventually gave up on the whole idea because it got boring. Besides we didn't know about WIS back then (probably about 8 years ago now). HD is a little different than what we were trying to do, but I think HD is far better than anything we could have done. :)

Posted by ezekialstarr on 5/26/2014 7:12:00 PM (view original):
Thanks Trentonjoe, that's very helpful information.

Thanks trail, I might leave the IQs alone then for now. Yeah blocking is definitely more important for the bigs than other positions, that's probably why WIS listed it as core. And as trentonjoe mentioned, it seems like it's a core rating for the zone defense (and especially 2-3). I definitely think this is something I'm going to have to monitor, I really want to get the scores as close to accurate as I can.

You guys probably know the Starr Scores do not take into account the offensive or defensive sets for a team. Instead, I kind of averaged all of the sets together as best I could to find the best player across sets, if that makes sense. This was because I didn't feel comfortable enough in my knowledge of the other sets to get them perfectly and also because I didn't want to overwhelm myself with all the work and end up giving up on it. If it's something all the coaches wanted me to work on though, I'd try to find the time and put my mind to it.

What I'm currently working on is plugging in the rest of the teams in Rupp to get a coach score. If you are all interested, I can also make a tool where you can plug in your own team and find your own coach score. It won't mean much if you can't compare it against a list of other coaches but I have enough plugged in by now to tell you if you are above a 90, you're really good.

I would love to plug it in to see all of the coach ratings for my conference in Wooden. 

Another thing that I think would be interesting for you to do, although it would likely require considerable time and effort to do it right, is account for playing time for each player in the overall team rating calculation. I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to write some code to grab data from the stats page by processing the text on that page and then finding [ firstLetterOfFirstName + "." + lastName ] and running through the next four objects and grabbing the number (double) after that. 

You'd also have to account for games played so I guess you could grab that integer when you were processing the objects to get to the minutes played. 

You'd also have to grab the total minutes played on the season to account for overtime minutes. From there, you'd just have to divide MIN*GP by totalMinutes and then multiply that by the player's rating. The sum of all of those would be the new team rating. 

That's a really good idea. I did want to do that initially and I think if I had Excel installed on my computer I could do a lot more. I have a Chromebook now so my Excel days (I miss them) might be over. I use Google Sheets now and while I want to love Google, it can't compete with the power, speed and stability of Excel. If I throw too much at Google Sheets, it crashes every time I try to open it and even if I can open it, the formulas stop working correctly :/ My workaround was a guess at what players would be playing the most minutes. =SE takes the top 4 players and weights them a little more heavily than the rest. Then it takes the next 4 at slightly lighter weight, then the next 2 even lighter and finally the last 2 are not weighted very heavily for team scores. I want to change this someday to account for the FB and FCP sets, because those last 4 players really should be weighted more heavily for those. I love your idea, trail, about eventually drawing from the real stat minutes. It doesn't get any more accurate than that. I'd need a lot of "=importhtml" functions to make it work and those are the ones that slow down the workbooks.

Google is constantly evolving and I think as Google can handle more, I will begin throwing more and more at it. The rankings page on the website is the results of 9 workbooks pushed to their functional limit. There are other spreadsheet platforms online out there and I was thinking maybe I should give them a shot.