there's nothing wrong with 100 but the reason some people recommend not doing it that way (myself included) is that you can't make independent changes. generally in the course of a season you want to make tweaks to your baseline setup, and also, for individual games, if you are going to game plan, often its appropriate to make changes. if you want to slightly reduce one guy, you ideally would be able to do that in its own right. if you force yourself to stay at 100, you cant - you have to go adjust other guys, too. that forces you to make changes you dont want to make, to make changes you do want to make, and i think that is a clear negative of that system.
personally i think its good to use bigger numbers than the 1-2-3 because you get the granularity. typically my teams are in the 50-80 range for the total - it gives me the granularity while also allowing me to make individual changes by themselves. seems to me to be the best of both worlds, but to each their own!
also, one interesting approach one guy took that i really thought was clever, is, he set each player to the number of shots he hoped they'd take. its a simplification but frankly distro is the thing HD coaches are worst at in this game, its really hard to get right for anyone, myself included. so a simplification to get most of the way there is definitely not a bad thing. anyway, the good part about it is it gives you something concrete to work off of, and generally, the actual outcome should come reasonably close to what you set it to. and, you are setting players in ratios to each other, which is really the critical part of distro that a lot of people ignore or dont worry about too much, even though its really all distro is. the ratios between any 2 players should make sense in the context of, if those 2 guys are on the floor, what ratio of shots do you want the two taking? the simple approach of setting to the number of shots you want taken, it gets you pretty close on those ratios. the biggest issue is if you are incorporating minutes played into your thinking (which usually will be the case, at least for starters vs backups), which you shouldn't be doing, but again, i think its a pretty clever way to get most of the way there, especially for coaches who are struggling to wrap their head around it.
5/27/2015 1:06 PM (edited)