Posted by Mr_Kid on 3/24/2016 4:24:00 PM (view original):

Posted by grimacedance on 3/24/2016 4:13:00 PM (view original):

Posted by bhansalid00 on 3/24/2016 3:48:00 PM (view original):

Posted by grimacedance on 3/24/2016 3:00:00 PM (view original):

Posted by Mr_Kid on 3/24/2016 2:39:00 PM (view original):

Posted by grimacedance on 3/24/2016 2:30:00 PM (view original):
For a motion offense, Nichols & Leedy passer ratings are too low. Passing is the most important attribute in your guards (esp. PG) in a motion offense. I can't see if Nichols is red/black/blue in passing, but he looks more like a SG to me, long term. For right now, I would flip Leedy and Nichols.

You have five young guards on your roster (Leedy, Nichols, Berman, McGraw, Petersen) and none of them have a passer rating over 50. Unless one of those guys is high-high in passing and going to end up at least 75 pass, your offense is never going to run well.

Everyone is HIGH in Passing besides Leedy.

OK, that's nice. But now you are waiting at least 2 seasons for those guys to be good enough to be successful D2 motion PGs. They don't gain those 20-30 points overnight. Sometimes it is better to find the guy with the red 80 rating instead of the guy with the blue 45 rating.

And you need to not let your recruiting classes be determined by who left, but rather what you want your team to look like 3-4 seasons from now. In 3 seasons, you will three senior guards and one junior guard to go with a bunch of young front court players. As long as you keep letting who left dictate your recruiting, you will always have a heavy imbalance between your front court and your back court.

Assuming you have no plans to cut anyone, here is how I would recruit for the next few seasons if I was in your shoes.

Constantly updating a spreadsheet like that and thinking through how recruiting will impact my team several seasons down the line made a MASSIVE difference for me.

Agree with most of this, especially the future planning for recruiting - but I don't know about the line that "Sometimes it is better to find the guy with the red 80 rating instead of the guy with the blue 45 rating."

D2 guys who come to campus with 80 PAS are unicorns. In Naismith D2 (five games in), there are a total of 5 freshmen in the whole country who even have 70 PAS. And given the choice of, say, a red 65 in PAS or a blue 45, give me the blue 45 - especially for a new coach who's trying to build a program. Getting high-high potentials is a huge advantage - and it only take about a season and a half for that advantage to pay off.

I was engaging in some hyperbole, but what about a red 65 or a blue 25? Even if that blue 25 is high-high, the best you can hope for is 65-70, which is where the other guy is.

Too often, new coaches only look at for the FSS potential color instead of combining the current rating with that color. I know I made that mistake a lot when starting out.

And the only major exception to that is PER/LP because it doesn't seem to have a ceiling if a guy is high/high. If a PF/C has good ATH/REB/DEF/BLK, is low in LP, but is high-high blue in LP, I'll grab him. My stud D3 center was 21 blue high-high in LP as a freshman. He's at 73 now.

Grim, I appreciate the words. Every player but 1 has BLUE potential all over the place. That is one thing I emphasize as a newer coach. One major question I have..should I switch to flex? Start practicing on flex and still run motion until next season?? Thoughts????

Why are you considering changing to flex? (This is an honest question and not sarcasm).

Because someone told me I should because of my great upcoming Shooters.

Posted by Mr_Kid on 3/25/2016 1:02:00 PM (view original):
Because someone told me I should because of my great upcoming Shooters.

I'll preface this by saying that I think the differences between motion and flex are fairly minor. I think flex does a better job of rewarding (1) guards who can drive and (2) big men that can shoot. Motion offense works well for your stereotypical players (a PG who can't drive, but can pass & shoot; a C who is slow, but has a great LP game, etc.) and flex works well for non-stereotypical players. But for the most part, a good motion team would be a successful flex team and vice versa. Both offenses rely heavily on very good passing skills.

My advice to you is this....you have to take the time to really learn this game for yourself. I looked at your history -- you are doing what I did when I first started playing HD. You cherry-picked some good D3 teams, had some success and are trying to move up to D1 as fast as you can. This is fine and doesn't make you a bad person or anything -- it is a perfectly acceptable "hack" of the game. The problem is that you have had some success without understanding why you are having that success. If you don't understand the game well enough to understand why those teams did well, you aren't going to be able to replicate it when you take over a low prestige school (and eventually, you will have to coach at a low prestige school).

So you need to study the game. Start going through the top 5-10 schools in your division in your world and study them. Compare the types of players that a motion/man team recruits versus a FB/press v. triangle/zone or any other combination. If you are going to run motion, find those great motion teams and study the attributes that their guards have, that their big men have. And then look at their best players and study their ratings history. See what kind of ratings they had as freshmen. See what areas they improved in -- make an educated guess of whether the player was red/black/blue in that attribute when they were recruited. Try to figure out what that coach saw in that player when he was just a recruit.

And then start looking at your recruits with that same eye. Start trying to figure out what that player will look like as a senior. Here is an example from a D2 recruit I pulled at random. He's a HS shooting guard.

Athleticism 32
Speed 56
Rebounding 11
Defense 29
Shot Blocking 13
Low-post 15
Perimeter 46
Ball Handling 54
Passing 21
Work Ethic 67
Stamina 62
Durability 57

So I take that player and add 20 points to every blue attribute (30 if I scout him and know he is high-high in it), 7 to every black and 0 to every red. These are roughly the minimums that a player will go up for that color, so I am scouting for the worst case scenario. Under that calculation, this player's ratings are.

Athleticism 32
Speed 56
Rebounding 31
Defense 36
Shot Blocking 20
Low-post 22
Perimeter 46
Ball Handling 54
Passing 41
Work Ethic 67
Stamina 82
Durability 77

Ask yourself what can this player do well? Would one of those coaches give this player a second look? When you begin to look at recruits this way -- where you know what talents your players need to succeed in your offense/defense and you take a cold view of what the recruit can and can't do well -- you will begin to have success.

That is a very good in-depth analysis. I appreciate all of the tips. Do you have any good ideas for a spreadsheet? I have made one, but feel I can make it more effective.

Posted by Mr_Kid on 3/25/2016 4:51:00 PM (view original):
That is a very good in-depth analysis. I appreciate all of the tips. Do you have any good ideas for a spreadsheet? I have made one, but feel I can make it more effective.

Some things I do (and keep in mind I'm an average coach):

1. As said before, class planning. On each team's 'tab', I have the next 5-10 year "Ideal" classes planned out, so I will have position coverage and not be stuck with a young group. Saves time while recruiting to know which types of players I need, and what juco/transfers I may need. As with all wars the best laid plans go out the window at contact of the enemy, but a good plan is better than no plan.

2. I have one tab just to sort recruiting- I copy and paste all players relevant to what I want, then I can use overall formulas to sort them, and can type in their 'final' numbers (Adding 20 for blue, etc as said above) to sort what they will be, not what they currently are.

3. I have a chart for each team to decide lineups. I don't use my personal overall formulas as gospel, but it makes it quicker to sort out my team (personally) and allows me to see what positions I'm okay with each player playing. I have a copy of that again with their 'ideal' ratings they may get to. I also find it easier to use the filter and remove players that I'm not looking at to decide strategies and lineups.

4. I have a PER calculator, mostly from back in my So-Cal awards days (long time ago), but it helps me see who's really contributing.

5. Extreme and usually useless- I have a notes sheet. It has what O/D certain HS's run (which I don't think has ever been useful) a list of messages for potential (to help me remember what's High-high), study hall time vs. GPA and other odds and ends from the forum (like HS FT% to letter grade). There's a lot of good info here, and sometimes it slides into oblivion and becomes very hard to find again.

Hope that helps, but as I said at the start, I've been playing off and on for years and only have one final four...