Post by Bruns on Apr 21, 2014 18:54:51 GMT -6
The league
Rosters – Every team’s rosters
Injuries – Who is hurt and how long are they out?
Free Agents – Who can you pick up?
Draft – Next year’s class
Potential Free Agents – Who is at the end of their contract in the league
Standings – Check the playoff race
League Leaders – Top 10 individuals in statistical categories
Weekly-Monthly Awards – Players and rookies of the week and month
Team Stats – Sortable team statistics on offense and defense
Historical Team Performance – How has your team done throughout the years?
General Board – This board has all the important parts of the season. Season discussion will have simulation results, resignings, free agency, training camp, preseason, etc… will be in here.
Depth Charts – Here you set your team’s depth chart for the season. You set your three-deep lineup and special traits your lineup needs. You pick your top scoring options who generally will take more shots. Pace is the speed your team looks for a shot. Generally, defensive stud teams go slower while run-and-gone go faster. More trapping and pressing create turnovers but also risk fouls to your players. Balance will determine whether you go to the hoop, play outside or a combination. Play to your team’s strengths.
Articles and Sigs – Here you can write an article about the league (read a few examples to get what we look for) for a chance to improve one of your players. If you do well, you can get a “+5”, a five point addition to one of your player’s attributes. You can write two articles a year. Some teams (i.e. the Jazz) do this every year to give their team a better chance to win. Others find it too time consuming. It’s up to you.
Training Complex – Here is where you use your “+5”s to improve your player. To see what attributes affect what grades, click here. Also, before each year you can add height to teenage players or weight to players to bulk them up.
Off Topic – Shoot the shit.
General Managers – A list of who owns what team. Soon you’ll know everyone by their team and you won’t need this. Until then, use it to tell who is who.
Trade Talk – Post who you’re looking to trade, who you want or view other teams’ trade blocks.
Completed Trades - For trades that have been officially completed. Post the team names in the title and the trade in the post. DO NOT COMMENT on a trade until both parties have posted they have accepted. That’s when it becomes official. Then watch people blow up at trades they think are unfair. This forum also has a list of all future picks that have been traded.
Signings and Cuts - Sign free agents during the season or release players from your squad. You will be on the hook for their remaining salary if you cut, though. You can also buyout a players here. Click here for the rules on buyouts. When you sign a free agent during the season you can do it regardless of your cap situation. You will sign them to a one-year minimum deal.
Position Changes – Move guys on your roster to a different position. Their defensive rating is possibly going to change so be on the lookout for that.
Past Draftboards – Look at old draft boards, discussions and prospect profiles
Drafts – View profiles of future draftees, the draft order and make your draft picks
ShoutBox
It’s that chat box under the links at the top of the page. It’s where the league congregates. Talk about wanting to fire dump, the most recent trade, irush’s freshman girlfriend, cable movies, etc… I highly suggest hanging out in there. It’s a nice community.
Your team
Players – A list of all the guys on your squad. Their ages, heights and weights and ratings are there.
Ratings:
Inside scoring: How well they go to the hoop
Outside scoring: How well they shoot from the middle and from 3
Handling: How well they pass and handle
Defense: How good they lock down the opposing player. Post defense helps inside guys, drive defense helps wings, perimeter defense helps guards, etc…
Rebounding: Self explanatory
Potential: This is their SCOUTED potential. Generally the better the grade the more likely they are to grow. But there are mistakes. Just like Darko was a lock star in real life and he busted, “A” potential in here does not necessarily mean success.
Salaries: The players’ salaries are listed at the bottom of the page. This has the length of their contract with a year-by-year breakdown of future salaries. You can see who will be free agents for you when and this will help shape your squad.
The season
Training camp – Seems like everyone’s favorite part. See how your team improved from one year to another. You can watch teams go from :-/; to ;D with a few big improvements at key positions. If a player improves from a B+ to an A in a certain category people call this a “+2”. When people talk about a guy “+5”ing in TC it means that the sum of their letter grade changes is +5.
Pre-season – just a quick run-through. Nobody puts much stock in this
Season- Every afternoon we have a sim. It alternates between 5- and 10-day sims with the exception of the end of the year, in which we have a 15-day sim to end the year.
Key dates
Day 99 – Draft declarations
Day 100 – The trade deadline. We stop the previous sim at Day 99 (so a 4 day sim instead of 5) and day this is the last day you can trade.
Day 120- The season ends, draft lotto is conducted after
Playoffs: Best of seven series to determine the winner. We sim the first three games. Take a break to fix depth charts, finish the series. Even if you're out of the playoff hunt, you can make a bracket prediction to win more points for your players.
The off-season
Retirings: Watch the old guys hang it up. Or the 33 year olds who have severe depression (happened once).
Resignings: Resign your players. NOT all players will request to resign.
Draft: The draft takes place over two days with time limits. Read the draft thread to read the updated order/timelines. You can see the scaled draftee contracts here. All first-rounders get four year deals. You can choose to have your second rounders have two or three year deals.
Free Agency: Sign free agents that aren’t resigned or drafted. If you have salary cap room this is more fun since you can bid until you go over soft cap. There are exemptions, which you can read about here. You can place up to 15 bids for “days 1-2”, then results are posted. Some players will sign, others will not. Same deal for days “3-4”. Then finally “day 5”. Then we’re off to the next season.
Basics:
Coaching matters. Playing to your team's strengths can greatly help your chances of winning. We will cover basics all the way to advanced strategies that I admittedly haven't perfected yet. I hope this can help people utilize their talent.
Pace: Pace determines how quickly you take shots. Do you pass it around and milk the clock or do you take the first look you get? I'll break down the advantages to each
Faster: More possessions, higher scoring, fewer turnovers per possession (but likely more overall)
Slower: Higher FG%
Now while that looks like a clear victory for "fast", don't forget that your opponent will have more possessions and score more too. A strong defensive team may want to go slow and grind it out. A fast team passes it around less so they have fewer turnovers per possession, but they will also get worse looks.
Scoring Focus:
Inside: 40% inside/60% jumpers/0% threes
Balanced: 25% inside/60% jumpers/15% threes
Outside: 15% inside/60 jumpers/25% threes
One thing people seem to not notice is that you will be taking a ton of jumpers regardless. Even a star PG with "A- inside" will not take many layups. He'll take runners and jumpers still. Bigs are the only ones who will constantly pound it inside like they're Melanie Silvestri after a couple pancakes. Even if you don't have a center as a scoring option in an inside offense he WILL shoot. Even if you have a SG who is not an option in an outside offense he WILL shoot. Balanced is the likely choice for most owners unless their team is set up to go "all in" for a concept
Press: Do your guards play good defense? You might want to press and force some turnovers. It could really slow down a fast-quick shooting offense and can force a lot of turnovers. It could get you in some minor foul trouble though. It also seems like you can give up easy buckets on the other side. I would avoid "never" pressing" unless your guards can't stop a nosebleed.
Trapping: When there's a center on the baseline, do you want your bigs to double him to cause trouble? The key benefit is turnovers forced. With most opposing bigs possessing C or D handles, you can cause some problems. But watch out! You might give up easy buckets leaving your guy and increase your fouls in traffic. Make sure you have big depth if you plan on doing this.
Beginner strategies:[/size][/color]
Roster composition: Since there are 15 depth chart spots and only 12 active players at a time, there will have to be three duplicates. The basic strategy here should be to have a third string wing and a third string big. These guys are the most flexible. And, barring injury, you usually only need 2 PGs. Going with a basic depth chart your roster should be composed of:
5 PF/Cs
5 SF/SGs
2 PGs
Balancing minutes: There are 240 minutes in a game. Many teams go with straight depth charts with little duplication of players. For example:
C: Shaq/Robinson/Scalabrine
PF: Duncan/Garnett/Scalabrine
SF: Bird/Pippen/Dr. J
SG: Jordan/Magic/Dr. J
PG: Nash/Kidd/Kidd
In this case, Scalabrine, Dr. J and Kidd are the duplicates. Scalabrine and Dr. J are third string guys, Kidd is filling both backup roles
Minutes breakdown: Generally, starters can get between 30-40 minutes per game. This is a rough breakdown of minutes I've seen per depth chart position. Factors including fouls make bigs play fewer minutes.
C: 32/12/4
PF: 32/12/4
SF: 35/10/3
SG: 35/10/3
PG: 38/9/1
As you can see, third string PGs are pretty much useless and a waste of a roster spot.
Intermediate strategies:[/size][/color]
Doubling up players:
Going back to our original DC:
C: Shaq/Robinson/Scalabrine
PF: Duncan/Garnett/Scalabrine
SF: Bird/Pippen/Dr. J.
SG: Jordan/Magic/Dr. J
PG: Nash/Kidd/Kidd
We can milk more minutes out of our starters.
C: Shaq/Robinson/Robinson
PF: Duncan/Garnett/Scalabrine
SF: Bird/Pippen/Dr. J.
SG: Jordan/Magic/Dr. J
PG: Nash/Nash/Kidd
If we really don't want Scalabrine matched up against big Cs, we can make Robinson take more minutes at C.
By switching Nash to backup PG, we could milk an extra two or three minutes out of him per game.
This can be incredibly useful if you are short on depth.
Players "official" positions: I've been the #1 abuser of position changes, but they actually end up being important depending on your DC. Since you only set your top three positions, you may want control passed that. For example, let's go to our new doubled up DC:
C: Shaq/Robinson/Robinson
PF: Duncan/Garnett/Scalabrine
SF: Bird/Pippen/Dr. J.
SG: Jordan/Magic/Dr. J
PG: Nash/Nash/Kidd
Shaq fouled out and Robinson needs a rest. Who are we going to? Remember, we DO NOT want Scalabrine going in to center. But our coach, who only knows the top-3 players at each position and their position, looks to the bench and sees this:
Scalabrine C
Garnett PF
Pippen SF
Dr. J SF
Magic SG
Kidd PG
Who do you think he's going with? The center. Scalabrine.
How can we avoid this? Pretty easily. Set Garnett to be a Center and Scalabrine to be a PF. When we're in our top-3 depth chart, it doesn't matter what our players' nominal positions are. But once we get past that their nominal positions can serve as essentially a fourth depth chart space.
With Scalabrine at C and Garnett at PF, our 4 deep looks like this
C: Shaq/Robinson/Robinson/Scalabrine
PF: Duncan/Garnett/Scalabrine/Up to the coach
With Scalabrine at PF and Garnett at C, our 4 deep looks like this
C: Shaq/Robinson/Robinson/Garnett
PF: Duncan/Garnett/Scalabrine/Up to the coach
Much better.
Advanced strategies:[/size][/color]
'Tweeners: My favorite thing. Guys who can play 2-3 positions. My current 'tweener baby is Chris Gatling. C/PF/SF extraordinaire.
Let's go back to our depth chart
C: Shaq/Robinson/Robinson
PF: Duncan/Garnett/Scalabrine
SF: Bird/Pippen/Dr. J.
SG: Jordan/Magic/Dr. J
PG: Nash/Nash/Kidd
Getting 10 mpg from Magic Freaking Johnson is not going to cut it. He can be our SF, SG or PG. And he'd be great at any of those positions, he's just stuck behind greats like Nash and Jordan. So let's move him around to steal him a few more minutes.
C: Shaq/Robinson/Robinson
PF: Duncan/Garnett/Scalabrine
SF: Bird/Pippen/Magic
SG: Jordan/Magic/Dr. J
PG: Nash/Nash/Magic
We've effectively doubled Magic's minutes while taking away from shitty players like Dr. J and Jason Kidd.
But if you're worried about what happens if Bird gets hurt and Magic is playing PG, don't forget, using your positions you can effectively make your DC four-deep
With Dr. J as a SG and Kidd at PG
SF: Bird/Pippen/Magic/No idea
SG: Jordan/Magic/Dr. J
PG: Nash/Nash/Magic/Kidd
With Dr. J as a SF and Kidd at PG
SF: Bird/Pippen/Magic/Dr. J
SG: Jordan/Magic/Dr. J
PG: Nash/Nash/Magic/Kidd
Got a +5? Lemme help you. Overall, boosting elite players to even-more-elite is the best way to go. Obviously, also guys you have under contract longer. If you know your player, but don't know where to boost him, here's a breakdown.
Inside Scoring [/size][/color]
Best for: PF/C
Ratings Affected: Inside Scoring
The skinny: Possibly the most valuable skill as this leads to the most scoring directly. While many wing players have great inside scoring ratings, they still end up taking more jumpers than PFs and Cs. In the end, a boost in inside scoring can add two or three points a game to a player and, more importantly, raise their FG%. This is the best upgrade there is.
Overall grade: A+
Jump Shot [/size][/color]
Best for: SF/SG
Ratings Affected: Outside Scoring
The skinny: This might be the most underused quality upgrade. For balanced teams, an average of about 70% of shots taken are not three pointers or "inside", they're jumpers. Some teams are above 80% jumpers. So why is this stat not upgraded more? Well, for one it doesn't lead to letter-grade improvements easily since it only affects "outside scoring". Also, the glory of three-pointers is much more alluring than meaningless jumpers. I think this one will get used more frequently as time goes on. Apparently this improves FT shooting too.
Overall grade: A-
3 Point Shot [/size][/color]
Best for: Highly rated outside shooters on "outside"-minded teams
Ratings Affected: Outside Scoring
The skinny: One thing I've always laughed at was when someone boosts their C+ or B- outside shooter with a +5 in 3 point shot. Teams shoot over 50% from two in this league (averaging about 1 point per possession), but solid outside shooting teams can get a little more if they shoot over 33.3% from three. But boosting a crappy 3 point shooter's outside game won't help much. Now, my major issue is that even the best three-point shooters average a mere five 3-point attempts per game. Now if you +5 3-pointers, you can realistically expect maybe a 2% or 3% increase in their percentage. So if a guy shoots 35% and boost it up to 38% on five attempts per game, you're going from an expected 5.25 ppg (35% of 5 attempts is 1.75 3pg) to 5.7 ppg (38% on 5 attempts is 1.9 3pg). That means you'll add .45 points per game by doing this. Is that really that big? Especially considering other options?
Overall grade: C
Handling [/size][/color]
Best for: PG
Ratings Affected: Handling
The skinny: This has proven to be the best way to lower turnovers at the PG position. While most PGs hang around 3.0 topg, a boost here could lower that a bit. Reasonably, a team loses out on 1 point per possession they don't get a shot off on. So even if a player cuts their topg by 0.5 (which is an incredible amount), they're only saving the team 0.5 ppg. Again, not the best attribute out there. I feel, overall, turnovers are the most overrated stat in this game.
Overall grade: C+
Quickness [/size][/color]
Best for: PG/SG
Ratings Affected: Handling, Defense and Rebounding
The skinny: While it looks great ("wow improve three stats!"), this seems to not help much at all. It doesn't really help keep turnovers down based on previous attempts, rebounding from the outside isn't usually a big deal and there are better ways to improve defense.
Overall grade: C-
Passing [/size][/color]
Best for: PG
Ratings Affected: Handling
The skinny: Just as mentioned with handling, this is overrated to me. And this helps clamp down on turnovers less than "Handling" does. This does, however, lead to better passes for better shots. There is really no way to define how this helps, but I do feel as though better passing might be one of the more underrated upgrades due to being able to improve FG% and assists through better passing
Overall grade: B
Stealing [/size][/color]
Best for: PG/SG
Ratings Affected: Defense
The skinny: If you steal the ball, you're saving yourself on average of 1 point possession. But when there are only a handful of players over 2 spg, what are you expecting when you +5 steals? Overall, I just don't think you're helping yourself more than 0.2 or 0.3 ppg by boosting your steals
Overall grade: C
Shot Blocking [/size][/color]
Best for: PF/C
Ratings Affected: Defense
The skinny: This is one I'm guilty of fapping to, but it's overrated as well. Blocks is such a pretty stat for someone who loves defense as much as me, but it clearly isn't the best way to boost D. Especially when you consider that blocks don't even guarantee you get the ball back (like steals do), boosting blocks by 0.5 per game may net you only about 0.25 ppg. One of the lowest boosts.
Overall grade: C
Post Defense [/size][/color]
Best for: PF/C
Ratings Affected: Defense
The skinny: The clear better alternative to blocks. While not as flashy as blocks, forcing a guy to go 5 for 20 inside is the best way to shut down a team. Boosting interior defense has extra emphasis with how many good inside scorers there are in the league.
Overall grade: A
Perimeter Defense [/size][/color]
Best for: PG/SG
Ratings Affected: Defense
The skinny: This helps shut down outside shots, namely threes. In this league, it's not nearly as important as inside defense considering the breakdown of shots.
Overall grade: C+
Drive Defense [/size][/color]
Best for: SG/SF
Ratings Affected: Defense
The skinny: Honestly, I don't know. I don't think anyone's ever done it. I can't see it being as beneficial as either of the other two defensive upgrades, however.
Overall grade: N/A
Offensive Rebounding [/size][/color]
Best for: PF/C
Ratings Affected: Rebounding
The skinny: Another overrated attribute, with less than 30% of rebounds being offensive, it just isn't as important as defensive rebounding would be.
Overall grade: C+
Defensive Rebounding [/size][/color]
Best for: PF/C
Ratings Affected: Rebounding
The skinny: We've had an "importance of rebounding" article and it's very true. Teams that rebound well win and that starts on the defensive glass. With a boost to defensive rebounds, you increase an attribute that you already have an advantage in (again, 70% of rebounds are defensive) and limit easy second shot opportunities from inside.
Overall grade: B
Strength [/size][/color]
Best for: Anyone, mostly PF/C though
Ratings Affected: Inside Scoring, Defense and Rebounding
The skinny: My favorite attribute as it improves the three biggest categories for bigs. While it doesn't directly lead to improvement like Inside Scoring does, the overall improvement can be noticeable for bigs. It cuts down their fouls generally, boosts scoring, blocks and rebounding. Just a great attribute overall
Overall grade: A
Jumping [/size][/color]
Best for: Idiots
Ratings Affected: Inside Scoring
The skinny: Nobody has ever tried this. It doesn't affect rebounding (lol) and I don't think anyone can imagine that it would be worthwhile.
Overall grade: D
Best for PGs[/size][/color]
1. Passing
2. Handling
3. Jump Shot
Best for SGs[/size][/color]
1. Jump Shot
2. Perimeter Defense
3. Strength
Best for SFs[/size][/color]
1. Jump Shot
2. Strength
3. Perimeter Defense
Best for PFs[/size][/color]
1. Strength
2. Inside Scoring
3. Post Defense
Best for Cs[/size][/color]
1. Strength
2. Inside Scoring
3. Post Defense
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