Post by eric on Dec 22, 2015 15:11:08 GMT -6
What is Stamina?
Stamina is a field in the mdb output of our software. It is on a scale of 0 to 1000. I noticed the other day that there is an option to coach games, and when I tried it out there was a new interface with a field named Energy. I coached the Revolution to a gutty win and ended up as follows: Pierce, Payton, Raef, Ricky at 31% Energy, Marcus Banks at 81%, Blount at 100% (but played 26 minutes). The resulting mdb output: 308 Stamina, 814 Stamina, 1000 Stamina respectively. When I started their next game, everyone was at 100% Energy. Thus Stamina is the base reality, and it is reported to two digits for Energy (which will turn out to be really annoying in a minute).
What Does it Do?
I set up two teams, one team with decent starters and another team with everyone all 50s. I coached both teams and kept all starters on both teams in for the whole game, then did that one hundred times (ignoring foul out games). The better team outscored the worse by 26.4 in the first half and 23.1 in the second. Then I did another hundred games where I switched out the starters for the bench on the bad team, players that were identical but for their Stamina level, and the margins were 26.9 and 18.4 respectively. Thus, playing with low Stamina makes a player worse. It's still possible to play with 0% Stamina and very unusual for a player to reach that: the only way I found was to play him all 48 minutes in a very fast v. very fast game and even that wasn't a guarantee.
How Does it Work?
This is where it gets pretty hard. Some pieces are easy: a timeout is worth +50 Stamina, the end of a quarter is +50 Stamina, except for the end of the first half which is +100 Stamina. I haven't had any overtime games so I don't know what would happen there. Everyone on the floor loses equally, everyone on the bench gains equally, but they aren't the same. The gain looks like a function of time to the tune of +1 Stamina per 2 seconds, granted at the end of each possession, banker's rounded (to the nearest round even number). The loss definitely isn't just a function of time, because different paces change it quite a bit. If you count up the lines in the play by play it's tantalizingly close - faster paces have less actions per play but more plays per time and the overall effect is more actions per time.
Unfortunately it's really really hard to try and back out how much a single possession costs. You need to have two guys with less than 95% Energy, sub one in for a play, immediately call time out and sub the next one in, then run them to the end of the game (hoping neither fouls out). It's not possible to stop a coached game until you've played it all the way through, so you only ever see Energy (two digits) instead of Stamina (all three). Once you're done you output the mdb to get Stamina and the gap is the cost plus the gain the second player had for that one possession on the bench. The average possession has 7 actions give or take, so it's really finicky to try and get all the variables to line up exactly and at this point I don't really care that much. It's pretty much 1 action costs 1 Stamina, and it's definitely faster pace costs more Stamina.
Play by Play, What's that Like?
An alphabetical list of those actions:
assist
block
bringing over the timeline (success and fail)
dribble
drive to X location (success and fail)
field goal (made and missed)
free throw (made, missed, and going to the line)
inbound
now has # assists/rebounds/points/whatever
pass
personal foul
rebound
shoots from X location
steal
trap
turnover
A list of locations:
backcourt
top of the key
left/right wing
left/right baseline
inside
Threes can only be taken from the top of the key and the left/right wings, but twos can also be taken from those zones. I'm not sure if the top of the key (e.g.) is two separate zones or the system just rolls on your three point probability if you shoot from there. So far I've never seen a player drive from the top of the key to the top of the key (e.g.) so my guess is it's the latter. I have seen players pass within a zone, and pass from any zone to any other, including backcourt all the way to inside.
A brief note on turnovers: the only turnovers I've seen are traveling and bad passes. Never a 3/5/8 second violation (explaining why the full court press is so useless), never a backcourt violation, never an illegal screen or offensive foul of any kind (or for that matter screen of any kind).
Even teams that never press/trap will sometimes press and trap. I haven't checked and don't plan to but surely "never" just means "the least frequent".
What About the Coach, Does He Sub Based on Stamina?
I have no g*sh d*rn idea how the coach does his job. Here are the options he has:
1. Timeout as in life: have to have the ball or a dead ball.
2. Substitutions mostly as in life: has to be a dead ball EXCEPT the free throw shooter can be subbed after making his last free throw (like in FIBA).
3. Defensive assignments: I suspected there was something like this when I did frontcourt/backcourt analysis and indeed, the coach can cross match on defense.
4. Pace, press/trap, focus, scoring options.
Stamina (and foul trouble) seems like just the sort of thing to guide him, but there's a lot of randomization in between. In the game I recorded carefully none of the starters went below 70% Energy, but the substitution pattern made no sense. Looking at the shooting guard, he generally took him out under 80% and put him back in at 85%, but in the third quarter he left him in at 78%, 77%, and 76% before finally subbing him at 71%. He then left the starting SG on the bench at 86%, 91%, 92%, 94%, 96%, 98%, and literally 100% Energy. I don't know WT* he was waiting for, and when he finally did bring the SG back in there were 3 minutes left in the game. Madness.
He doesn't try to play his starters together (including at the start of the second half) or avoid playing all bench guys. After his first sub at six minutes in the first quarter, the starters played together for three total minutes: the last three. He doesn't seem to grasp that the end of quarters will give guys rest: I routinely see him sub players in at the first dead ball of the second quarter even if seven seconds have passed.
He gets seven timeouts but called one. There is no first half use or lose timeout or distinction between full/20, but a team can have a maximum of four timeouts entering the fourth quarter. You could really finagle it if you did something like:
start at 100%, 8 minutes on come out at 80%, 4 minutes off
start at 97%, 4 minutes on come out at 87%, 4 minutes off to 92%, 4 minutes on come out at 89%
start at 99%, 12 minutes with three timeouts come out at 84%
start at 89%, 2 minutes on come out at 84%, 2 minutes off to 90%, 8 minutes on with four timeouts come out at 80%
38 minutes, never got below 80%
meanwhile the software coach managed 33 minutes getting down to 71%
And the craziest thing the coach does: he changes around your strategy. I've only seen him change pace so far, but it was from "very slow" to "very fast" so if that's possible it feels like
Stamina is a field in the mdb output of our software. It is on a scale of 0 to 1000. I noticed the other day that there is an option to coach games, and when I tried it out there was a new interface with a field named Energy. I coached the Revolution to a gutty win and ended up as follows: Pierce, Payton, Raef, Ricky at 31% Energy, Marcus Banks at 81%, Blount at 100% (but played 26 minutes). The resulting mdb output: 308 Stamina, 814 Stamina, 1000 Stamina respectively. When I started their next game, everyone was at 100% Energy. Thus Stamina is the base reality, and it is reported to two digits for Energy (which will turn out to be really annoying in a minute).
What Does it Do?
I set up two teams, one team with decent starters and another team with everyone all 50s. I coached both teams and kept all starters on both teams in for the whole game, then did that one hundred times (ignoring foul out games). The better team outscored the worse by 26.4 in the first half and 23.1 in the second. Then I did another hundred games where I switched out the starters for the bench on the bad team, players that were identical but for their Stamina level, and the margins were 26.9 and 18.4 respectively. Thus, playing with low Stamina makes a player worse. It's still possible to play with 0% Stamina and very unusual for a player to reach that: the only way I found was to play him all 48 minutes in a very fast v. very fast game and even that wasn't a guarantee.
How Does it Work?
This is where it gets pretty hard. Some pieces are easy: a timeout is worth +50 Stamina, the end of a quarter is +50 Stamina, except for the end of the first half which is +100 Stamina. I haven't had any overtime games so I don't know what would happen there. Everyone on the floor loses equally, everyone on the bench gains equally, but they aren't the same. The gain looks like a function of time to the tune of +1 Stamina per 2 seconds, granted at the end of each possession, banker's rounded (to the nearest round even number). The loss definitely isn't just a function of time, because different paces change it quite a bit. If you count up the lines in the play by play it's tantalizingly close - faster paces have less actions per play but more plays per time and the overall effect is more actions per time.
Unfortunately it's really really hard to try and back out how much a single possession costs. You need to have two guys with less than 95% Energy, sub one in for a play, immediately call time out and sub the next one in, then run them to the end of the game (hoping neither fouls out). It's not possible to stop a coached game until you've played it all the way through, so you only ever see Energy (two digits) instead of Stamina (all three). Once you're done you output the mdb to get Stamina and the gap is the cost plus the gain the second player had for that one possession on the bench. The average possession has 7 actions give or take, so it's really finicky to try and get all the variables to line up exactly and at this point I don't really care that much. It's pretty much 1 action costs 1 Stamina, and it's definitely faster pace costs more Stamina.
Play by Play, What's that Like?
An alphabetical list of those actions:
assist
block
bringing over the timeline (success and fail)
dribble
drive to X location (success and fail)
field goal (made and missed)
free throw (made, missed, and going to the line)
inbound
now has # assists/rebounds/points/whatever
pass
personal foul
rebound
shoots from X location
steal
trap
turnover
A list of locations:
backcourt
top of the key
left/right wing
left/right baseline
inside
Threes can only be taken from the top of the key and the left/right wings, but twos can also be taken from those zones. I'm not sure if the top of the key (e.g.) is two separate zones or the system just rolls on your three point probability if you shoot from there. So far I've never seen a player drive from the top of the key to the top of the key (e.g.) so my guess is it's the latter. I have seen players pass within a zone, and pass from any zone to any other, including backcourt all the way to inside.
A brief note on turnovers: the only turnovers I've seen are traveling and bad passes. Never a 3/5/8 second violation (explaining why the full court press is so useless), never a backcourt violation, never an illegal screen or offensive foul of any kind (or for that matter screen of any kind).
Even teams that never press/trap will sometimes press and trap. I haven't checked and don't plan to but surely "never" just means "the least frequent".
What About the Coach, Does He Sub Based on Stamina?
I have no g*sh d*rn idea how the coach does his job. Here are the options he has:
1. Timeout as in life: have to have the ball or a dead ball.
2. Substitutions mostly as in life: has to be a dead ball EXCEPT the free throw shooter can be subbed after making his last free throw (like in FIBA).
3. Defensive assignments: I suspected there was something like this when I did frontcourt/backcourt analysis and indeed, the coach can cross match on defense.
4. Pace, press/trap, focus, scoring options.
Stamina (and foul trouble) seems like just the sort of thing to guide him, but there's a lot of randomization in between. In the game I recorded carefully none of the starters went below 70% Energy, but the substitution pattern made no sense. Looking at the shooting guard, he generally took him out under 80% and put him back in at 85%, but in the third quarter he left him in at 78%, 77%, and 76% before finally subbing him at 71%. He then left the starting SG on the bench at 86%, 91%, 92%, 94%, 96%, 98%, and literally 100% Energy. I don't know WT* he was waiting for, and when he finally did bring the SG back in there were 3 minutes left in the game. Madness.
He doesn't try to play his starters together (including at the start of the second half) or avoid playing all bench guys. After his first sub at six minutes in the first quarter, the starters played together for three total minutes: the last three. He doesn't seem to grasp that the end of quarters will give guys rest: I routinely see him sub players in at the first dead ball of the second quarter even if seven seconds have passed.
He gets seven timeouts but called one. There is no first half use or lose timeout or distinction between full/20, but a team can have a maximum of four timeouts entering the fourth quarter. You could really finagle it if you did something like:
start at 100%, 8 minutes on come out at 80%, 4 minutes off
start at 97%, 4 minutes on come out at 87%, 4 minutes off to 92%, 4 minutes on come out at 89%
start at 99%, 12 minutes with three timeouts come out at 84%
start at 89%, 2 minutes on come out at 84%, 2 minutes off to 90%, 8 minutes on with four timeouts come out at 80%
38 minutes, never got below 80%
meanwhile the software coach managed 33 minutes getting down to 71%
And the craziest thing the coach does: he changes around your strategy. I've only seen him change pace so far, but it was from "very slow" to "very fast" so if that's possible it feels like
