The fun thing about SB is that the ones that actually do like it has to prove that it works as while those who doesn't only have to say it or in this case write it for it to be so.
Yeah,and it makes prefectly sense
SB have a relevant impact on salary and potential while little to none apparent effects in a game...everyone can see the "negatives" aspects of have SB on their players,that's why SB lovers have to show to the other users the positives of SB,that are hidden or simply non-existent
Handling is another skill that seems to have little effects in game,but his impact on potential and salary seems to be lower than SB,so while I would never train it,doesn't hurt too much
i am unsure about the uselessness of SB, to be honest my players are in a pretty inefficient values for this skill(betwen 8-11 so they impact salary but are very low compared to opponent IS), but when i look at my best blocker(11) :
(4599003) he is pretty consistent in sligthly less then 2 blocked shots a game over the last seasons. Also i could assume that the amount of affected shots is roughly the same, and the efficiency of them should be highly impacted ... I could assume it is worth roughly 3 miss shots during a game.
he also takes 13 shots a game, and convert 58% of them(which means 7,54 hit shots). Taking him as his average opposition, the 3 avoided shots by blocking would be more then the half of his miss shots. I am thinking 13 shots ain't so far away from the average, but the average % would be lower but still with 50% shooting blocking wouldn't look bad.
But there are two additional things to consider, blocking is help defence so maybe some of the from blocking affected shots would be against guards so that the number by other defences skilled forced misses will increase why the one from blocking stays the same. Also it didn't looked at OD as a helpful skill by a center, which is a thing i really believing and can back it up with a quite succesfull BB season where i played above 30min+ every game with 8 OD/12 ID centers.
Overall i think the inside defence skills both ain't that important, but blocking didn't looked so bad in comparision to ID to me. Even when a pushing off the ID/SB skill, to lead to the death of inside tactic like it happens some time ago for the outside tactics with OD(a long time inside tactics doesn't seem to work in the current ge)