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Unfortunately basketball is a two way game where the team that scores the most wins.

Therefore whoevers offense did the best, surely defense a factor, wins.

For example if a team is very bad at offense, it doesn't matter if the other team is good or great at defense, the team still isn't going to score very well.

Defense is important but you can't win with defense because there are no points scored on defense.

This is why basketball is an offensive game and offensive players that can guarantee points are the most valuable. It's logical.

If you hold the opponent to 1 bucket but you can't score one yourself, you still lose. Defense just can't win. Only scoring buckets wins.

Now that said, if you want to include defense in the picture, fine. I am happy with simply comparing the offenses strategies alone regardless of defense or even prediction. This will work great for LI since there is nothing that really stops it. You just need a stronger opposing LI or some massive help from prediction most of the time (and or just a much better team). There have been some games that make it look otherwise here and there lately.

IF you want to put in all the offenses versus all the defenses and come up with pace-adjusted scoring efficiency you are gonna need a lot more data and a lot more complex analysis.

so by *your* understanding of *my* reasoning, if an opponent has OD 6 and ID 12, you would still attack inside because LI is the bast and that is your best skillset.


as for can't win w defence. maybe ask your self if you understand game mechanics when a lucky fan comes into the game and scores agains od 17.

as for comparing offenses just among themselves, all i can say is like if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, DEFENSE will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Unfortunately basketball is a two way game where the team that scores the most wins.

Therefore whoevers offense did the best, surely defense a factor, wins.

dont want to get into a further argument as i already switched priority to low on this thread.

a perfect analogy to what you said, but in real life, to be clear, is the following.

unfortunately basketball is a game that prioritizes playing tall guys.
therfore whoever is bigger wins. surely leaping ability matter as you can be tall and weigh 150kg and not jump more than a french fry, but height is still the trump card.

i am in the wrong for engaging in a subjective and relative argument. this is not even philosophy.
i agree w the rankings of the offenses based on the most frequent skillsets available and what defenses are being played today. some miught come to the same conclusion based on different arguments. it really does not matter. niether to you or me why others think you the other is wrong, short sighted or narrow minded, even more so when we agree.

NObody would play 6OD 12 ID at a high level. THe training and asalary doesn't make sense.

Bang for your buck is more OD every single time, regardless of position. At least 10 OD even for Cs at the top level most of the time.

That's what you face because of training and salary formula imbalance GE deficits aside.

So if you can play opponents that don't train OD, go for the other tactics.

I guess here your point about Defense matters is being proven by my words. But less in terms of tactic than raw player builds.

Here's what I think.

LI and LP statistically have a very similar shot selection and it's understandable considering that players are built the same way for both. At top level LI usually does better offensively for a couple of reasons: LP needs more PA to generate the same amount of inside shots and LP also generates fewer fouls. Going to the line in this game is worth a lot more than in the real world because TS% on other shots is generally lower than in the NBA, but TS% on FTs is actually in line. I don't know if anyone tried but it's possible that LP is better than LI if the big men have no DR/HA, decent to good PA and the guards have enough PA themselves to feed them on enough possessions: big men with no DR take more dunks, which may increase the overall shot efficiency.

Patient and PTB are next. These are tactics that exploit mismatches. They work if the opponent can be dominated or beaten at some positions. I would think PTB is generally better because with Patient you put all your eggs in one basket and if you play the shooter at PF or C you will miss out on a lot of stops. The problem with these tactics is that at top level they end up being frustrated by the fact that the opponent has no real weak link, so you need to offset the shooter in Patient and hope you can get enough rebounds. These tactics have a worse TS% of even outside tactics, but, crucially, as they seem to do better on the boards they may be a better choice than outside tactics. How close they are to inside tactics, depends on the mismatches.

Motion/R&G/Princeton. Again shot selection is quite similar, R&G gets more fouls and Princeton fewer (like LI vs LP). All of these tactics rely on Jump Shots and in terms of efficiency Princeton>Motion>R&G IF you can get an open shot (unlike inside shots, where PA affects the proportion of inside shots but not the FG% by any significant margin, here it actually affects more the FG% than the shot distribution). Fouling rates are worse for all of these tactics, R&G being slightly better. The key here is again possessions and R&G and Motion have a worse rebounding rate than Princeton. So Princeton with appropriate personnel should be better in theory, because getting open shots here matters more than for inside tactics.

BO is actually hard to judge because it is a tactic most people use when they have a sizeable advantage in talent and want to avoid getting GDPd. BO may well work as well as other neutral tactics, although it generally yields worse team ratings.

Isolations are the worst and I doubt people have really understood how they work and how to make good use of them. They both get over 50% jump shots and 3s at a penalty, so I am almost sure they are worse than anything else.

Based on the above I'd divide this way:
Tier1
LI
LP
Tier2
Patient (offset)
PTB
BO?
Tier3
Princeton
Motion/R&G
Patient (not offset)
Tier4
ISOs

Last edited by Lemonshine at 5/10/2019 6:24:50 AM

Interesting thread.I used to play this game back in the days but then got bored.

Having played similar manager games before i have come to the conlcusion that there is rarely a better offense.It's more about which offense will give you the best results with the players you have.I dont want to reveal too much but consider this : every offense has an algorithm that gives different importance on certain skills per position.

So offense A has a factor of 1.2 for SG jump range while offense B has 1.4 factor for the same stat/position.

Now the same offense A has a factor of 2 for PF passing while offense B has 0.6 for PF passing.

Same thing goes on and on for every skill in every position.

Now we dont know the formula.If we did we could easily calculate which offense is best for our team and the stats our players have.

Here's the real problem.When everyone trains their players the same,people start believing that Look inside is the best offense.That is true but only because all good guards have inside shot nowdays but no jump range.I have been trying to find some good JR passing combinations and seems like noone has that.

So nowdays every top team has a balanced player in each position and whoever has played the more/gathered the more money wins the title until a team that had been tanking for long enough comes along with more money to have more balanced players or bigger roster depth.

Players with a driving level of 1 can still be used efficiently in the proper attack where the factor of driving on that tactic in the specific position is the lowest.

The true beauty of this game is to find the way the formula works and suddenly start winning games with simingly worst roster just because your tactic suited you better and it seems to me like even 10 real life years later noone has actually come much closer to understand what every tactic needs in every position they just go for the all around players again.

Here's the real problem.When everyone trains their players the same,people start believing that Look inside is the best offense.That is true but only because all good guards have inside shot nowdays but no jump range.I have been trying to find some good JR passing combinations and seems like noone has that.
[...]
The true beauty of this game is to find the way the formula works and suddenly start winning games with simingly worst roster just because your tactic suited you better and it seems to me like even 10 real life years later noone has actually come much closer to understand what every tactic needs in every position they just go for the all around players again.

Well, while I agree that a lot of it is based on player composition, there is also a fundamental flaw with the engine in terms of outside offenses - shot selection appears to be too constrained by the engine. For example, if you look at my team, I am currently now in the top league in the USA - pretty fortunate to be there, of course, but fairly competitive because my team is obnoxiously highly trained in JR and SB. I almost exclusively face outside zones and outside predictions on GDP, and my team still shoots higher from 3 than from 2 (right now .362 from ouside vs. .358 for all shots). And yet, my team still attempts twice as many two point shots as three point shots, simply because the engine parameters don't appear to be flexible enough to actually let a team that is built exclusively to jack up contested threes do so other than the last minute of the game. And I think it'd be difficult to put together a team more likely to want to shoot threes than this - I wanted to see if it was possible to steer the shot selection toward threes and did everything I could to discourage any other type of shot.

Part of the problem, too, is that training inside scoring guards is easy. One on one training gives training to up to six guys, in handling and driving and inside shot if you go that route, at a high speed, and set up the elastic effect for other skills. Training outside shooting trains half as many players, at a low speed to boot, and then the elastic effect seems to hurt even more (based on my training my guys for their first three seasons in JR). And then when you factor in OD, well, JR + JS + OD is a surefire way to get into the SG salary formula, and if you get all three high the salary shoots up, while punting JR and DR + HA + IS plus ridiculous OD is much cheaper (and effective) on the PG formula.

But when you get past all of that, you also get a bonus to rebounding when you play an inside offense, and LI draws fouls at a much higher rate than outside offenses (which, to my eternal chagrin, do seem to also commit a lot of offensive fouls, even though I have guys who rarely otherwise commit a lot of fouls). I think there was a correction early on in the life cycle of the game, where it used to be outside offense was overpowered, and for pretty much the entirety of my time here, it's been pretty much inside or bust.

Well ask Manon or Teemo how they killed it in the B3 with high SB or how many titles Germany won with the same blueprint. As I said here or elsewhere, I trained a big with elite defensive skills (11/18/18 + nearly 18 RB also) and bigs who were elite offensively (16 JS, 20 IS, very high DR type of elite) would still score efficiently on him. Meanwhile my guard who is in the NT and has elite outside shooting is extremely streaky in outside offenses irrespective of who is guarding him.

This is without considering the baseline advantages that hrudey mentioned like higher team rebounding or the higher number of fouls drawn in inside offenses, easier training (or at least leading to a much higher overall TSP) AND lower salary.


Last edited by Lemonshine at 6/9/2019 6:30:10 PM

Here's the thing about SB I'm noticing, as well as ID.

SBing at a higher level than ID results in better usage of SB. I think most people believe that SB has to be equal to ID. Problem with that is GE tries to pick the best action based on the skills. In my observation, the GE will pick ID over SB. What that means is your player will get in position to defend, but then he won't necessarily contest the shot. When SB is higher than ID, the GE will decide to defend the shot rather than get into a good defensive position. This results in shots being blocked, but also results in SB going against the opponents offense to defend the shot which results in misses not seen as a statistic.

Because of this, I really don't think ID over 10 or 11 is needed. I forget what NBBA team it was, but several seasons ago there was a manager than had no more than ID of 10 on a big man. His theory is that ID above that resulted in very little additional defense compared to much higher levels. For example, a guy may shoot 60% against 10ID, but shoot 56% against 18ID. Those 8 additional ID pops aren't worth the time or salary.

On the flip side, if you have 10ID and 18SB, for example, the defender will get into position with 10ID, but the GE sees the best chance of stopping the shot with his 18 SB. Therefore I believe that 10/18 (ID/SB) could defend better than the 18/18 (ID/SB) because the SB will be utilized more based on the GE selection of skills.

Thats the issue with LI tactics. 60, 58 or 56% is still elite efficiency. Anything over 52 true shooting percentage in this game used to be elite. Nothing had changed since season 23 when i quited, slightly more skillfull players.

The only way to defend LI is try to minimize shots the C, PF and SF take. It could be done by having absurdry high OD stats on guards. But that could be countered by having high driving skills for centers. Thats the way players built had changed during 23 seasons. Higher driving for centers, everything else the same. Never bothered either to have elite ID or SB either. Had been playing div 2 with 12 ID 7-10SB centers, everyone kept rolling around 56-58%...around the same as agains 18ID...

Even the best Li guards tend to shoot bellow 50 % like 48,5 mostly, because high OD of opponents and low passing skills to make their salaries managable. Best bet to defend shot is to force not to take it. better force guards chuck bricks from midrange with 8 JR.

Last edited by Vilkai [LTU NT] at 6/10/2019 3:05:18 PM

The only way to defend LI is try to minimize shots the C, PF and SF take. It could be done by having absurdry high OD stats on guards. But that could be countered by having high driving skills for centers.

Well it's not only DR on big men is also guards with 18 and even 20 IS...which, remember, used to be FREE and it's still relatively cheap salary-wise.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 6/10/2019 4:35:46 PM