BuzzerBeater Forums

Preparing for everything means preparing for nothing. Basketball is a very fast game and you need to make decisions on the spot, depending on your opponent actions. Often one team plays well when the opponent plays man to man defense, but totally collapses when the opponent puts zone defense. Why? Because they were guessing the opponent will play man to man, and you cannot prepare well enough for both.
Also often great coaches change the pick&roll defense mid match to stop the opponent. Well the other team can't always adjust to that fast enough, often costing them a game, also because they were preparing to play against different kind of pick&roll defense.

Much of what is mentioned here requires in-game adjustments. GDP is no help there and introduces nothing new except extra credit for guessing.

Last edited by LDR at 9/29/2019 11:29:07 PM

RL coaches don't guess. They prepare their team for everything

Not sure which teams you have coached or played before in real life, but as a former professional coach, this kinda surprises me.

Although it is in a way correct in lower levels, where you don't know anything about your opponents or their coaches and they play without any tactics or sense, but as you get to a higher level, there are always constants - play style, coaching style etc...

I've never coached at international level or a pro team before (yes I was a professional coach, but my players weren't pro players, I was just on payroll), but such things can actually be seen even up to NBA level - like how Spurs players guarded Harden in one game to minimize his flopping and force him to shoot mid range shots, or like how they defended Jokic in the playoffs last season (you would notice them trying to cut off his passing lanes in some games), or like how Celtics had Horford defend Giannis inside, or how the Warriors are forced to rely on individual brilliance deeper down the playoffs than run their usual motion offense because it gets foiled more often. And it's not only in basketball. Other pro sport coaches watch a lot of tapes of their opponents, and such activities are also well documented. These are what GDP reflects, although it might not exactly mimic real life, but I feel it's decent enough.

Yes, as coaches, the best case scenario is that our players Excel in everything and can face anything that's thrown into their faces. But we also take one match at a time, and tailor whatever we have to stop our opponents.

Last edited by BuzzRBeater at 9/30/2019 4:52:06 AM

I didn't try to make sense of it. If you actually read what I wrote, you'd realize I said that it doesn't exactly mimic real life. 3rd paragraph, last line.

But since you no longer deny that coaches do predict their opponent's play styles, I guess I made my point.

Well I don't see what demolition you have done, except for conveniently pretending that you didn't make a sweeping statement about coaches in real life preparing for everything. But I guess it's not up for discussion anymore since you agreed with me on that :-P

But yes I agree that predictions are indeed a ridiculous attempt to force managers to not always play LI. Yes, they can always tweak the game engine, but the last time they made a major tweak it made OD totally OP. I can imagine them (or I get the idea that Marin is the only one left now?) messing up and making it worse. I guess GDP is a low risk low reward kinda thing, some easy way out to sweep the problem under the carpet rather than solve it.

Also, just to be clear, I'm not denying that BB is different from real life. It deviates a lot from real life - in real life, players are getting taller and taller. PGs are now 6'3" or 6'4" and bigs like Ben Simmons and Giannis Antetokounmpo can play like guards, meanwhile in BB, 7 footers aren't all that worthy because of the slow training on outside skills, and the most valuable players are around 6'9" or 6'8" where you can train both outside and inside skills. Hence I do not understand your obsession with the game having to exactly be like in real life, when GDP isn't the only thing which makes it different from real life.