Game Shape: a measure of how fit/ready your player is to play, game shape starts each season at 'respectable' and can improve to 'strong' and then 'proficient', or decline down to 'average', 'mediocre', etc. GS is affected by how many minutes a player got the previous week (total minutes accumulated over the season may also play a role): ~60ish minutes/week is considered ideal for getting GS to increase up to 'proficient'. Too many minutes (80+) or too few (<40) will often but not always cause a decline in GS. Try to find a rotation that keeps your guys within that 50-80min range each week.
Game shape has a pretty decent effect on how well your guys play so if you can keep your players in strong-proficient GS you will give yourself an advantage over an opponent whose GS is only 'respectable'. It is possible to train GS. You generally want to be doing training which actually improves a player's skills, but if you are going into the playoffs and your GS has room to improve, you could train GS to give yourself an edge in promoting, etc. Beyond that training GS is usually not a good idea.
Enthusiasm/effort: Enthusiasm is a sort of team-wide measure of how well your team will play in a given game. The standard enthusiasm is 5 and you can increase/decrease enthusiasm by changing the effort your team puts into games (effort is called 'attitude' in the set-lineup page, enthusiasm and effort can both be seen on the set-lineup page).
Normal is the standard effort and does not affect enthusiasm. Crunch Time is increased effort and will cause your players to play harder/better in the current game but will also cut your enthusiasm by half following the game. Take It Easy is decreased effort and will cause your players to not try as hard in the current game, but will increase your enthusiasm by a third following the game. Enthusiasm slowly moves back toward a 5 over time, and it moves more quickly the farther you are from a 5: it make take a couple days for enthusiasm to decline from 7 to 6, but it may drop from 14 to 13 or even 12 in just one day. (The same is true for enthusiasm moving upward from a 1 or 2 back toward a 5.)
A TIE at 9-10 enthusiasm is generally considered to be equal to a Normal at 5 enthusiasm. So managing enthusiasm/effort allows you to build up enthusiasm for big games: you can TIE against weak opponents (or very strong opponents you think you have no chance of beating) for several games in a row to build up your enthusiasm and then play a normal or CT with high (7-10) enthusiasm and give yourself an increased chance to beat a team that is normally better than you. It's generally a good idea to TIE against bots/inactive teams, and generally a bad idea to waste enthusiasm by using a CT unless you really, really need to win that game (determines home court for the playoffs, etc), and even then you need to consider whether having a high enthusiasm might not still be more valuable. If you are just trying to give yourself an edge against a rival, a normal with high enthusiasm is often enough to get the job done.
Tactics: these are generally explained in the game manual. One thing to remember though is that even if you want to be an inside focused team, or an outside focused team, it is still important to have reasonably decent players at your non-focus positions. Even if your big men are great, if your guards are terrible they will have a hard time getting the ball inside to your big men or making shots when the ball can't get inside, and it will cost your team victories. Having a balanced team also gives you the option of switching tactics to suit your opponent, or to create an element of surprise.
Last edited by J-Slo at 1/7/2011 10:45:12 AM