BuzzerBeater Forums

It would not be better, in your opinion, to push a level of 14-15 in all players of the team , sacrificing individual offensive skills with the purpose of being able to create shots with higher scoring percentage?

High PA is good and I think I have about 8-9 players with at least 10 on my roster, but in the end it's a trade off: do you increase PA or do you increase shooting?

The percentages for scoring do not seem to suggest (to me) that increasing PA beyond what you normally see (i.e. pushing 14-15 for all players as you suggested) will increase shooting efficiency. The difference between assisted and unassisted is large but probably not large enough in my mind to make up for less shooting.

The TS% on assisted shots is 56% and 43% on defended shots, which is very significant. On 100 shots you will score 112-86=26 extra points. The problem here is: how many more assisted shots will increasing PA give you? If that number isn't significant then despite the huge TS% discrepancy the impact will be minimal and you will be better off putting skills in shooting which will increase both assisted and defended percentages.

Look at the 2 extremes: 5 players with 1 IS/JS and 20 PA and 5 players with 20 IS/JS and 1 PA. I'm a big fan of PA but I don't think pushing it beyond offensive skills on all players will help your efficiency. Especially for big men who can actually shoot, I don't see why you'd want to pass the ball for shots which are worse even when they are assisted.

My main doubt is whether high PA across the board actually affects the shot type that is taken by a team and how this interacts with DR. If there is a significant change in the type of shots taken, then yes, I could see it a difference maker, but we don't have the data required to draw conclusions on this.

Of course when you start looking at this from a team perspective you will want players with specific skillsets to have very high PA, but I think in general you can go with the minimum to guarantee a healthy AST/TO ratio at all positions. Also we don't know exactly how the team flow comes into play in the GE. We do know it's very likely other team ratings are used by the GE to simulate results irrespective of position, so it's definitely a smart idea to have good passing guards if this is the case (we'd need someone to trot out a team with high passing bigs and trash passing guards to check what happens when team flow is low but PA in the team is not).


People who tried to make outside offences work at the highest level tried to have high PA across the board and they can tell you how it worked out for them.


******Edit: miscalculated the point differential (which is bigger than I initially said). The point still remains, we'd need to estimate how many more assists (both successful and unsuccessful) 1 level of PA will give you.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 5/9/2018 6:52:49 AM

Top quality PFs are usually quite close to switching to the PG formula.

Scrap what I originally posted here. I forgot how I analysed the numbers and this reasoning was incorrect.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 5/9/2018 7:16:55 AM

But then you need to ask yourself if you understood the OP correctly. I'm sure he's not talking as a D4 manager.

It makes no sense whatsoever from a salary efficiency perspective to have 5 players with 14-15 PA in D4. It probably doesn't make sense in D2 either. I have 5 players with at least 13 PA and 9 with at least 10 PA out of 12 players on the roster (of the 3 who are below that level, one is a scrub to mop up minutes and another is the star player) and I don't consider myself lacking in that department.

I think having 14-15+ PA across the board can really only be done in D1, however the results would apply to any lower league scaled back accordingly.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 5/9/2018 12:45:29 PM

Yes it's from the data I used some time ago.

The shooting efficiency is very different. If you take out the fouls, guarded shots are much worse than assisted shots. There is a huge component of shooting efficiency on guarded shots that comes from shooting fouls.

PA will definitely increase the amount of assisted shots, the question is how much? Shooting will also increase shooting efficiency outright, the question is by how much?

The issue you are trying to assess is: how much are marginal points in PA worth compared to marginal points in shooting and what is their cost? If you go from 13 to 14 PA, how many more assisted shots will you get and how much will it cost you in terms of salary? Conversely if you go from 16JS to 17JS or 13JR to 14JR or 16IS to 17 IS how will that impact your shooting efficiency and how much will it cost you?

Salary wise I'm pretty sure adding PA is cheaper. Efficiency-wise I'm not sure, especially for big men. I had a big man who had 1DR 1HA and 6PA, he was been super efficient for me as a C in D1 and he had more assist than turnovers. If he had 12 PA would he be shooting as much? Probably not.

Because inside shots are more efficient, logic would dictate that you put PA on the players you don't want to take the shots or that will take more inefficient shots. This is usually the guards and that's the way most people play this game. If you have elite guards like those 2 Aleksandar bought several seasons ago, then you may try to push PA on the other positions in order to get them more assisted attempts. However, whether this will work and what the cost of this would be I'm not sure. I know that those 2 had at least 76 JS/JR between them and very very high salary though (around 200k), so the price for this strategy is not low.

Also at this point I am curious about if there are teams that made more than 11 in the team ratings for the flow.

I think this is pretty hard to achieve. I just ran trough some games from the top NT level.

(45833) 10.0 flow Lithuania
(45775) 9.3 flow Portugal
(45776) 9.6 flow Lithuania

These three games are from last seasons semi finals and final (euro championship).

And from season 40 (world championship).

(44588) Spain vs. China and both are under 10.0
(44543) Spain vs. Taiwan and both are at 9.6

We have here three of the best NTs with the flow stays still under 10.0.


In my point of view, you can only achive a high 10 flow, if you have PA on all five players:
(46321) my swedish team had a 10.3 and Austria a 10.0.
I think it is possible to push the flow rating even higher, because Sweden didn't play with the best possible "flow line up". A player was injured and another one still gets PA training.


I have one last point. (99545969) that's the BBB final of two seasons ago. The flow is a 10.3. What makes it really interesting is that Tehran played Princeton. And according to an old BB post, Princeton is the tactic, which relies the most on PA and flow. And even here, a flow of 11 wasn't reached.