BuzzerBeater Forums

I'm still waiting for somebody beside me to run some stats. Except for those who don't care for any realism here at all, I think some hard data is in order to really see if the results of some skill combinations are rational.

i just read the small print on becoming a buzzerbeater supporter, and it said a requirement is to weigh in on this debate, so here goes:

i think of solutions as a spectrum, in this case, from status quo to ranges of changes.

-- if one thinks of training as "adding points per game", then (team) FT training is i would guess one of the most effective training practices a manager can use -- up to a point (marginal utility and all that). and that point is reached more quickly, probably, than with other skills (most managers would agree that average or respectable FT produces acceptable results).

-- the irritant is the odd player who just can not hit a FT, the career 0-1000 player. the simplest solution is to devote one week of training, get that atrocious up to pitiful, which usually means to somewhere between 33 and 50 per cent. little time, big returns. the principle of single-position training is useful for those who object to using team training to improve but one player.

-- if this is unacceptable, because nobody misses all free throws, then i would suggest more or less eliminating "atrocious" as a beginning skill as a 18 or 19 year old player -- in real life, it is safe to say, few players are atrocious, but many are pitiful or inept. to balance this, perhaps the speed of ft improvement as a result of training could be slowed slightly.

-- if the game developers are pursuing "realism", then i would have free throws influenced by other factors, including JS, but also experience, stamina, and game shape. for laughs, there could be an unknown cap on ft ability -- i could practice fts till the previously mentioned frogs had figured out how to use their wings, but i would never be a ray allen or dirk nowitzki -- making it in this way similar to stamina or more elusively a player's "physicality".

if forced to advocate for one of these positions, i would suggest eliminating "atrocious" as a ft ability.

In a BB world the following would be true:
A marathon runner and a weight lifter would be both bad 100m sprinters because they never trained short distance sprints.

I think the following would be a more realistic event:
A marathon runner would beat a weight lifter on the 100m distance any day, no matter if he ever trained sprinting distances.

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In my opinion a player with good enough dexterity to hit jumpers at a decent rate will also have a better skill shooting free throws than a player inept at those shots - no matter what Larry Bird might have said.

If only the marathon runner had trained 100m sprints once in a while...

I get your point, I just think it would be extremely boring if every good jump shooter is a good FT shooter as well...

Don't change the rules BB-Charles.

People who argue for realism are missing the fact that good jump shooters are most likely to be good FT shooters because guess what, they take time to train FTs. You think Steve Nash, Dirk, and Durant only practiced Js? They spend weeks just standing on the free throw line practicing. Hell, even Shaq, Ben Wallace, and Brendan Haywood took the time to practice but they still suck at FTs. At least in BB, if you take the time to practice it, you will get the skills for sure. I can't say the same for Shaq and company.

Those who argue for realism only argue for the "realistic events" that benefit them. Why not argue for:
1) Players and Staff dying (i.e. Petrovic).
2) Economic crises once in a while.
3) People getting injured for more than a season (i.e. Yao).
4) Lockouts once in while.
5) Natural disasters destroying arenas (i.e. NO Hornets had to play elsewhere during Katrina).
6) Players going to jail, getting too fat to play, missing games for random reasons.

If the only reason for linking JS and FTs is because of "realism," then those should be added as well.

PS: I can hit 95% of my FTs but I can't hit my jump shots. My friends and I have this running joke that they don't even guard me when I shoot jumpers.

The main argument that people have who are arguing for a linkage between jump shooting and FT skills is that a big disparity between these two is unrealistic (though conveniently ignoring the expert testimony of actual players like Larry Bird and Isaiah Thomas). Well, let's look at some stats, and ask whether there is a good correlation between shooting percentage and free throw percentage.

So I got the data for 452 players from the 2010-2011 NBA season from ESPN.com. Plotting FT% versus either FG% or 3 point% gives an unimpressive cloud, no sense by eye that there is a relationship between the two. And their linear correlation coefficients bear that out: r-squared for FT% vs FG% is a paltry 0.038. This might reflect the effect of big men, who can have high FG%, but have FT difficulties in. For 3pt shooting percentage is was better, but r-squared was still a small 0.132.

Because there were a good number of players who took very few 3 point shots, where they might have been screwing with the resulting correlation, I removed those players who attempted fewer than 0.3 three pointers per game. That made the r^2 =0.108.

Also, it's worth noting that the slope of these linear regression lines (despite the fact they didn't suggest a strong correlation) weren't very steep, between 0.38 to 0.52. This suggests that if you did link the two skills, it wouldn't be linked very tightly (a slope of 1 would mean that for a given % increase in FG/3P%, you'd get the same increase in FT%, 0.5 you'd get half that, etc.).

Now, one thing that was apparent from the data was that there were only 12 players who never made a FT (likely these guys took very few attempts), and then the next level of players, with the lowest FT%, started around 30% (there was nobody in between). This would support the suggestion that the lowest levels of FT be bumped up a little, if you believe that BuzzerBeater's main objective should be a realistic simulation of basketball stats.

I don't believe that, and never have in issues of game design where "playability/decision making" and "realism" are at odds. If you link shooting (either by jumpshot, or jump range, whatever, despite the evidence to the contrary) to FT, then you remove one of the strategic calculations that a manager has to make. "Should I train JS, or FT this week?" When that happens, things get boring IMO. Of course this was part of Charles's point.

If you want the game to be closer to reality there would be two ways:

1) Easy: JS and JR have cross training with FT
2) Hard: FT affects the speed of training the JS and JR

lets draft an hypothetical guy with respectable JS and JR and atrocious FT

-> Today he can be a monster that is unnatural, being a very good shooter that sucks at FT and you should manually correct this flaw of the game training FT.

-> On the first option you would train the shooting and he would improve on the FT, making him even more monstrous that he is today but closer to reality, being good from the field and from the line.

-> On the second option the monster that can't shoot free throws doesn't exist (his jump shot training speed should be very small at some point) and you should train his free throw otherwise he won't be a monster. You get almost unable to be a good shooter without a decent FT.


I think that everybody wants the game to be closer to reality, but they also like challenges and don't want the game to be easier. What you guys think about the second idea, would it be more tough and also more close to reality or I'm suggesting nonsense?

If you want the game to be closer to reality there would be two ways:

1) Easy: JS and JR have cross training with FT
2) Hard: FT affects the speed of training the JS and JR

I kinda like that idea from a game design perspective, but it's not closer to reality.

Actually, it is.

Free throws are the easiest thing for a basketball player to score. The more effective a guy is in shooting FTs, the better are the chances that he'll hit jump shots far away from the basket.

I think JR would be the key factor, in this situation. It doesn't make sense that a guy that averages, let's say, 45% in 3FG is averaging 22& in FTs. Just saying...