General question for some of the old pros in our Conference - when developing players, particularly freshmen, do you tend to give somewhat balanced practice time, or put 20-30 into the key attributes? Also, while I've read that returns on practice time diminish around 30 minutes, does anyone have a differing opinion?
About how much improvement during a season (on average) should one expect from a starter with about 25-30 min a game?

Rouge, it really varies. If you are putting 20 to 23 mins. into each O and D, you should expect about a 40 point improvement +/- 3 points for a guy with a decent WE. That is what I typically see. Keep in mind that I practice FT at 14 minutes until they are A+. Freshmen will probably be a little less because you probably need to spend more minutes for study hall.

If you are spending a lot of minutes trying to improve defense (footwork), the numbers will be lower as I find defense the slowest thing to improve. If you are putting a lot of minutes into conditioning, then you generally gain more total points as 3 areas improve when you do this (as long as Ath, Spd, and Stamina are in the range of 35 to 75 to begin with). WE also factors into improvement, as you know.

I try to concentrate on areas that are important for the position AND that are conducive for improvement. Example: rebounding is important for a SF but if his rebounding rating is below say 25, I won't spend more than 10 minutes on it. Same goes for high-end ratings. A C with LP of 87 isn't going to improve very much. Spend the minutes elsewhere unless you have nothing else you want to improve. As a general rule, I believe the law of diminishing returns starts to set in between 20 - 25 points. I would never spend over 25 on any rating unless I had absolutely no other skill worth improving.

Just my opinion.

They do improve slowly but remember, you are getting a 3 for 1 bonus with conditioning. Each may jump up by 3 or 4 points each, depending on where your stats are to begin with. So for 15 min. of practicing time, you could get a total improvement, including stamina, of 10-12 points. Not too shabby. It would take 20+ minutes to improve LP, Reb, PE, by that much. Just what I have found anyway.

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That first round CT loss squashed any chance I had of winning CCOY.

Offseason Improvements:

Name	WE	Total Change
M. Wright	72	19
P. Meaney	68	15
J. Edmonds	71	17
J. Williams	78	26
S. Crews	16	-2
W. Drum	52	9
A. Ennis	35	-1
T. Peterson	81	18
J. Magee	53	3
J. Gallagher	57	9
J. Gonzalez	66	15

Andrew, very impressive offseason work. A question for you - is offseason progress purely a product of WE and luck, or is there another element. My guys with comparable WE's tended to do worse than yours.