How good are the rookies? Should you draft three useless guys and call up the rookies instead?

Should a beginner start in an open league? How fast do open leagues fill up?

How many minutes should you draft? Do you need 3936 minutes for each position or can guys play a little bit more?

How much do slow down or up tempo offenses effect minutes played?

Do guys get injured?

Say a guy played 2870 minutes. (35 minutes per game) Should he play 35 minutes a game, or could he play 40 in some games and 30 in other games without getting tired?

rookies suck but right now it seems like they at least fill in minutes

open leagues are a good place to start - theme leagues draw the more seasoned owners

right now because of the rookies and because the fatigue penalty is not that severe you can get away with drafting as few as 18000 minutes if you know what you're up to

most people run uptempo in order to optimize possessions per game and increase fg% - the only time to run slowdown is when your team is overmatched and you're hoping to get lucky

guys occasionally get injured the factor seems to be games played in real life

owners tend to push minutes played but there will be a fatigue penalty as you get under 90% - you probably cant control minutes played as much as you'd like but there are owners who just take a player out for a game or two to get the average back in line

good luck!

Posted by Midge on 3/26/2011 1:47:00 PM (view original):
How good are the rookies? Should you draft three useless guys and call up the rookies instead?

Should a beginner start in an open league? How fast do open leagues fill up?

How many minutes should you draft? Do you need 3936 minutes for each position or can guys play a little bit more?

How much do slow down or up tempo offenses effect minutes played?

Do guys get injured?

Say a guy played 2870 minutes. (35 minutes per game) Should he play 35 minutes a game, or could he play 40 in some games and 30 in other games without getting tired?

(1) The rookies are better and can play more minutes than the $239,000 300+min players.  Yes.
(2) Yes, probably less than a week.
(3)  Because of the rookies, you only need to draft a total of about 17,500 minutes.
(4) It doesn't, you just need to draft enough usage% to run up tempo.
(5) If their fatigue is low enough, yes.  You probably shouldn't be concerned as long as it's above 90%.
(6) If a guy played 2870 minutes, he can play at a pace of 2870*1.02/82 (35.7 minutes) per game without getting fatigued.

Thanks for the info. Will your team be okay as long as the usage%  of the five guys on the court adds up to 100% or more?

Posted by Midge on 3/26/2011 2:03:00 PM (view original):
Thanks for the info. Will your team be okay as long as the usage%  of the five guys on the court adds up to 100% or more?

As long as they also have enough "possession tier points", yes.  http://whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?TopicID=360613&Page=5

Posted by ncmusician_7 on 3/26/2011 2:11:00 PM (view original):

Posted by Midge on 3/26/2011 2:03:00 PM (view original):
Thanks for the info. Will your team be okay as long as the usage%  of the five guys on the court adds up to 100% or more?

As long as they also have enough "possession tier points", yes.  http://whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?TopicID=360613&Page=5

Beware you can also have too many possesssion points, rule of thumb is if you 5 guys on the court add up to 120% or more you may have too much usage

What happens if you have too much usage?  If salary cap is not a concern, why would this be a bad thing?

if money is no option there's still a couple factors to consider

one - if you have a high usage high FTA per min guy like Shaq and a high usage low FTA guy like Bird the more Bird shoots the less Shaq's FTAs are going to cause trouble for the opposition so there will be dilution of that impact - now if all your guys are high FTA so be it but otherwise you wind up robbing peter to pay paul and you also in the case above go from having a 60% efg guy taking shots to a 55% efg guy taking shots which is not so hot either

two - with a few rare exceptions high usage guys tend to be high turnover guys - the one stat in the whole player base-line that doesnt seem to suffer from dilution is turnovers - guys might steal shots or boards or dimes from each other but for whatever reason it always seems that they meet or exceed their real life TOVs

Ash might have some further words of wisdom on the subject but that's my quick two cents

Expounding upon felonius' post:

1)  That's exactly right.

2)  The only way I've found to get less turnovers for pretty much everybody is to get too much usage, which is a good way to lose to an owner who got the most for his money.

Because of 2), I actually prefer to build a team with less usage than "needed" to keep players out of the individual possession penalty.  I always avoid the team penalty, but often I'll force that high FTA, 60% efg% guy to have way more possessions than normal, because I can live with a couple of extra turnovers if he's giving me 6-8 more FGA & getting to the line somewhat close to what he did IRL.  But ideally, you'd not do this.  It's pretty risky, and if it goes bad, it goes really bad.  It's much safer to get 14 or 15 usage points and run up-tempo than to do the 10-point idea I just advocated.

I actually have a question as it relates to the second point you made there. Shaq is known for having awesome usg% and efg% (around 20 and 60 respectively), but is a terrible free-throw shooter (hovering between 45% and 50% in most years). So when he goes to the line, say 05-06 Shaq, there's only a 46.9% chance he's going to get two points when he goes to the line. Isn't he actually hurting my team by taking possessions away from guys high TS%, like your Nash's and Allen's, because even though their efg% is lower than Shaqs, they hover around 90% when they get to the line, albeit a lot less than Shaq. For example, Allen finishing with an efg% of 55% (11/20) and makes 5/5 of his free throws, he scores 27 points with a TS% of 60%. Shaq on the other hand finishes with an efg% of 60 (12/20) but only makes 4/10 of his free throws, giving him 30 points with a TS% of only 56%. The more Shaq shoots from the line, the more he hurts your team I feel, as even though you'll be getting the other team in foul trouble, your team's TS% suffers when he takes shots away from more efficient scorers. 

So basically, I was wondering what makes Shaq the more common center than say Yao Ming, who shoots much better from the line. I understand that Shaq's great efg% is so high that it almost makes up for his terrible shooting from the line, but shouldn't we see more efficient free throw shooters on most teams (especially big men and high usg% players).

It's not about the 4 points he scores from the line, it's the 5 to 8 fouls he makes the opponent commit.  Guys like Nash, Allen & Bird don't really get to the line much.  Trust me, things go south for your team quicker when you have foul trouble than when you miss free throws.

I thought I'd add something regarding minutes drafted.  I agree with ncmusician that you can get away with drafting only 17,500 minutes.  In fact, you can even get away with drafting a few hundred below that.  However, you really have to stay active in managing your player minutes.  I've seen a lot of owners draft below 18,000 minutes and then have their teams fall apart because they didn't stay on top of things.

Posted by ashamael on 4/7/2011 9:03:00 PM (view original):
It's not about the 4 points he scores from the line, it's the 5 to 8 fouls he makes the opponent commit.  Guys like Nash, Allen & Bird don't really get to the line much.  Trust me, things go south for your team quicker when you have foul trouble than when you miss free throws.

Also, people with high FTA/FGA ratios in real life have much lower ratios in the sim.  Basically, eFG% is far more important than FT%.

Yeah... you overpay for TS%

So someone like the 78/79 Cornbread Maxwell with 808 FGA and 716 FTA would be a waste of time?