Posted by eleibowitz on 4/3/2011 9:22:00 AM (view original):
Posted by hallcd on 4/3/2011 9:19:00 AM (view original):
maybe a better questions might be, does a team of 5 on the floor ever incur some sort of performance penalty for having significantly more than 100% usage? If so, when (approximately) and how does having too much usage on the floor hurt you?
hallcd check out the link I just gave you and yes there are possession penalties for too little and too much usage.
Leibo's partially incorrect. There is
not a possession penalty for having too much usage. There are reasons you don't want too much usage, but I'll get to that.
Possession penalties work in two ways, team & individual:
team: if the team doesn't have a combination of 10 usage points on the floor, there is a team possession penalty that occurs, making it much more likely for someone to turn the ball over.
individual: If the team possession penalty is met yet there isn't enough usage on the floor to keep players from having more possessions than they did IRL, an individual possession penalty occurs, making it much more likely that the player who is being
overused turns the ball over. I also have a theory that it hurts the player's fg%, but I haven't tested enough to conclude that and have never seen it documented.
There are two reasons you don't want to draft too much usage:
1) Usage is directly tied into the salary formula... as in, it costs money to get a guy with higher usage. If you spend salary on possessions that your players will never get, that is a direct waste of money and therefore making your team less likely to shine in other needed areas.
2) Say you spend a ton of money on a true monster... a guy with huge efg% that gets to the line a ton (Shaq, for example). And then you get another guy with high usage that might still have good efg% but doesn't get to the line as much (Ray Allen). That second guy is taking away possessions from the first guy - the one you
want to take as many possessions as possible without incurring a penalty. To really avoid the individual penalty, you almost always need a guy that's 4th tier or higher usage, so that's not necessarily a bad pairing... but when you start adding another 3rd tier or higher usage guy, you generally aren't getting your money's worth from the top tier guy even if all three get their expected total possessions.
It can seem deep and convoluted, but after some experience, you'll find a zone that works well for you. The main thing is to not listen to someone who tells you "get xx% usage for your 5 on the floor" because they're most likely wrong. You need to experiment with the usage tiers to get a good feel for it. I personally like having a 1st tier, a 3rd tier, a 4th or 5th tier with 2 6th tiers, but I've had success with many other combinations.