In baseball, there are statistics such as OPS+ and ERA+. OPS+ is On base plus slugging when accounting for factors like the run environment (dead ball and steroid ERAs wouldn't be remotely comparable for example) and park factors.

Couldn't there be an eFG%+, TS%+ and Def+ to account for pace/scoring environment? I think it would be useful to normalize scoring statistics by pace, especially here. I don't think this would/should necessarily affect the SIM itself, but if I plug 19-20 Giannis into a team and set the team to Up Tempo, why doesn't the SIM account for the fact that the Bucks were already up-tempo, thus allowing Giannis to play like that in the first place? You see what I'm getting at?

I think what would make more sense - and accomplish what I think you're intending to accomplish - would simply be to normalize stats by era (particularly shooting percentages and defense). Which is something they technically were supposed to have done already for shooting percentage, but whatever they did they didn't do it right.

Normalizing by individual team pace would be much more complicated. You'd first have to try to figure out whether there's a correlation between pace and those stats, and if so what the correlation is, then craft a formula on a stat-by-stat basis, and then apply that formula by historical team pace (which currently is not information that's in the sim at all). Normalizing by era based on historical league averages, by contrast, would be much simpler.

Hm, yeah, I don’t exactly know how eFG% would be affected by pace.

By historical league averages, you mean the average of all seasons?

Supposedly there is some accounting for it in this engine but it seems poorly implemented based on the outcomes we see in basic things like shooting percentages from players in eras where everyone shot poorly. The normalization they do to adjust for eras (your performance in a stat relative to the rest of the league in that particular season) in baseball seems pretty well modeled and works a lot better the baseball sim. I think with more robust design, we would see better shooting, less turnovers, less fouls, worse rebounding, etc. from older players. Conversely we would probably see worse three point shooting from current era players. I'd like to think they could borrow some of the design logic from the baseball sim, although I think it has some hitter/pitcher matchup dependence that could complicate it.