More Strategy Options in 2018?

[fcabanski]

Does the new version have more strategy options such as setting first scoring option?

The strategy options in 2017 are sparse. I can't tell a team "shoot more 3's", for example.

[Gary Gorski]

You can try the demo to see the areas of improvement from the 2017 version but this sort of thing I have always gone about in less direct ways as I don't think its realistic to just say you can tell a NBA team to shoot more 3s as a team. On the strategy screen you can increase the Spot Up option and you can instruct individual players to shoot more 3s and really the best way to accomplish this is by trading for or acquiring three point shooters.

[fcabanski]

Coaches draw up plays for 3's, and practice getting people open for 3's.

In strategy, I see how to tell players to spot up, but there is no option for shoot more 3's.

[Gary Gorski]

DDS:PB creates specific types of players and is very good in doing so - part of the reason it does so is because it prevents the game from being exploitable. Lets take a player like Pau Gasol. Last season Gasol shot 54% from 3 and he shot 104 of them so it wasn't like he made 5 out of 10 - because he shot a fair amount of them the game will likely generate him as a pretty decent 3P shooter because the game only knows numbers. It doesn't know that Gasol is a career 37% shooter for 3 but this is offset by the fact that the game knows only 1.6 out of his 9.4 attempts were threes. Now if you can click a button and tell him to shoot 5 threes a game that's going to throw things way off because he's not going to shoot anywhere near 54% on that kind of volume for three - in fact this year he regressed to his career average and shot 37.6 on slightly more attempts per game.

That's why the game forces you to build a roster to match a strategy. If you want a center who launches 5 threes a game then you need to go bring in a Channing Frye or something.

In order to have the freedom to truly force anything you want to happen there has to be an offset and the game isn't designed for that right now. If you wanted to take Gasol and turn him into Frye the game would have to change his ratings so that he shot more like 35% on that kind of volume than 50% or if you told Russell Westbrook to stop driving and be a standstill shooter his scoring rating would have to plummet because only 1.1 out of his 20.0 FGA per game are catch and shoot shots so he would no longer be a great scorer. There would also have to be a much more drastic component to the relationship side of things - if you told Westbrook to stand there and shoot he'd tell you what to do with yourself and you'd be fired by the end of the day probably.

I'm not saying the game will never be able to do this sort of thing but for now it doesn't in the order of preserving realism.