Floor Range & Ball Actions

[Rizzo]

Can anyone explain to me the way that floor range and ball actions work together? I'm coming from DDS:PB3 and haven't been exposed to any of this floor range stuff before. On top of that, there are many more ball actions than what I'm used to as well.

A question I have about them: I know strategies allow us to work on the preferences of a player's ball actions (i.e. drive and pass more at the expense of post up). Is there a way to alter a player's floor range? Is it hard-coded for a specific player, does it change given an offensive system being used, neither, both or something completely different?

[Gary Gorski]

Well first off welcome back to the game! It has come a LONG way since the DDSPB3 days.

Floor range and ball actions work together in that the floor range gives you an idea where the player likes to shoot from while the actions will tell you what he tends to do when he gets the ball. For example I opened up the NBA mod and looked at Ben Simmons - it gives him 38% post, 61% midrange, 0% corner and 1% above break - in other words Simmons is almost never going to look to shoot unless he can get inside the arc. Then if you look at his ball actions 11% is drive/pass, 7% is drive/shot, 0% catch and shoot, 2% pull up and 4% post up. With 0% catch and shoot it means that Simmons is practically never going to shoot the ball off of a pass to him - in fact 20% of the time he's going to put the ball on the floor to either drive and hopefully create a shot for someone, drive and get to the paint for a shot or once in a while drive to get somewhere for a mid range jumper.

There is no way to change the floor range at this time (well except going to commissioner mode and editing it) but the offensive systems will modify them in real time. Lets say you have someone like Dwight Howard (76% post floor range with 26% post up ball action). If you have an offensive strategy like pace and space you're going to be moving Howard out of the post frequently. Now in doing so though you might turn Howard basically into nothing but a screener or passer because only 6% of the time does he do anything but a post move or make a pass. However if you took someone like Embiid you might end up with him shooting even more threes than he is used to now with that sort of offense because he's got % in floor range for catch and shoot or pull up jumper so if for some reason you think he's a good weapon from outside and want to encourage that even more then you would choose an offense that emphasizes outside play and it he will be able to adapt to it because he's comfortable doing so.

[Rizzo]

Wow! Thank you for all of that. Very, very informative post and helps me understand the way the game works much more a this point. I'm glad to be back to the newer engines for this series for sure!