by Wildcat18 » Mon Feb 03, 2025 5:17 pm
I’ll try to answer what you’re asking to the best of my understanding;
You have several levers to pull to affect how your players play: sets, pace, crash boards, offensive freedom for offense, and defensive set, crash boards, and full court for defense
The biggest effect of sets is what you need to recruit, particularly when it comes to your bigs. Motion offenses for examples needs everyone to be able to pass and handle the ball well, but your center doesn’t need to be able to shoot jumpers. Shuffle offenses, on the other hand, work best when your 4s and 5s can shoot threes because they spend some time at the top of the arc, while the guards need to not be zeros in the post because they set themselves up there. The game should have a decent description of the sets on the strategy page, for more information.
Unless things have changed since the 2022 version when creating a coach, the sliders when you create your coach don’t really matter too much - you can change the percentages on zone defense and pace from the strategy page, and the veteran/young players slider only actually matters for AI coaches AFAIK. I’m not sure what the ambition, discipline, and temperament sliders do, if anything.
For developing guys, playing time and coaching staff ability are your two main levers - players develop best when they have at least some playing time, and I’m pretty sure they learn sets faster when they play more.When you recruit freshman or JUCO players, they’re going to come in with at most 10 “rating” in a set, so whether they knew a set from high school isn’t something I’d ever worry about.
I’m going to finish by explaining my philosophy and how I go about recruiting, and hope that my thought process is helpful to you. So I look to run a faster version of the Villanova offense under Jay Wright. Since a 4-out/1-in motion offense isn’t in the game, I go with the 3-2 Motion offense as my main set instead. I run that 60% of the time, then run 5-out and Princeton the rest in a ratio that changes depending on my team. For 1-4, I look for outside shooting, ball-handling, and passing, and at the 5 I look for inside shooting, passing, and rebounding. For everybody, I want defense to at least be a C.When recruiting, I tend to try to recruit starters in “bunches” - I’ll try to recruit 3 guys who will start 4 years in the same year, particularly when I just join a team, in the hopes the guys develop together and are a quality veteran squad capable of making a deep tournament run in year 4.