It would not be better, in your opinion, to push a level of 14-15 in all players of the team , sacrificing individual offensive skills with the purpose of being able to create shots with higher scoring percentage?
High PA is good and I think I have about 8-9 players with at least 10 on my roster, but in the end it's a trade off: do you increase PA or do you increase shooting?
The percentages for scoring do not seem to suggest (to me) that increasing PA beyond what you normally see (i.e. pushing 14-15 for all players as you suggested) will increase shooting efficiency. The difference between assisted and unassisted is large but probably not large enough in my mind to make up for less shooting.
The TS% on assisted shots is 56% and 43% on defended shots, which is very significant. On 100 shots you will score 112-86=26 extra points. The problem here is: how many more assisted shots will increasing PA give you? If that number isn't significant then despite the huge TS% discrepancy the impact will be minimal and you will be better off putting skills in shooting which will increase both assisted and defended percentages.
Look at the 2 extremes: 5 players with 1 IS/JS and 20 PA and 5 players with 20 IS/JS and 1 PA. I'm a big fan of PA but I don't think pushing it beyond offensive skills on all players will help your efficiency. Especially for big men who can actually shoot, I don't see why you'd want to pass the ball for shots which are worse even when they are assisted.
My main doubt is whether high PA across the board actually affects the shot type that is taken by a team and how this interacts with DR. If there is a significant change in the type of shots taken, then yes, I could see it a difference maker, but we don't have the data required to draw conclusions on this.
Of course when you start looking at this from a team perspective you will want players with specific skillsets to have very high PA, but I think in general you can go with the minimum to guarantee a healthy AST/TO ratio at all positions. Also we don't know exactly how the team flow comes into play in the GE. We do know it's very likely other team ratings are used by the GE to simulate results irrespective of position, so it's definitely a smart idea to have good passing guards if this is the case (we'd need someone to trot out a team with high passing bigs and trash passing guards to check what happens when team flow is low but PA in the team is not).
People who tried to make outside offences work at the highest level tried to have high PA across the board and they can tell you how it worked out for them.
******Edit: miscalculated the point differential (which is bigger than I initially said). The point still remains, we'd need to estimate how many more assists (both successful and unsuccessful) 1 level of PA will give you.
Last edited by Lemonshine at 5/9/2018 6:52:49 AM