BuzzerBeater Forums

I've been browsing these forums a while and I noticed the use of 'salary efficiency' when talking about player values.

I assume that a player salary is correlated to their TSP. So how are players considered salary efficient? Can a lower salary player be more effective than a higher salaried player?

Bad handling players will lead to a lot of turnovers (less possession for other guy, less scoring chances)

This is incorrect as turnovers due to steals and bad passes depend heavily on other factors, like PA, position of play and tactics selected

Bad OD big men will just gift free three pointers.

This is also misleading as 'gifting' 1 or 2 3 pointers to the opponent's C is unlikely to be game breaking and yes, those bad shooting Cs will hit 3s like a competent shooter when facing 1 OD, but the volume will be hardly relevant.

Salary efficiency means having as much as key skills as possible (including primary skills) with a low salary compared to players at the same position. It usually requires keeping some skills which compounds the salary growth as low as practically possible. This often has an impact on the cap calculations as well, as salary and cap 'usage' are are closely tied together and for high end player it has implications on what is achievable and what isn't

I made a simple example for Cs on the our forums not long ago here: (303721.23) of 2 Centers that have the same key skills (except for SB and JS), but one cost 100k more than the other.

To go with more examples so you get what we're talking about.
GUARDS
Example 1: https://i.imgur.com/hN8hrvm.png 78k the LI best friend. This player is very salary efficient due to restraining JS, JR and to a lesser extent HA, RB and DR. He costs 78k, can easily play in D1, in most tactics he will take very few outside shots due to the high PA/low shooting combination. The shots he will take will be mostly drives, so he will still score very efficiently as those shots are predicated on IS. Note the low potential limit as well, this player can be probably built with a superstar prospect that can be bought cheap after the draft.

Example 2:https://i.imgur.com/DCZHEjk.png 100k, the switcher. You can see what happens here: no outside skills, decent but less than ideal OD but top notch inside defensive skills. This is the guy you play at PG and switch defensively to a big man. Still within MVP cap comfortably. This guy will allow you to play a SF (typically another salary efficient, but also offensively gifted player) at PF without having to worry about his RB or inside defense skills. You could lower PA and OD to get reasonably good outside skills, however I'm not sure it's worth it as he'd still be underwhelming against D1 level of OD.

Aside from these 2 cases (number 1 was fairly common, number 2 much less so but has been built before), the general balancing act you'll have for guards is between PA and JR (and JS), keeping in mind that RB adds a lot of salary and IS almost none (it used to be none).

SFs: SFs are typically very balanced players with extremely high TSP (even 150 or more, if HoF, see TL for examples) and low-ish salary. For SFs usually OD, JR and PA need to be limited to some extent to control the salary. At SF you already look for highest TSP (excluding HA/DR maybe) at the lowest possible cost that fit the tactics you want to play the most.

BIG MEN: see example from other forum. Usually for big men, you need to punt (keep as low as possible) one of the 4 primary skills and keep JS under control (because JS adds a lot of salary and for Cs specifically its utility is questionable). Traditionally this has been SB, but it can be done efficiently also with IS. A low IS player would look like this:
https://i.imgur.com/O52jKdt.png and you will likely have to play Normal or Outside oriented tactics to better utilise his skill set. 136k is still very cheap for that kind of TSP. For top tier big men you need HoF potential.

Punting ID is almost impossible since it trains with IS and SB, so the player would not be salary efficient, but I'm sort of intrigued about what a very skewed player of this kind would perform. It would be something like this: https://i.imgur.com/V4SGFr0.png. Alas, nobody will build something like this since it takes too much effort and you'd need a near perfect trainee in terms of skills, initial TSP, potential and height and I'm also unsure if the negative elasticity from the low ID on other inside skills will make this at all possible

Last edited by Lemonshine at 5/19/2020 12:02:00 PM

Read again what the manual says and you will see it nowhere states or implies you will have 'a lot of turnovers' with low HA. It says you will have fewer turnovers due to losing the ball (to steals or bad passes only) it does not quantify or even give an indication of the amount of such reduction. I had a 1 HA/1 DR player in the past: this guy (30952612) and he had 2 AST to 1.3 TO for his career (he had 6 or 7 PA). I started this guy even in the EBBL with his 80 TSP, figure that, and when I sold him people were shocked as they thought such a player should not perform that well against players with 30 or more TSP over him (293441.16). Even in D1 for me he had more assists than turnovers and I played him both at PF and C. You can check his career stats for yourself https://www.buzzerbeater.com/player/30952612/careerstats.a...

Of course a PG will need more than 1 HA and 6 PA, but the conclusions from the case above should be valid in general adjusting for the amount of OD the players face.

Bad OD bigs are just bad and give free points that should never happen. Whether you think it's game breaking or not, when people look into how many close games they've lost, they'll figure that by fighting for all the inches, like taking these free points out of the equation, will lead to that extra yard that wins the game.

Bad OD bigs will have better primaries, because in most cases whoever trained them made a choice to train IS/ID/RB/SB over OD.

Now would you rather have a big man with 1 OD and 17 IS or a big man with 3 OD and 15 IS? Ultimately at the C position you 'need' next to no OD, it's just a nice to have in a club setting that does not cost extra salary and so it's usually worth pursuing if you don't have to sacrifice anything else. Most other Cs even in D1 have terrible JR and their JS is usually only driven by how much 1v1 and IS training has been done and therefore it may not be that high either.

A C with 11 JS and 3 JR may hit 30% of 3 pointers against a 1 or 2 OD defender WHEN he's actually defended, which given the OD, it won't be that many times anyway. So if a C averages 2 3 pointers per game (I'm being generous), you'd need to assess how many of those are open shots and how many are guarded. Let's say it's 50/50 guarded/unguarded and when guarded the 3FG% goes from 0.100 to 0.300, then the opponent's scoring improves by: 2*0.5*(0.300-0.100)*3=0.6 points per game. Is this relevant and worth having less primaries for?

If we're talking PFs then it's different, however PF defenders tend to have better OD as well, as you'd hide the lowest OD big man on the opponent C everything else being equal.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 5/19/2020 12:04:53 PM

they do get smoked in a reverse-patient offense though.

That's when you play zone.

I disagree, as if you have your poorly rounded big man covering a guard at centre, then he will get burned, zone or not.