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I remember making research before draft update and 7,2"+ center with all atrocious seemed to be a bias. They used to be not more trashier players than the average trash from the draft.

The bias probably happening because of limited data size, since there is very few 7,2"+ players per draft. There is equal ammount of 6,2" or lower guards with atrocious inside skills as there are tall players with atrocious outside skills percentage wise.

The lowest variation between balls and TSP as of 2 recent seasons scouting data with utopia seemed to be: PF, PG, SG, C, SF. The SF is the riskiest one, althrough in the market last season the elite of 65+ TSP guys had been listed as SF's mostly, PF being second.

SF salary formula generally don't have bad OD because they'd revert to PF. SF draftees often have low PA because if they don't they end up in the PG formula. There is nothing shocking or debatable in what I said and Alonso is incorrect on this. Best case scenario he has more than 50 TSP balanced all around, but on average he will be below 50.

In the following post, boule says:

Atrocious in a drafted player is often associated with a tall player and with a center position.

This is correct. You have plenty of examples of C that have been actually trained and still have garbage secondary skills even on the TL. My current trainee Banuelos was a C in the scouting report and I put him second on my list precisely because of that. He was a 6'4'' A+ 5/5 C mind you and he had elite inside skills and good outside skills, but that could have gone south quite badly. The safer pick was the 7 footer A+ 5/5 who was in a more reasonable formula and sure enough whoever picked ahead of me thought the same way.

C is the worst possible listed position. You know he'll have good inside skills but you know little to nothing about secondaries. A player with all 7s and 5 JS is an A+ Center (68 TSP). However a player with 7 in each inside skill and 1 otherwise is also an A+ Center (33 TSP). This is why it's dangerous to pick a player in the C formula: the same thing can't happen with other formulas and A+ rating. People do train very tall C draftees with garbage outside skills in their primaries because it's quick and easy.

So you tell me: Who are making way too many assumptions and baseless incorrect claims?

You are assuming that the formula and the salary only tell you about 3 skills which is just wrong, because what the position is NOT, as well as the salary, give you information. You are out there saying A+ SF "will disappoint" when it's realistically impossible to make a 3.5k+ SF with less than 50 TSP (you quite literally need less than 6 skills in HA/DR/SB combined) and even then he'd be a player with great shooting, rebounding and defense. And yeah an A+ SF can be as high as 68.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/24/2020 12:51:32 PM

Not A+, try again.

TL; DR: I think the two players are similar.

It seemed that the discussion went into a debate, but I just want to try to answer the OP's question by some simulation.

The OP's situations is to choose among two candidates.
Candidate 1: 18yo, 3/5/C+, 6'7", SF
Candidate 2: 19yo, 5/5/A+, 6'7", PF
Goal: Find the best strategy to pick a good candidate who eventually grows as a SF.

My assumptions:
1. The ten player skills are independently (to other skill and height/potential) and uniformly distributed between 1.00 to 7.99 for 18 yo and 1.00 to 8.99 for 19 yo (could be argued, especially that for MVP+ potentials, skill distribution might be leaning toward the high end side, but no one except Marin knows the actual distribution).
2. C+ means 2000-2200 in salary and A+ means 3400+. I made this assumption from another guy's draft data in season 48.
3. I don't have the updated salary formula. Used CoachParrot plus a simple scaling on my own so that it should be within 2% most of the time from BuzzerManager's estimation.
4. The OP wants a SF prospect, so only the TSP matters.

The simulation:
1. Randomly generate players until salary/ position fall in the right range.
2. Round the skills to integers (anyway, no one sees the decimal from the draft ;) ).
3. Repeat 10k times, make histograms.

The results:

The 1%/5%/10%/20%/30%/40%/50%/60%/70%/80%/90%/95%/99% percentiles for the two situations are:

For the 18yo: 33/36/38/39/41/42/43/44/45/46/48/49/52; average=42.87.
For the 19yo: 42/45/47/49/51/53/54/55/57/59/61/63/67; average=54.04.

Picture:

Analysis:
How much difference in TSP from a 18 and a 19 equalizes the value of the two player? It's probably true that the 18yo will get 15p+ in his first year with good training, but there is a training cost... So the expected market value of the two players might be quite close!

Personal thought:
1. I would probably pick whomever, sell him, and buy a real good one from the TL. The OP is from the U.S. so it should be easy to find the right man with the right flag!
2. If you want to change something in the generation, please suggest, maybe I can do one or two when I have the time ;).

Last edited by Feizai Passing by at 8/24/2020 7:34:16 PM

You don't need to go through all this trouble though: the minimum TSP of a SF in that range is 31 and the maximum is 54. So yeah, if it was completely random you'd expect a TSP of around 43.

The 19yo however is probably incorrect, because the theoretical minimum for a 5.5k PF is 39, but the maximum is actually 80.

How many of your simulations fell within the salary range and in the correct salary formula?

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/24/2020 9:57:45 PM

It's his assumption, not mine.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/25/2020 4:56:53 AM

Glad you liked it!

First I want to make a remark before the reply. Yesterday after the post, someone told me that Joey Ka reverse engineered BuzzerManager's formula in season 48, (160760.16), which should be much reliable than what I was doing. Maybe I will implement that when I have time, but below is based on what was on my post.

(1) I don't know how you rounded the numbers. It is very important because if you rounded them to the closest integer, the player will look on average 5 points better than what you look on the webpage. But if you use the floor function, the salary will be understimated.

Since I need to make my own estimate on the salary by re-calibrating CoachParrot's formulas, I scaled it so that my estimated salaries. It goes in the way that, when estimating skills as integers, are close to BuzzerManager's estimation, which seemed to estimate skills as half integers. And skills are indeed randomized between [0.5, 7,49] and [0.5, 8.49] for 18yo and 19yo, respectively (you caught me). By doing so there is neither the 5-point-average problem or the salary underestimate problem as you stated; the main issue is the reliability of the formula.

(2) Just as a theoretic question, I don't know if a Monte Carlo simulation is necessary or if you can be exhaustive.

When we have to round the player skill to integers {1, ...,, it is already a equal-distanced sampling rather than an exhaustive search, so it only provides another good estimate.

Skipping all the details, I'd say the full 8^10 searches will take probably 12-24 hours in my configuration, and maybe in minutes in a high spec computer and optimized code. But again, that is still only a good estimation since the actual parameter space is in floating numbers.

Below is for your older reply.

A second point is that 15 pops seems too optimistic.

15 points in the first season is based on the fact that most people train One to one for their SF trainee these days. So when I say what is the TSP difference for a 18yo and a 19yo to have the same market value, I'd say 15 is an upper bound. But it certainly should be lower. I would refrain for saying more since I didn't really made an investigation on the marker value for 9p+, so it is up to all of you to interpret anything from my last post.