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Whoever said you should expect 15-20 fouls hasn't seen my teams average of about 25pg! 45 in one game!

The more we learn, the less we know...

can we conclude to a certain randomsness here ? ;)

no seriously. Let me hurt my brain here and walk a train of thought, correct me if I make a mistake in my logic...
- In any case the fouls comitted will have to be calculated by the game engine somehow.
- I'd say the game engine triggers on certain types of events, and starts his calculation. (these events include scoring-attempt, defense-attempt, rebound-attempt,...). Note that running fouls and 3sec violations are just a way of showing a turnover, so nothing to do with fouls here!
- the engine will need a formula, so it is obvious that some parameters will have to be used.
- in order to not have to make different formula's for different triggers, the parameters will be general parameters, and therefor stamina, experience and game shape for instance could be used. There IS a possibility that the BBs are not lazy, and made different formula's for every different event, in which case they could add defensive and offensive and rebound, and other skills.
- Since many managers lately try to figure it out, and come to contradictory results using skills like defense and stuff, I'd say the BB where lazy. ;þ (well, no offense, I would be too, especially when you can then watch all those curious wanting-to-know managers try to figure out how it works and go scrambling all kinds off skills in it to figure it out while all the while the formula might be prety simple)
- this results in me thinking there is 1 foul-calculating formula for each foul calculation, but then again, the game engine needs to know the type of foul to show in the commentary box, so... . Actually it doesn't realy matter if this is, or is not the case for what is following, so don't crack your heads over it. ;)
- since there are many many triggers in 1 game, and every player can only have 6 before fouling out, there must be some decent chance the fould calculation comes out negative, and no foul is made. But, on the other hand, fouls should occasionally be there.
- now here is the clue: would the calculation depend mostly on the parameters that are set, like the skills (no matter if they are specific, or general) then the calculation would mostly end in the same result, meaning that 1 player either makes hardly a foul in 10 games, while an other fouls out after 5 minutes every game... Because this is no fun, there has to be some kind of variable into the formula.
- 1 way to add a variable is to add a random factor, and I'm sure there is one (as will in every calculation since otherwise the result of a calculation would always be the same) BUT, I also think there is 1, or more other extra parameters in the formula that are variable, but not random. an example of such a parameter could be: fouls made already in this quarter, and/or in this game, and/or the previous game, and/or his average amount of fouls he made in his career, last year, last moth, etc. There are loads of parameters that change prety fast over a short period of time that could be used for this purpose.
- in the end, it will always stay a calculation, and even if a player has only 5 % chance it becomes a foul, if he gets unlucky, he fouls 3 times in a row. Mostly though, and that's my opinion, the calculation will have a nature more like 30/70 to 70/30 percentage, depending on the situation ofcourse. Meaning there is about 30% of randomsness.

(and now I need to cut my logic and go on in the next post because I already used up my max amount of characters...)

continuation of previous post:

- all these points lead to me thinking there is a lot less to it than we all think.
If you ask me, the calculation is rather simple, not too many parameters are being used, but due to the high amount of triggers when a fouldcalculation needs to be done, and the fact it should mostly not come out as a foul to not spoil the game it results in a larger variety of outcomes, which results in us not being able to figure out what we need to avoid them, I dont even think we can, and I also don't think we should be able to avoid them. And honestly, if they wanted to keep the random factor as low as possible, but still generate good results, it would be nearly impossible to create a formula.

...and now I wait for a BB to tell me he did the impossible. ;)
(I know BB-Domenica's fingers are itching) ;þ

my excuses for the long post, it seems to be a nasty habbit of LA's to create large messages (at least I read that somewhere, and I imediatly recognised this characteristic to be my own. ;)

still i wonder which parameters are used?

That's quite a bit of thought you've put into this. ;)

I'm inclined to agree that there is likely more random responsible for a player's fouling (or not fouling) than there is skill set. That said, it may have more to do with the opposing player or team than the player who fouls.

The rules:

The central part of the game engine is how the half court offense/defense works. The general idea is that a team gets a series of opportunities to score. What kind, and what the quality of those opportunities are is a function of the offense they are running, the matchups between the offensive players and their defenders. A player must decide whether the opportunity presented is good enough to take a shot… this of course changes as a function of amongst other things… the shot clock, the players experience, the score of the game, the history of the quality of shots the team has seen recently, the offense the team is running, and whether that rookie shooting guard of yours thinks he knows better than the coach does how good he is at making jump shots.

That suggests to me that if the opposing team's SF keeps getting the quality shots, my team's SF is going to have a greater chance of getting into foul trouble. But perhaps I'm over-simplifying.

ofcourse if 1 player from the opposing team takes the majority of shots, his defender has bigger chance to foul out.
But in my opinion that is because he will have more triggers where a foulcalculation is done. The more calculations a player gets on himself, the more fouls he will get. At least that seems logical to me...
If you look at it like this, it is not nessecary the skills of the players in question, but the amount of triggers that set the amount of fouls.