BuzzerBeater Forums

i think the biggest flaw are the "end" game fouls when you watch the pure stats, in this phase of the game the offensiv team is much better in getting their good free throw shooters to the line even without a shot. And it isn't rare that you get 8+ free throws like this in a close game so the number is signifikant and leads to more freethrows of the good shooters.

Also fouls in the bonus, are giving free thows without a shot, even when they are in my eyes independent from free throw skills so not only the 3pt plays have less then 1 shot per two free throws.(and a 2 ppointer + one free throw should be as common in lower and high levels)

Your idea made me curious so I had a look with my roster.

I considered two analysis:

A) FT Skill vs FTs/(FGA+k*FT/2)
where k is a number between 0 and 1 (1 is just the case you made). I considered different choices for k, since, as the GM said, the number of total FTs can be significantly different from the double of shooting fouls (namely, the number of "additional FGA" you must add is smaller).

B) FT Skill vs FTs/(FG Missed + k*FT/2)
A good player should make a lot of FGs, so his calculated ratio would be pretty low even if his FT skill is good. So, I considered only missed shots here (k is the same as before)

Results...not good, I fear.

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/1340/catturaxs.jpg

Correlation value is 0.37 (0.57 if I delete the "outlier" at the top left corner of my graph, but with a so small sample even a player is significant), while the R-squared value is just 0.14 (0.32 witout the outlier).

Moreover, the player coloured by yellow in the graph only played 20 minutes in my season. If I delete him (after all, he didn't play enough, his data could be caused by random) both the correlation and R-squared stat fall (to 0.26 and 0.07 respectively).

Notice that this result is indipendent from the kind of analysis (A or B) and from the choice of the k value, (there is only a difference of 0.01-0.02, nearly, between the various values of correlation.)

Just to be sure, I added also your sample to mine (I used your graph, maybe the values were not exact but they should work). If I use both the samples together the correlation and R-squared both fall, again (corr=0.31, R^2=0.1)

After all, it's enough to see my graph to think there is no particular correlation. If you don't consider the yellow point, it seems just white noise to me. So i can only conclude there is no correlation between FT skill and the number of FTs.

Which is not strange, after all. If the shooter is not good at FTs, he won't look for them. But the defenders won't mind if they stop him with a foul...

Last edited by Paco el Niño de Piombo at 6/1/2011 5:08:35 AM

Cooooooooool! Nice stats.

Yes i cant believe i totally forgot about bonus free throw shots that happen when the other team has too many fouls. TOooooootally forgot about that. I feel ashamed to call myself a basketballer!

Yer those R-squared values are quite low, although our samples sizes are probably a bit too small for that kind of analysis. Maybe if i had a full year of data, plus satgnent FT levels all year, but at this stage it is looking like its pointing towards no correlation.

Which i agree, i remember when i used to play basketball, and we had aguy who would not miss from the line, we would just set him up to get fouled as often as possible driving to the ring etc. So it was a deliberate tactic, and i know players in the NBA go for that, someone like Dirk nowitzki definately does that. So maybe Buzzerbeater should do this?

i actually think it does, but maybe not all game. Liike the GM says, when you watch the game when there is bonus situation and its close, not only do good FT shooters tend to go to the line more, but also i think to some degree, that the coach sub's some of the better FT players on, dependant upon the situation. So maybe the game engine only takes this into account in this special circumstance?

one reason for the slight correlation might be that the FT skill is higher for older players in general, as are the other skills... so trainees might distort the picture.

Hey guys, good discussion, some interesting ideas coming out here.

To the poster who said 'older players' i can only assume that you actually meant players with higher experience will get more FT's per FGA.
To which i say, probably! Experience is this engima-type skill, which, is probably implemented a lot simpler than what most people would believe! But i do believe that experience has some kind of effect on this ratio.

As for driving, thats an interesting comment. Im not sure. I certainly don't disagree, I quickly analysed it same way i did with FT rating, and essentially its a worse 'direct' relationship between Driving and FTA.

But again, im only looking at my team, whom i mainly play an inside offence, so it could very well be different for a team who plays outside offence. I have a feeling the number of factors are large. Depends on opponents defense, defensive skills of individual opponents, your offense, game situation etc etc. in which case you would need a very large pool of players and data to really analyse this properly, all of which i just dont have. So no biggy.
I think in the end, its probably more related to, as you said, the hidden physicality trait that is within the game that people talk about. And its probably multiplied by a factor of X, by other stats, including Driving, FT, IS, Experience, etc etc.