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