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I'm interested in training guys to run a Princeton offense. Has anyone had success running it? And what do I need in my players? I'm assuming I'd need high passing on my bigmen and I'd need inside shot and jump range on all my players.

I'm interested in training guys to run a Princeton offense. Has anyone had success running it? And what do I need in my players? I'm assuming I'd need high passing on my bigmen and I'd need inside shot and jump range on all my players.

Anyone who has bad handling or passing will turn the ball over a lot.
Anyone who has bad jump range or jump shot will miss a lot of shots.
Anyone who has high driving but low inside shot will go about 3-17 on driving layups.

It's an offense that's deceptively simple in this game - if you have anyone that can make it fail, it will fail spectacularly. If everyone is well-suited to it, it can work really well, although you'll still have six minute stretches where you score maybe two points.

Good honest answer! Haha. Sounds like there’s some kinks to be worked out with it still.

Anyone who has bad handling or passing will turn the ball over a lot.

I think this should be investigated. I have a player with 1 HA and 6 PA and his Ast numbers are higher than TOs (which are not high anyway). He plays C so he does not do much ball handling, however I think there is a case for HA being a bit overrated in that respect. You can also see 18 HA / 15 PA players making bad passes repeatedly in a game.

Anyone who has bad handling or passing will turn the ball over a lot.

I think this should be investigated. I have a player with 1 HA and 6 PA and his Ast numbers are higher than TOs (which are not high anyway). He plays C so he does not do much ball handling, however I think there is a case for HA being a bit overrated in that respect. You can also see 18 HA / 15 PA players making bad passes repeatedly in a game.

Yes, but what kind of A:TO does he give you when you play Princeton against a team of similar quality to your own? I don't have a lot of data points with handling or passing that low in my Princeton history, since my current crop of guards played basically Patient when they were getting their SB training. The only example I can reasonably use is Michael Klein, who I know was drafted with 1 in both PA and HA. He also played only in friendlies/Cup games early in his career and I did a lot of 1v1 and passing along with pressure his first few seasons. By the time I hit the almost exclusive Princeton run (seasons 21-25, roughly), he was already up to 5 PA/6 HA and so wasn't quite the disaster that I thought when I let someone talk me into keeping and training him.

I don't know because I don't play Princeton, however he generally does pretty well, especially as a C:http://www.buzzerbeater.com/player/30952612/careerstats.a...

He has recorded 138 assist to 117 TO for me in D1.

And here you are posting anecdotal evidence in a thread about the Princeton offense. Where people who are interested in the game come for help.

Whatever floats your boat mate. However if you checked the stats of the player I linked you will see that even at D1 level he had no need for HA to be effective.

It's good to know that seasons and seasons of 'stats' mean 'anecdotal evidence' in some backwards area of the US where people also don't bother doing any research or concerning themselves with facts. I do occasionally play Princeton, but I cannot present this player's season stats and claim I mostly play outside tactics because it's not true. Anyway the most recent competitive game where I played Princeton was this:
(99792152) The 1 HA / 6 PA player had 3 assist and 1 turnover in 18 minutes

Princeton emphasises flow, therefore there is very limited ground to believe a player who has more AST than TO in general would have a much worse outcome in Princeton. Unless that player was forced to pass out dunks and open inside shots or hooks, but that would be a problem with the tactic not with his skills. This player has much better results in LP than he does in LI and LP is a tactic that looks for a good shot much more than LI. He's shooting 54%/23%/88% for the season despite no HA and no DR and in fact his TO numbers are sometimes lower than players who have double digit HA in my league (see even players below who have more TO than him despite playing in lower leagues).

So yes I am pretty sure that he provides convincing evidence that PA is a much more effective skill than HA because he has no HA and that makes it evident. It means low HA does not necessarily turn into a boatload of steals and bad passes, while low PA is guaranteed to kill your Assists numbers.

HA won't get you assists and it's debatable to what extent it will reduce the turnovers (which is why I replied to hrudey). It is very pertinent to this thread that HA may not be important at all while PA certainly is. There are plenty of players with very high HA and no PA, perhaps you could study those and tell us how they perform in both Ast and TOs. I will help you out, check the following who are the reverse of my player:
- (35968295) 1 PA 10 HA and he has played Princeton 4 times and Motion 6 times this season.
- (27293056) 1 PA 8 HA mostly playing patient
- (33957686) 1 PA 14 HA played only R&G
- (38284043) 1 PA 12 HA only neutral tactics

I could provide you with more anecdotal facts, but unfortunately they would show the same exact thing, so there is really no point.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 04/05/2018 09:30:16

A won't get you assists and it's debatable to what extent it will reduce the turnovers (which is why I replied to hrudey). It is very pertinent to this thread that HA may not be important at all while PA certainly is. There are plenty of players with very high HA and no PA, perhaps you could study those and tell us how they perform in both Ast and TOs. I will help you out, check the following who are the reverse of my player:

I think the problem I have with contributing more is that for pretty much the entire time I've played this game until this recent experimentation, I've been obsessive about making sure my guys don't have low PA or HA, and I'd always been among top two or three in fewest turnovers. Most of the low HA/PA evidence I have is anecdotal from Klein, who was 1/1. Hitchcock started 7 HA/1PA, and he's still only 10 HA/3 PA, which could lend more support to the "bad passing is bad" aspect but it a poor testbed for the other side.

The reason I mention the Princeton specifically is that the flow skills of the C in particular do tend to matter more than in most offenses. Passing on big men is extremely useful at all times, of course - the C assist to the PF for a dunk is likely one of the easiest baskets to convert. But Princeton seems to use that even more on passes back to the exterior as well as passing to people for driving attempts, which unfortunately seems to be way too frequent with a solid passing C and a guard/SF who has high driving and low IS.

My other bigs have 11, 12 and 13 PA and when I played Princeton in Utopia against weaker competition I was playing Cornaglia at PF who had 20 HA and 11 PA if I remember right. Needless to say Vadikolias is the only player in my entire roster with such low PA and HA, which I suspected would make it more TO prone. It very unfortunate I didn't take note of another big man who sold a few weeks ago who was similar to Vadikolias (he had 1 HA / DR, and 6 OD / 7 PA were swapped compared to him) but I can guarantee he had no TO issue either.

My point is that after seeing how Vadikolias has done in the last 5 or 6 seasons I'm very skeptical about HA. I'm sure it reduces the turnovers, but the real question is by how much. I know that PA reduces turnovers because the player can find a way to get rid of the ball when he's in a pickle. Turnovers are not only bad passes and it stands to reason that different TOs are affected by HA in a different way. TOs as far as I know can be:
STEAL_ON_PASS
STEAL
BAD_PASS
TRAVEL
OFF_FOUL
THREE_SECOND
SHOT_CLOCK_ZERO
and a Bad Pass includes different situations (such as receiver not ready) although I suppose that's purely cosmetic.

That said, the elephant in the room is DR, obviously. HA always come with DR and it appears that more DR = more touches/shots. That seems to be the case in most tactics at any level. I have no doubt that lower DR reduces the number of TO opportunities and changes the kind of shot a player will take to some extent.

For season 38 and 39 I have full data on every single event which happened in the EBBL. I can't collect more data until I get supporter again as I need the play-by-play. In any case, in S39 my 2 starting bigs fared like this:
- 20% of Vadikolias (1 DR and 17 IS) shots were Dunks and another 21% were Inside shots. He had then 8% Putbacks and virtually no Driving Layups (he literally had 1). He had 170 attempts in 421 minutes, 14 of which resulted in a foul.
- 23.5% of Ma Anhui's (12 DR 13 PA and 12 IS) shots were Driving Layups, 13% were Dunks, 10% were inside shots 16% were Putbacks. He had 205 attempts in 630 minutes, 22 of which resulted in a foul.

You see a clear difference in shot selection there and these guys often played together or at least against similar competition. My guess is that tactics influence the general type of shot, but the rest is down to individual skills. So a close/midrange shot can become a Driving Layup instead for players with DR.

Note that the league-wide:
- Dunks had a FG% of 83% and 13% Foul Rate;
- Driving layups had a FG% of 42% and 10.8% Foul Rate;
- Inside shots had a FG% of 39% and 11.4% Foul Rate
- Hooks had a FG% of 25% and a 9% Foul Rate

Unfortunately there were only 7 games where Princeton was played that season so I would need a larger database with more seasons or more leagues to extrapolate meaningful data for Princeton only. Maybe if I get supporter again I will expand the DB and finish the output stats properly.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 04/05/2018 12:36:20

Offtopic, but I have to expand your numbers, cause they are only half-finished
In 2012 I made an analysis of all types of shots in BB. It's similar to your last paragraph.

- Dunks had a FG% of 83% and 13% Foul Rate

I had: 75% FG ; 70-75% assisted ; 30% of all actions were defended ; 12% foul drawn ; 20-25% foul during defended shot

- Driving layups had a FG% of 42% and 10.8% Foul Rate

35% FG ; 40-45% assisted ; 55% of all actions were defended ; 11-12% foul drawn ; 23% foul during defended shot

Inside shots had a FG% of 39% and 11.4% Foul Rate

38-40% FG ; 45-50% assisted ; 50% of all actions were defended ; 10-13% foul drawn; 20-25% foul during defended shot

Hooks had a FG% of 25% and a 9% Foul Rate

25% FG ; 10-15% assisted ; 85% of all actions were defended ; 7-10% foul drawn ; 5-10% foul during defended shot

And I'm back into hibernation ;)