The balance between IS and ID for guards was disrupted further. To deal with guards with absurdly high IS, managers
had to start using zone defenses, forcing those guards to take more inside shots over centers instead of guards who could never realistically afford enough ID to contest their shots.
Only
after that did managers optimize the 3-2 zone even further by creating blockers with SB 23+ who could contest those inside shots from IS 23+ guards on an even higher level.
This is why 3-2 zone with two elite shot blockers is not the actual problem. It is simply the symptom.
Increasing the cost of SB for centers was necessary. I wouldn't even call it an increase, it was more like restoring it to the fair value it used to have. Doing a massive increase in one season is a problem of its own, but since there are more major issues atm, I'll not focus on it here. However, increasing the cost of SB for centers does nothing to make managers return to m2m.
If managers can no longer afford inside players with ID 22 and SB 22, what will happen? They will simply use inside players with ID 21 and SB 21. Because the reality is still the same: putting a low-ID guard against a high-IS guard in m2m is not a tactical decision. It is volunteering your defender to be a traffic cone in front of a bulldozer.
And if the price of SB for inside players is increased even further, managers will simply optimize around it again. Maybe they will use a 3-2 zone with only one elite shot blocker. Maybe they will use a defensive center with high ID and moderate SB, like ID 22 and SB 15.
And if SB becomes so expensive that training it twice will lead to automatic bankruptcy, managers will
still find a way to play zone. They will even use 3-2 with normal centers, or switch to outside box and 1.
Because at the end of the day,
anything is better than watching a guard with ID 13 trying to defend a guard with IS 23 in m2m. That is not defense. That is a player politely asking his opponent "Mr. O'neal, please step on me harder!"
And now we arrive at the current salary formula change for guards, so let's analyze it. This "SF"
(50507521) received a salary increase of exactly 4%. He went from 201 272 to 209 482 with these skills:
Meanwhile, all-round SFs designed for m2m, with IS below 20 received a 6-7% increase. And those rare SFs with high SB who are even better for m2m, were hit even harder.
BuzzerManager's salary calculator wasn't 100% accurate, but it was still the closest approximation of the old salary formula. According to its calculations, we get the following:
PG: +1 ID costs about the same as +1 IS
SG: +1 ID costs about the same as +1 IS
SF: +1 ID costs about
46x more than +1 IS
PF: +1 ID costs about the same as +1 IS
C: +1 ID costs about the same as +1 IS
Read that again. Even if the BM calculations are off and +1 ID for SF costs only several times more than +1 IS, the point remains. So long as player's position is SF, you can pretty much spam IS as much as you want, until his position switches to a PF. That's how absurdly unbalanced the salary between IS and ID already is for SFs, and why managers spam IS.
Virtually every issue for guard salaries can be traced back to one absurdity: IS is calculated as a secondary skill for SFs while ID is calculated as a primary skill.