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aaaaaaaaaaa.aisku

So we have geared up to do these simulations on a wider basis, made some tweaks to the engine to make the pattern of fouling/being fouled more like the nba and tuned to individual players... so now we have to retune the engine to play realistic basketball again. But just for fun, given where the game engine stands now.. and I want to emphasize that I don't think the game engine is truly optimized at this point, i did a test sim on tonights Lakers/76ers game. In short, the simulations show the lakers winning ~75% of the time, with an average margin of ~7 points. Thaddeus Young leading scoring for the Sixers (>20 points), Kobe obviously for the Lakers (~30 or more) ... Elton Brand and Andrew Iguodala held to a below average game. If Philly wins it will be because someone unexpected broke out and scored in a big way... most likely Willie Green.

Last edited by BB-Forrest at 12/3/2008 3:58:23 PM

How do you guys determine the skills levels of individual players? Is it a judgment call or are you feeding their statistics into a program and it spits out their skills?

Steve

well that is changing on a daily basis.. like i said last time was a mix of stats and judgement... im trying to move to an all stats system, but i haven't perfected it yet... it might not be possible. this philly/LA comes from the all stats approach.

Last edited by BB-Forrest at 12/3/2008 6:14:49 PM

THIS IS ACTUALLY FROM BB-FORREST NOT MARK..

so as i suspected our prediction is only about 75% of the way there.... tonights LA/Philly game ended up 114/102.. which is about the same proportional margin as i predicted, but a higher pace. In general the scoring was much more balanced than the simulation... Kobe was the highest scorer though with over 30, Brand was limited severely, Iggy had an OK/kinda good night. Thaddeus Young didnt really break out though..

Looks like everybody is just a little too good defensively in the simulation... gotta make for some more exciting basketball... but its promising..

Last edited by BB-Forrest at 12/3/2008 9:49:23 PM

aisku

i personnally expect portland to lose, but greg oden will still get 30 + points.

just to clear things up: this game is already done with a 101 - 86 win for portland ;)
here´s the boxscore if you ar interested (http://www.nba.com/games/20081128/NOHPOR/boxscore.html)

hm, I guess we BB-managers have the advantage that the world of BB is after all slightly more deterministic than reality.

This i think is an interesting question. First just think about the nba... what do you think the variance is in the nba? I mean its not like you can ever play the same EXACT game many times in a row... so you cant know what the real variance of results are... This is relevant to the task I have before me in so far as whether I should care about my results exactly matching the results from the NBA... or should my view be that the average result is reasonable... and the actual NBA results might simply be a particular result picked from the distribution around that average.

Whats further the more and more dimensions that I consider measuring the results and evaluating how the simulation matches reality.. the more i should expect one of those dimensions to be away from the actual mean. I dont know if that's a clear description...

Let me try again in the context of buzzerbeater. Last season we made a change to the game engine which effectively reduced the variance of the results... Now there was some great debate amongst us as to whether that was appropriate, and how we should evaluate whether or not the variance was too small or too great. It seems some users really would love there to be zero variance, and the "better" team to win everytime.... Now of course I dont know how you define better other than running it through the simulation and if the simulation is non deterministic than that sort of loses meaning unless you mean run it a million times and pick the median result... If we did that would it be a better game? would it be more realistic? are the answers to both those questions actually different? or the same?

My contention is that the game should have some variance, and the actual result should deviate from the median result some percentage of the time. I think that is both more realistic and a more interesting game to play... but from reading the forums sometimes i get the feeling that the userbase does not agree and would rather there be no variance.