The way the sim software is set up, all of the baseline data that decides how individual players will perform are based on LAST year’s stats. So look at how a player performed in the previous season to figure out how the sim will perceive their value. This is where it might be advantageous to look at per 36 minute stats for players who get small amounts of playing time in real life, but may have a larger role on your DTNBA team. By no means does it statistically translate 1:1 from these stats into the sim, but it’s one way to estimate how a player might do in the sim. Also, because we are using last year’s stats as baseline data, we also use last year’s salary figures to determine a players cap hit. The last thing you want to do is draft a player that had a contract value of 1 and then realize that they will be a 3 cap hit once the starts.
The other important thing to know is that each team is allowed to update 1 player at the mid-way point of each season. The mid-way point happens whenever a DTNBA team has played 41 games. This date is different for each team depending on your schedule. So if a player is exploding onto the scene and is outperforming his previous year’s stats, you have the opportunity to use this rule to help improve your team.
So how do stats translate into the sim? Well, the sim is a tricky system. Basically, the Commissioner puts in the total sum numbers of each category into the sim for a player. So total points, assists, steals, minutes played, games played, etc. The sim takes those numbers and generates a category rating out of 100 for that players much in the same way NBA 2K does. I didn’t write the program, so I don’t know exactly how it does this, but it does. LOL.
Now if you look at the right side of the roster pages you will see a 1-9 rating for each player for their outside, driving, post, and transition offence and defense.
O-O = Outside Offence (think Ray Allen)
T-O = Transition Offence (think Steve Nash)
D-D = Driving Defense (think Bruce Bowen)
P-D = Post Defense (think Dikembe Mutombo)
Now these are numbers generated by the sim based on the stats I input, but I think that total minutes play a bit a role in these ratings. One final caveat with using per-36 numbers are that if a player has played a really low number of minutes on the season, say like 500 total minutes, I have found the numbers won’t translate as well as they should and the ratings the sim generated will be a decent bit lower, maybe even like 10-15% lower than they should.
So to summarize, the sim generates box score ratings and defense/offence ratings for the players based on the stats I input. More total minutes = better. Very few total minutes = not good.
The next chart you see there is how those players produced in the sim based on the lineup provided by the former GM. In the sim, you don’t specifically determine that you want X player to play 35 min, but rather you submit a depth chart for each position and the program runs a simulation based on that active depth chart submission. This has a bit of a learning curve, but you’ll see how it looks when you start submitting a depth chart (DC).
So using per-36 numbers won’t dictate exactly how a player will react to the sim, but I always tell GM’s that it’s a useful tool to see how someone might pan out. However, it’s not the be-all and end-all of evaluation tools. Real boxscores can only really tell you that. I would say per-36 is best used to judge if a fringe player will do well if given heavy minutes on your DTNBA team.
