Posts tagged "Stats"
Several small Football GM stat/simulation improvements
Simulated sports can never be exactly the same as real sports, but the closer it gets, the better. So when you notice something weird in the stats or in the play-by-play log, please let me know. That's how I found out about all these little issues in Football GM that I just fixed in version 2023.06.21.1277:
Bold league leading stats on player profile pages
Inspired by basketball-reference.com, on player profile pages I added bold/highlighted text for each stat a player leads the league in. Most players don't lead the league in anything, in which case there is no change for them. But for the top players in your league, it gives you a quick glance at just how dominant they've been.
It works on all the stat tables on the player page - regular stats, advanced stats, playoff stats, etc. It also works on player ratings, and even ages to show you the oldest player in the league.
I know this seems like a simple little feature, but there's actually a lot of details involved in implementing this, so I figured I would blog about it!
Better plus/minus stats
For a long time, Basketball GM has had raw plus/minus (or +/-) as a stat, which is how many points per game his team scores with him on the floor minus how many points it gives up. In basketball, this is not the most useful stat in the world for multiple reasons.
One is that it's not adjusted for playing time, but obviously it's very different to have a +/- of -1 per 10 minutes or -1 per 30 minutes. To address that, the +/- stat has been replaced by a "per 100 possessions" version, which makes comparisons of this value more fair.
But even per 100 possessions, it's a pretty shitty stat because if you play with good teammates you'll have a good +/- even if you're not very good. This is the problem that various adjusted plus/minus stats try to solve with fancy statistics. Those are probably too complicated to include in BBGM, although BBGM does include the box plus/minus (BPM) stat which is a simpler approximation of adjusted plus/minus.
No more hard cutoff in three point shooting tendency
You may have noticed a funny thing about the number of three pointers that certain players take. There was a hard cutoff at about 35 in the 3 point rating. Slightly above that cutoff and players would take a few three pointers per game. Slightly below and players would take none. This has never made any sense.
It was particularly annoying for players barely above the cutoff, since they are bad three point shooters, so you don't actually want them taking a bunch of threes. That puts you in a situation where you may be hoping a player's three point rating does not improve, so they can stay below the cutoff rather than chucking up a bunch of inefficient shots.
Now, finally, that hard cutoff is gone. The number of three point shots is now continuous. Players with ratings from 35-45 will shoot fewer three pointers (most noticeable towards the lower end of that range), and players with ratings below 35 will shoot more. Not a lot, but more than the 0 they shot previously.
Some people may think a better solution would be a more fundamental change in how shot selection works, and they might be right. The advantage of what I did here is that it's a quick little fix that mostly leaves the game alone, except to address this one annoying issue.
Historical stats in real players leagues
It's almost a year since real players were added to Basketball GM. Today there is another big improvement to this feature: historical stats.
When starting a new realy players league, there is a new Historical Stats setting:
The default on PCs is All seasons, active and Hall of Fame players only. That means you'll see the full career stats up to the current season for all active players, and the Hall of Fame will be fully populated as well.
The default on mobile is None which is the same as it used to be. This is just because loading the stats uses a fair amount of bandwidth and disk space, so I'm wary of making it the default on mobile.
But the really cool option is All seasons, teams, and players. That gives you the full league history back to 1947, including:
Game Highs, like the most points each player scored in a game
Basketball Reference has a lot of cool features. One of those cool features is Game Highs, where on every player page you can see a table of their highest single game statistical outputs, broken down by season or career. So for each player, you can see the most points, rebounds, assists, etc. they ever recorded.
Now Basketball GM has a very similar feature, also called Game Highs. You can view it in two places. First, in the Game Highs table on each player profile page:
Even more advanced stats!
Earlier this week I added a bunch of advanced stats to Basketball GM. Well, now there's even more.
Team Advanced Stats: Go to Team Stats and switch from Team to Advanced to view stats like Pythagorean wins and losses and offensive and defensive ratings. Basketball-Reference.com has a good glossary of terms if you don't know what some of the stats are.
Player Win Shares and Ratings: Player pages and the Player Stats page now show offensive and defensive ratings along with offensive win shares, defensive win shares, win shares, and win shares per 48 minutes.
You guys like stats, right?
I rolled out a few new features over the past week, all aimed at one goal: more stats. Ideally, Basketball GM should provide you with all the advanced stats available for real basketball leagues. It's not there yet, but it's closer. Here's what's new: