2025 CelticsBlog Draft - Sim Notes
After the draft, there will be a voting period, but primarily there will be a simulated season and playoffs. We will use
www.whatifsports.com to simulate the results, and I encourage you to sign up for a free account and check it out. I am a pretty new player over there, but I will share a few tips about how to perform well in the sim, what to consider, etc. Some of this is pulled from the website, some from the internet, some I wrote.
The SIM uses players real life stats to determine outcomes of each possession of a game. There is stamina that is based on how many minutes that player played in real life. All stats are based on %s, which helps compare eras better. Don't focus on things like PPG - you want to instead look at that player's usage % to see how often he shot/got fouled/turned the ball over per 100 possessions, and then his eFG% to see how efficiently he scored on that usage. You'll want to draft enough 3s (I aim for at least 400 3PM for a season based on my drafted players' real-life stats) so that your opponent doesn't pack the paint on you. Defense is important and if you do it right, you can draft 3 good defenders who can "switch" with your bad ones (like a good defensive player who is 95%+ at PG and SG and a bad defensive player who is 95%+ at PG and SG).
What isn't a problem:
Era-normalization: This is not really a problem. The website (the "Sim") looks at things in a "per possession" context. Usage rate, eFG%, foul draw rate, AST%, TO%, OREB%, DREB%, yada yada. All per-possession. So if Player A and Player B played in two separate eras with two vastly different paces, the stats will normalize that accordingly.
Example: we don't care about how many rebounds a player grabbed per game. We don't even care how many rebounds a player grabbed per36; we care about what % of available rebounds that player was able to grab.
There is also a small adjustment made to all players' 2FG% and 3FG% based on the average effectiveness of the era, and the website even approximated 3PM of players who played pre-3pt era, as well as approximating blocks/steals/etc for eras where that info wasn't tracked. It's not perfect, but it's not as big of a problem as you probably assumed it was, and I don't think there's a better solution out there.
Roster Fit/Chemistry: This isn't a problem. You have to build teams to compliment your other players' strengths. This isn't like a fantasy basketball team where you just sum the raw "points" your players produced. You still need to have a good balance of passing/spacing/rebounding/defense/positional versatility/bench/etc etc on your team. The engine is simulating what it thinks would happen if your players were on the court at the same time against your opponent's players.
Example: If you have McHale plus 3 good passers like Magic, Bird, and Stockton, then your McHale will probably score a higher FG% than he did in real life. If you put players who barely pass around McHale and make him create for himself, it would be lower.
Even though x,y, z are all great players in this format, you can't game the system by putting them all on the same team. Everyone would pack the paint on D against you and you'd struggle to score.
What actually is a problem with this methodology:
Style of play is nearly-invisible to the stats: The sim has no way of knowing that a player like Barkley would eat away the shotclock on ISOs. It just sees what % of possessions the player used, and what the results of those possessions were, and how the players around them might affect it. Unlike a video game, there's no physical attribute "speed", "agility", etc ratings.
Defensive ratings are imperfect: While most of the numbers on a player's card are based on their actual real-life stats, there is one semi-arbitrary number: defense. The website assigns a 0-100 score for every player's defense, and there is some human error in this one component. All-D and DPOY awards boost this score. There's a lot of accuracy in some instances. But for some players, the ratings are inaccurate.
Also, the website doesn't have a way to differentiate if a player is good at certain aspects of defense (on ISOs vs help, on perimeter vs paint, rotations, etc), just if they're good/average/bad at D overall, and how effective they are at guarding each position.
Teammate boosts: X shot over 65% in several seasons that he played with Y. The website has no way to separate how good he would have been in a vacuum/without Y in those seasons. So X is a very very very good player in the Sim and we don't know how accurate that would be. It's not as big of a problem as you're imagining. He still only shoots roughly as often as he did irl, so he's still just a putback & lob type of guy in the Sim. If you paired him with say Z (bad passer) as his PG in the sim, his numbers would drop significantly, just like in real life. But it is a small issue.
The Sim can't see invisible things like well-set screens, boxing out, etc. This means that X is considered a bad rebounder in the sim. In real life, we know that he helps his team secure rebounds even though he doesn't grab them often himself. This could be solved if someone ever made a more complex sim that looked at on-floor/off-floor ratings too. It also doesn't factor in clutch rankings, mental toughness, etc.
Gray area problems These are things that I don't think are a problem but someone might argue that they are:
Era-styles: Up above I explained how everything is pace-normalized and how efficiency is era-adjusted. The one caveat to that is that 3-point attempt rates are going to stay what they were. In real life, Larry Bird never made more than 90 3s in a season. Some people might say "if he played today, he'd attempt 600 per season!" Well, he didn't. I think trying to make him shoot more 3s on-paper than he did irl would lead to more problems than it solves, but just putting this here for anyone who has this thought/question.
Minutes: Players can only play roughly the amount of minutes that they played in real life before they start to get "fatigued" or injured. You could argue that if a bench player was given more opportunity, they could play more minutes just fine. I could argue that if we took all of the elite low-MPG guys and could play them starter minutes without penalties, X would be a top 50 player. I think it's better the way that it is.
How a player?s minutes are defined:
When selecting a season, look at the total minutes played. Divide total minutes by 82 games, and you have the minutes per game a player can be assigned in the sim (you can round decimals up to the nearest minute).
Efficiency vs. big minutes:
Players from the beginning of our timeline play more minutes than today?s players. Based on the minutes formula above, a lot of times stay players from before 2015 play significantly more minutes than players in the most recent years. So you?ll get the older players on the court more. On the flip side, the efficiency of modern stars is higher than that of older stars most of the time. Since stas get high usage rates, a guy from 04-05 is likely to be less efficient but still take up a sizable portion of the offensive load. This is more of an issue in the typical salary cap league where the older players are more expensive than the modern ones, and less of an issue here where there is essentially no budget. But something to consider when looking at the years your players played in, is the potential tradeoff between minutes and efficiency.
Positional eligibility:
One big difference between real life and the sim is that with the modern players we have eligible here, most of them can play at least 2 positions. Most PGs can play 1-2, most SGs can play 2-3, most SFs can play either 2-3 or 3-4 (or 2-4) and most PF and C can play both those spots. So in the sim you can have two small guards in the backcourt, or two big monsters in the paint, and it can work as long as your team overall is balanced and you have the limitations of those players compensated for elsewhere. In real life in a modern draft, you may not want to pair Kareem with Wilt because of spacing, but in the sim that duo would be dominant as long as you provided shooting and passing around it. Something to consider.
I hope the above helps. Feel free to ask any Q?s.
Topic: 2025 CelticsBlog Fantasy Draft: '05-'25 Edition (Read 9200 times)