Allowing GMs to edit "Primacy"

[Ian Noble]

Allowing GMs to edit "Primacy"

I'm in the process of working on some new code that will hopefully allow you GMs the ability to make sim changes by logging onto a shared Google Sheet and picking your rotations:



Bear in mind that this is currently just a big work-in-progress, and it's not a guarantee that it will ever be implemented, but just today I think I've figured out how to do it all now and I'm optimistic I'll never have to make a manual sim change ever again once the code is done

The most exciting thing I want to try and introduce is giving you GMs the ability to edit the in-game "Primacy" (as NBA Live calls it) rating, so you control which of your players shoot more! In the screenshot above it's controlled by the column with the stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

What is Primacy? Every player in the game has a Primacy rating and the main thing it controls is which of your players takes your team's shots! For instance TJ Leaf currently has relatively high Primacy compared to the rest of the Phoenix Suns, so even though he's benched he's leading his team in scoring! Primacy is proportional to the entire team as a whole: if I set one player to have 99 Primacy, and the rest of the players on the team to 1 Primacy, the player with 99 Primacy will take almost all the shots that game, and that's why whatever system I introduce will need to not skew Primacies in a way that damages the realism of the game.

Higher rated players tend to have higher Primacy and score more, which makes sense. Every player's Primacy changes by a random amount every time I save the game, but by incorporating this as an automated system it will overwrite the changes made by the sim engine each time I save after simming and give you GMs control!

HOWEVER! The biggest thing here is that I don't want to damage league realism and without any rules a GM could easily set James Harden's Primacy to 1 star and he'd score less than 10 points per game - that's not realism! In my opinion we need to identify and continually monitor a set of the league's best players to ensure their Primacy doesn't drop below a certain amount. Just as Yahoo fantasy leagues don't allow you to bench Lebron James, I think it would be good to identify players whose Primacy should never fall below, for instance, a rating of 80.

TL;DR: I'm making a system allowing GMs to choose who on their team can score but the system needs some level of regulation. Let's take some time to identify which players we consider to be scorers in which Tier:

Tier (Primacy Range): Example Players

• Tier 1 (90-99): Lebron James, Luka Doncic, Damian Lillard, Kawhi Leonard, Nikola Jokic, James Harden, Joel Embiid, Anthony Davis
• Tier 2 (80-99): CJ McCollum, Jaylen Brown, Karl Anthony Towns, DeMar DeRozan, Zach LaVine
• Tier 3 (1-80): All other players

[Jared Montini]

This sounds dope!

[Jerry West]

Can't be understated how big a step forward this possibly is

[Ian Noble]

Interested in getting you guys thoughts on the Tier system, or maybe a completely different system, it's all a work-in-progress currently.

[Ian Noble]

Examples to illustrate (completely pulling these numbers out of thin air currently):

Tier 1 player - 1 star primacy = between 90-93 primacy
Tier 1 player - 4 star primacy = between 94-97 primacy

Tier 2 player - 1 star primacy = between 80-85 primacy
Tier 2 player - 5 star primacy = between 91-99 primacy

Tier 3 player - 1 star primacy = between 1-32 primacy
Tier 3 player - 2 star primacy = between 25-43 primacy
Tier 3 player - 3 star primacy = between 35-55 primacy
Tier 3 player - 4 star primacy = between 49-72 primacy
Tier 3 player - 5 star primacy = between 65-80 primacy

[George Gervin]

Love the idea! As far as tiers, beyond the overall rating of a player, should we also consider their shot attempts/volume IRL as well? Some guys who are in the 80s tier that wouldn’t be Tier 1 (or maybe even 2) for Primacy boosts are, in real life, big time scorers (Donovan Mitchell, Trae Young, and Zach LaVine all good examples of guys 85 or lower rated who are averaging at least 24 PPG IRL).

[Ian Noble]

Ahh so I might have jumped the gun on the spreadsheet editing! Configuring Google Sheets has taken 90% of my time, the actual coding 10%. Looks like there's no way to stop external users (you guys) from changing font size and colour, or removing all the settings I've put in place, which just aint the way to do it.

Back to square one on the web-side of things.

[Shaquille O'Neal]

10 stars for Harden Iso

[Jeremiah Hill]

This used to be the hidden thing no one knew about lol.

[Ian Noble]

I'm tempted to just go ahead with this plan anyway. You filthy GMs () would only be able to mess with the formatting of your own team section on the shared spreadsheet, so I'd know who to reprimand when the time came for it

edit: and in the longer term I'd find a more robust solution.

[Ian Noble]

As an "Alpha Test" if any of you would like to play around with editing your team, please follow these steps:

- Get a Google Account if you don't have one already - you can even attach non-Google email addresses if needed.
- Direct Message me the email address on your Google Account.
- I will reply with a link to the Database

Note: this will not actually make in-game Sim Changes yet, it's just to test how things might go wrong with using a restricted access Google Sheet.

[Ian Noble]

Feb 2, 2021 13:57:24 GMT Ian Noble said:

As an "Alpha Test" if any of you would like to play around with editing your team, please follow these steps:

- Get a Google Account if you don't have one already - you can even attach non-Google email addresses if needed.
- Direct Message me the email address on your Google Account.
- I will reply with a link to the Database

Note: this will not actually make in-game Sim Changes yet, it's just to test how things might go wrong with using a restricted access Google Sheet.

bumping

[Kevin Hollis]

I would like the ability to edit other team's primacy ratings.

[Ian Noble]

Primacy is good to go. The difficult thing will be testing how I feel the standard deviations around the 1 to 5 stars should behave. All GMs so far have a lot of players with just 1 star, which is fine (my team is the same), but it does mean I need to place a lot more <if> <then> functionality around that basic 1 star rating.

The next step is manually preventing great scorers from taking no shots. If I set Lebron James to have 1 star, we do not want him shooting 3 shots per game, his Primacy should be between 85-99 only imho, otherwise the realism is ruined.

I took a cursory glance across the rosters and these are the tiers I've put together below. I think "tier applications" may become part of the Stock Watch process from now on - for instance Jerami Grant probably go into the "top_tier_scorers" list, but not until his rating gets bumped by Walt.

# 85 - 99 Primacy
god_tier_scorers = [
                   "Anthony Davis",
                   "Bradley Beal",
                   "Damian Lillard",
                   "Devin Booker",
                   "Giannis Antetokounmpo",
                   "James Harden",
                   "Jayson Tatum",
                   "Jimmy Butler",
                   "Joel Embiid",
                   "Kawhi Leonard",
                   "Kevin Durant",
                   "Kyrie Irving",
                   "LeBron James",
                   "Luka Doncic",
                   "Nikola Jokic",
                   "Paul George",
                   "Steph Curry",
                   "Trae Young"
                   ]

# 70 - 95 Primacy                    
top_tier_scorers = [
                   "Andre Drummond",
                   "Bam Adebayo",
                   "Brandon Ingram",
                   "Chris Paul",
                   "Collin Sexton",
                   "D'Angelo Russell",
                   "DeAaron Fox",
                   "DeMar DeRozan",
                   "Domantas Sabonis",
                   "Donovan Mitchell",
                   "Ja Morant",
                   "Jaylen Brown",
                   "Jamal Murray",
                   "Julius Randle",
                   "Karl Anthony Towns",
                   "Kemba Walker",
                   "Kyle Lowry",
                   "Kristaps Porzingis",
                   "LaMarcus Aldridge",
                   "Malcolm Brogdon",
                   "Nicola Vucevic",
                   "Pascal Siakam",
                   "Russell Westbrook",
                   "Shai G Alexander",
                   "Victor Oladipo",
                   "Zach LaVine",
                   "Zion Williamson"
                   ]

[Andrei Kirilenko]

Not to nitpick your own player here Ian but what are these tiers based on? For instance Jamal Murray averages 18 ppg (41st), on 15.6 FGA (32nd), and on 23.7 usage (53rd). Compare that to Gordon Hayward at 22.3 ppg (27th), 16.6 FGA (27th), and 24.9 usage (46th).

Hayward is by all means a better scorer / higher primacy player but then doesn’t even appear on the list. Perhaps we can have a system based on either FGA or Usage for what tier a player should be in?

[Ian Noble]

Feb 15, 2021 0:18:05 GMT Andrei Kirilenko said:

Not to nitpick your own player here Ian but what are these tiers based on? For instance Jamal Murray averages 18 ppg (41st), on 15.6 FGA (32nd), and on 23.7 usage (53rd). Compare that to Gordon Hayward at 22.3 ppg (27th), 16.6 FGA (27th), and 24.9 usage (46th).

Hayward is by all means a better scorer / higher primacy player but then doesn’t even appear on the list. Perhaps we can have a system based on either FGA or Usage for what tier a player should be in?

Yeah I posted the tiers to get everyone's input on the tiers, so by all means post your own additions/subtractions.

[George Gervin]

I think something like these could work for parameters:

• God tier: Player must average at least 26% or higher usage rate AND average at least (combined) 24 FG + FT attempts per game
• Top tier: Player must average at least 23% or higher usage OR average at least (combined) 20 FG + FT attempts per game (think a lower threshold is okay here)

To give an example of how those tiers would break down, right now using those God tier parameters on the NBA’s stat website, the following players would qualify:

• Beal
• Doncic
• Tatum
• Lillard
• Curry
• Giannis
• LeBron 
• KD
• LaVine
• Kawhi
• Kyrie
• Embiid
• Mitchell
• Jokic
• Brown
• Young

Are there outliers? Absolutely— Harden wouldn’t qualify under those parameters based on shot attempts, but no one would argue he isn’t in that tier. PG also does not qualify based on shot attempts falling short, but no argument there either on his inclusion. Im also not sure Brown, Mitchell, or LaVine belong in that tier even though they qualify. But some criteria like that does help truncate the pool in a way that’s somewhat objective.

[Andrei Kirilenko]

I wonder if we just leave it up to GMs for now and see how it goes. We can call each other out if we notice any sort of abuse of power (i.e. intentional tanking). I think Gervin's formula is good but it will be impossible to account for team-specific situations in D5. For instance, what if a team was Murray and 4 scrubs? Surely we would want Murray's primacy to be near 99, but our tiered system might prevent us from doing that.

[Ian Noble]

I should just clarify since I'm getting questions via DM:

Primacy via the Google Sheet is not implemented yet.

The code is ready, but we need to iron out all these bits first.

[Ian Noble]

I think it's good to identify these two God/Top tier groups, but we should make decisions based around those "God"/"Top" tiers part of the stock watch process otherwise we're going to be constantly wrangling over which players go where, also it could change on a daily basis.

[Ian Noble]

Feb 15, 2021 14:04:01 GMT Andrei Kirilenko said:

I wonder if we just leave it up to GMs for now and see how it goes.

This would be a fun test for sure, but I don't think it would be too pretty , but I am tempted to just give it a go anyway.

How long before Primacy affects free agency negotiations I wonder!

[James Kay]

I would suggest doing away with any classification system for primacy. It seems to me to add an unnecessary complexity.

The purpose of allowing GMs to edit primacy is to give us some additional control over our team styles - this seems to stifle it.

We already have a sort of vague rule against sitting your best players for tanking purposes - why not do something similar with primacy?

I feel that anything should be fair play a long as its not intended for tanking. If a GM figures out that forcing one of their stars to take a back seat role is beneficial to the team, that's not unrealistic in the slightest.

[Ian Noble]

Feb 15, 2021 23:41:41 GMT James Kay said:

I would suggest doing away with any classification system for primacy. It seems to me to add an unnecessary complexity.

The purpose of allowing GMs to edit primacy is to give us some additional control over our team styles - this seems to stifle it.

We already have a sort of vague rule against sitting your best players for tanking purposes - why not do something similar with primacy?

I feel that anything should be fair play a long as its not intended for tanking. If a GM figures out that forcing one of their stars to take a back seat role is beneficial to the team, that's not unrealistic in the slightest.

Yeah we could at least trial this for a week.

As a very basic start:

1 Star:
Primacy = 25 +/- 15

2 Star:
Primacy = 40 +/- 10

3 Star:
Primacy = 55 +/- 10

4 Star:
Primacy = 70 +/- 10

5 Star:
Primacy = 85 +/- 14

[James Kay]

Feb 16, 2021 11:45:12 GMT Ian Noble said:

Feb 15, 2021 23:41:41 GMT James Kay said:

I would suggest doing away with any classification system for primacy. It seems to me to add an unnecessary complexity.

The purpose of allowing GMs to edit primacy is to give us some additional control over our team styles - this seems to stifle it.

We already have a sort of vague rule against sitting your best players for tanking purposes - why not do something similar with primacy?

I feel that anything should be fair play a long as its not intended for tanking. If a GM figures out that forcing one of their stars to take a back seat role is beneficial to the team, that's not unrealistic in the slightest.

Yeah we could at least trial this for a week.

As a very basic start:

1 Star:
Primacy = 25 +/- 15

2 Star:
Primacy = 40 +/- 10

3 Star:
Primacy = 55 +/- 10

4 Star:
Primacy = 70 +/- 10

5 Star:
Primacy = 85 +/- 14

Is there any way to allow us to edit the raw primacy number?

[Ian Noble]

Feb 16, 2021 14:00:18 GMT James Kay said:

Feb 16, 2021 11:45:12 GMT Ian Noble said:

Yeah we could at least trial this for a week.

As a very basic start:

1 Star:
Primacy = 25 +/- 15

2 Star:
Primacy = 40 +/- 10

3 Star:
Primacy = 55 +/- 10

4 Star:
Primacy = 70 +/- 10

5 Star:
Primacy = 85 +/- 14

Is there any way to allow us to edit the raw primacy number?

Yes but then we'd REALLY get extreme results. D5 shouldn't just be a shitshow

In testing I once set Steph Curry's Primacy to 99, the rest of the team to 1, and he averaged 84.1ppg. That's fun for like a week but after that the integrity of the entire league would be doomed

[Andrei Kirilenko]

What if each team gets ~700 primacy points to distribute between their team? And you have to distribute all 700? That way it prevents one 99 and a bunch of 1s

[Walt Frazier]

Personally I prefer Ian's range method. We can test/re-work if we want to change the ranges, or make them larger / smaller, but while I like the customization I actually don't think I want to account for "x" number of points every time. I love the idea of just setting a 1 or 5 star and letting the program take care of the rest.

[Ian Noble]

I've now tested and tomorrow's sims can now be done without any other filters than these:

1 Star:
Primacy = 25 +/- 15

2 Star:
Primacy = 40 +/- 10

3 Star:
Primacy = 55 +/- 10

4 Star:
Primacy = 70 +/- 10

5 Star:
Primacy = 85 +/- 14

GMs with complete control over who is shooting. I seriously doubt this system stays exactly as it is (!) but it's worth a try.

edit: just a note that primacy levels will remain unchanged for those GMs who have yet to set their primacy levels.

[James Kay]

Feb 17, 2021 22:31:54 GMT Ian Noble said:

I've now tested and tomorrow's sims can now be done without any other filters than these:

1 Star:
Primacy = 25 +/- 15

2 Star:
Primacy = 40 +/- 10

3 Star:
Primacy = 55 +/- 10

4 Star:
Primacy = 70 +/- 10

5 Star:
Primacy = 85 +/- 14

GMs with complete control over who is shooting. I seriously doubt this system stays exactly as it is (!) but it's worth a try.

edit: just a note that primacy levels will remain unchanged for those GMs who have yet to set their primacy levels.

Am I just being dumb ? where is the link to the google sheet?

[Bryan Colangelo]

Feb 18, 2021 0:11:13 GMT James Kay said:

Feb 17, 2021 22:31:54 GMT Ian Noble said:

I've now tested and tomorrow's sims can now be done without any other filters than these:

1 Star:
Primacy = 25 +/- 15

2 Star:
Primacy = 40 +/- 10

3 Star:
Primacy = 55 +/- 10

4 Star:
Primacy = 70 +/- 10

5 Star:
Primacy = 85 +/- 14

GMs with complete control over who is shooting. I seriously doubt this system stays exactly as it is (!) but it's worth a try.

edit: just a note that primacy levels will remain unchanged for those GMs who have yet to set their primacy levels.

Am I just being dumb ? where is the link to the google sheet?

Here you go!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1NFykg8sZTzlrH2_DFhF6gaerZl1qMDacoeieH2Iotco/htmlview