Re: Scouting and you; the basics
Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2018 9:59 am
How do you assign scouts to get the best possible coverage for the NHL draft?
Your #1 NHL EHM resource site!
https://ehmtheblueline.com/forums/
I put them on the NHL draft, scout 17-18 years old, 3 stars players or more and on intensive.StarboardWinger wrote:How do you assign scouts to get the best possible coverage for the NHL draft?
Shindigs wrote:What Philou said, although personally I can't stand the spam of getting reports on all the 3 star+ prospects so I have them on no updates and just look at all the compiled scout reports when prepping the draft on the day of the draft. But a big part in that is me always playing with some variation of the challenge rules, so I can't really trade for picks; That leads to me not needing to know who I'm going to draft before draft day since I can't target picks for the guys I want anyways. I have 1 scout in permanent NHL scouting, 1 in the AHL and one on next opponent. The other 12 are all on the NHL Draft all year long. Really wish you could pick permanent for the NHL draft and not need to resend all of them several times per season, but sadly you can't.
I will scout my own young players 4 or 5 times through a season, trying to get a handle on their abilities and real potential. As we've said, some guys never can be scouted correctly it seems, but for the rest.... you scout enough and you'll get extra tidbits here and there about their mental makeup and their game to be able to piece together a fuller picture.nino33 wrote:When I play I too am not a fan of the notifications (but then I usually play with all leagues enhanced so there's always a lot of mail HaHa)
In addition to the draft I have scouts on selected leagues and geographical areas too (but I rarely scout individual players unless I'm making a trade for them)
Now that you mention scouting youth, I've scouted my young prospects individually (I rarely play/almost always editing so I'd forgotten)Primis wrote:I will scout my own young players 4 or 5 times through a season, trying to get a handle on their abilities and real potential. As we've said, some guys never can be scouted correctly it seems, but for the rest.... you scout enough and you'll get extra tidbits here and there about their mental makeup and their game to be able to piece together a fuller picture.nino33 wrote:When I play I too am not a fan of the notifications (but then I usually play with all leagues enhanced so there's always a lot of mail HaHa)
In addition to the draft I have scouts on selected leagues and geographical areas too (but I rarely scout individual players unless I'm making a trade for them)
I do it for the "pretend factor"Primis wrote:In contrast, I rarely scout actual specific leagues. I just haven't found the value in it.
Yeah, if a player has different role values he gets different comparisons; Same goes for player role. When I played around with the editor on a guy who was already fully scouted his conparisons changed based on role values as well as role.DeadPlatypus wrote:So some things I'm fairly sure of:
1. The projected player only tells you what a player's offensive and defensive role are. The number's that seem to come pretty close for me:
"A more talented version of": +1 to both
"A poor man's": -1 to both
"Offensive-minded": +1 to offensive role, -1 to defensive role
"Defensive-minded:" +1 to defensive role, -1 to offensive role
I think there's two more rare ones "offensive/defensive awareness" which might be just +1 to the respective role.
Averaging out all your scout's player projections and combining them with what you know from snippets gives you a pretty good idea of their offensive and defensive role distribution.
2. The line projection and the 'excellent', 'good', 'decent', etc. prospect ratings measure the same thing.
If you average out all your ratings or lines you get a somewhat accurate projection of a player. The scout report ratings tended to be a bit more accurate than the line projection ratings for me.
3. Scout projections don't measure solely PA, I'm pretty sure the offensive and defensive role are factored in somehow.
So for two prospects with identical PA, the one with higher offensive and defensive role should get better projections.
4. Scout projections might factor in CA
So for two identical prospects, the one further along in their development should have higher scout projections, and for two prospects with identical player and line projections, the one with worse current stats might actually have a higher PA.
I did some analysis (on just a 74 players from the first draft of the historical 2006 db, but I'm planning on doing more on the latest TBL db that I let sim for 10 years), that indicated that the CA and PA of the projected player had no correlation to the PA of the scouted prospect (less than 0.1 using Excel's CORREL function). It did have about 0.75 correlation each to defensive and offensive role, which is the highest correlation I could find between any scouted values and known player stats. Taking away the modifications I used for poor/talented/offensive/defensive reduced the correlation. It definitely tries to find player comparisons with the same role and position, and in a multiplayer game I've had the projected players change between log-ins, not quite sure why that last one might be, though.The hypothesis I'm currently more or less subscribed to is that player comparison essentially tells you which db negative PA rating a player has. As in those quite common guys who get compared to roughly 160 CA guys as well as 130 CA guys are -8 (which has the 130-160 range). If you're aware of what the different negative PA values in the db that are NHL relevant are and you try and figure out which - value a player has based on his comparisons and try and figure out where in that range he falls based on the ratio of 160 CA comparisons to 130 CA comparisons you will generally not be far off the mark. So far in using that grading method I had >80% success rate at predicting player PA within 10 points and >90% rate of success at having the PA being within the db - PA value I predicted when looking at every single prospect (except the ones I drafted, to avoid cheating) for 3 drafts. So that makes for a sample size of roughly 600 players (210 players per draft - the 10 or so I drafted for 200*3 players) this doesn't mean it guaranteed works that way, but when a hypothesis is correct that much of the time (considering that the human factor will always lead to some mistakes); It's pretty safe to use that method without expecting too many surprises.
I had some limited evidence to suggest that players who went up in the ISS rankings during the year were more likely to have higher PA than their peers, but it didn't hold as I analysed further down the draft. That might be worth doing more analysis on for the top ISS picks.When I accidentally left in a few players I added in Sweden for testing purposes in the db I gained some insight into how the ISS rankings go as well as to how the AI drafts. The guys in question were 14 with 100 CA (which means 100 Rep too) but with 100 PA too. When their draft came the ISS ranked them as #1-#3 in the draft despite them having 100 PA. Because they had such high Reputation they were considered top of their draft class; This was in the pre-season ranking though, and by the mid-season ranking they had dropped to the low 20s due to the ISS moving away from their community perceived skill (Reputation) towards their actual skill (PA). By the end of season rankings they were at the bottom of the 1st round with one of them sitting outside the 1st round. But the AI didn't care, they ended up all going in the top 5 in the draft because of their high CA/Reputation.
Like I said, I've only analysed one draft so far, but I'm interested in seeing how a poor draft influences the various projections. I found the 'excellent, good, etc.' to be slightly more accurate than the projected lines. I didn't think to check if those lined up with the star ratings exactly, but I think they do. The best correlation I've gotten for those was a sort of 'prospect value' rating, which combined PA, Offensive and Defensive role, and CA. Specific weighting of those stats resulted in at best a correlation of 0.67.There are also "trap" comparisons that are complete BS. If you see mostly "like Victor Rask" as the top end comparison on a prospect and some poor man's Turris thrown in there too, that guy is probably chilling in the 130 range even though you wouldn't think so based on the comparisons. In my findings there is also a noticable over-representation of busts with 4 star scouted rating. To the point that I will actively draft 3 star prospects over 4 star ones as to date I've drafted a single 4 star guys that wasn't a bust (Grigori Denisenko in the 16-17 db). And I've drafted at least 100 4 star prospects, so a 1% or so conversion rate isn't exactly stellar. That's for forwards at least.
Also note that after the first few drafts with premade prospects when playing with the "generate no extra players" option you will go into what I refer to as "the drought years" which is about 8 or so years where the drafts are made up of about 1-3 decent regens and the rest is varying degrees of useless newgen players. Often these drafts will consist of unreasonable amounts of defensive forwards at the top end and it's not uncommon to have no more than a single top-6 player in the whole first round*.
PA is the potential ability of a player and CA is the current ability of the player.taitoja wrote:This is driving me nuts; what do PA and CA mean? I assume it's something to do with the editor, though I can't confirm since I don't have access to it at the moment.
Thank you!philou21 wrote:PA is the potential ability of a player and CA is the current ability of the player.taitoja wrote:This is driving me nuts; what do PA and CA mean? I assume it's something to do with the editor, though I can't confirm since I don't have access to it at the moment.
Scouts also have a current and potential ability, although in most databases, the vast majority of scouts' attributes are randomized as the game is generated. That's why your best bet is to get a young scout with decent attributes and hope he still has potential for growth. As for JPP vs JPA, you can generally get a good idea of a player by looking at his visible stats, but young players with room for growth are much harder to judge. That's why it's better to have scouts that are good at judging potential, it provides you with more information you can't see yourself. If you play with hidden attributes, then ability scouts become much more useful.Saytham1980 wrote: Wed May 23, 2018 1:59 pm So when I check the FA-Market for Scouts I mainly focus on the JPP-skill and not so much on the JPA-skill?
So far I always tried to get Scouts with both skills as high as possible. Best would be 20/20. But in an online league it's tough to get such a guy, because there are way more human GMs hunting for them.
thegreaterikku wrote: Fri Jul 27, 2018 6:07 pm Is there a place where I can read how to select a good scout? Because that whole thread was awesome.
Shindigs wrote: Fri Mar 17, 2017 1:05 pmSo what do I look for in scouts? When I look to sign scouts I set the filters to 10 Determination, 10 Adaptability, 3 Discipline and 15 Judging Potential. I then proceed to sign all the youngest scouts that live up to all of those criteria starting from the ones with the best Determination+Adaptability to the ones with the lowest, since those "mentals" won't grow as much over the course of the scout's career as their "technicals" in the form of Judging Player Potential will. Since all they're scouting is the draft I have a much lesser need for Judging Player Ability, as how good they are right now isn't really what I'm looking for. But any scout with 15+ Judging Potential will have close to that in Judging Ability too anyways. Why the 3 discipline you may ask? The reason is that scouts with 1 Discipline have had some pretty horrible track records with me. They kept saying that literally every single player they ever scouted was "like Daniel Sedin" even if it was a defensive checking forward. Scouts with 2 Discipline don't appear to have this issue, but since attributes do sometimes drop by 1 I want that extra 1 point of buffer; that's why I set it to 3 Discipline in the filter.