What is Court Intelligence in DDS? Over the years of CSL existence we heard that IQ as it’s called supposedly helps the player make better decisions, maximise potential, helps the team win more games etc. Presumably then, a team with higher IQ should perform better vs the same team with lower IQ.
There has never been any evidence to show that this was true. So we at CSL StatStuff decided to run a little experiment. We decided to create a fictional default league in DDS3 and run a few simulations with the team’s IQ as-is, lowered to 30 and then changed to 90. This is just to see what happens. Will a lower IQ produce a worse record than default? Will we see improvement in wins with higher IQ?
First, we took over a team, Memphis Grizzlies, and did the following:
- Adjusted the player’s durability to 100 to reduce the impact of injuries (this was done for all players in the league). While durability is set to 100, however, injuries do happen and may have a slight effect on the results.
- Set the strategy to 5 for Zone, Press, Defensive Intensity and Pace. Both Rebounds were set to 8
- Rotations were all left as-is
We then ran two sims to set a baseline i.e. what is the default record with no adjustments.
Results:
NO ADJUSTMENT
......Record ..PPG ..FG% ..APG ..PTS/100 POSS
Sim 1 30-52 95.5 43.4% 19.4 96
Sim 2 32-50 99.4 45.1% 20 98.8
As we can see our Grizzlies performed slightly better in the second sim but overall the team’s record remained similar. Leading scorer for both teams was Rudy Gay averaging around 20 ppg in both Sims with an impressive 95% STP% and just under 3 TOs forced per game. Solid two way player.
Now lets see what happens to our Grizzlies if I reduce everybody’s IQ down to 30.
IQ = 30 for all players on Grizzlies
.....Record ..PPG ..FG% ..APG ..PTS/100 POSS
Sim 1 30-52 98 44.4% 19.9 98.1
Sim 2 29-53 94.7 43.1% 18.5 94.7
Somewhat unexpected but there was not much reduction and team’s overall record certainly reflects that. While the second sim showed a reduction in stats across the board, it only resulted in one extra loss. Rudy Gay again was the leading scorer and his stats are again around 20 ppg and impressive 95% STP% and 3 TOs forced.
OK
Now let’s see what happens if we raise the IQ up to 90. There has to be a difference between a team with all players at 90 and a team with all players at 30.
IQ = 90 for all players on Grizzlies
.....Record ..PPG ..FG% ..APG ..PTS/100 POSS
Sim 1 29-53 96.7 43.4% 19.7 96.5
Sim 2 25-57 96.6 44.0% 19.5 96.6
Well that is a huge surprise. Especially that second sim with the worst record of all so far. There was an injury challenge there but that was with Tony Allen being side-lined for some time. But how can this be that 90 IQ across the board did not help the poor Grizzlies.
We decided to continue to experiment.
Perhaps we did not put the team in the best position to succeed. Since IQ is supposed to help teams that run high pace offense, let’s see if we raise the pace to 9 and run a sim.
IQ = 90 for all players on Grizzlies and Pace = 9
.....Record ..PPG ..FG% ..APG ..PTS/100 POSS
Sim 1 27-55 94.9 43.1% 19.4 94.9
(Note: we ran two sims actually as in one of them Rudy Gay suffered an injury and was out for almost a month but records were the same)
So it looks like if the team is not meant to run IQ does not matter. Actually, does IQ matter at all?
For the final test, we decided to lower the Defensive Rebounds to 3 just to make sure the team is really running.
IQ = 90 for all players on Grizzlies, Pace = 9 and D-Reb = 3
.....Record ..PPG ..FG% ..APG ..PTS/100 POSS
Sim 1 33-49 98.3 44.3% 19.6 98.7
I’ll admit the sample size is very little. But we ran five sims with IQ at 90 and the results did not look impressive at all. Does IQ matter?
(All sim files are saved and available in a ZIP if you would like to see. Just send me your email. Also, I have a Word summary file with stat screenshots)
That was quite an impressive article and study that you performed andrei, major kudos!
he was the first player that came to mind when I clicked on the thread
2028
