Scouts are professionals hired by NBA franchises to evaluate player talent or opposing teams' preparation or strategies. A prospect scout typically looks for younger players with potential or existing players whose rights may be available through free agency or trade. An advance scout, however, helps prepare the team by studying the strategies or tendencies of opposing teams. [1] Scouts travel extensively, attending basketball games to do these evaluations. [1]
Scouts sometimes dress very casually to blend in with the public and fans at the game. This is done so that other teams do not know the players to which their respective organizations may be actively interested.[ citation needed ]
In the late 1990s, NBA scouts began using computers to organize information or compile data to evaluate and grade each player or team being scouted.
Many factors which contribute to a scout's analysis of a player and scouts place differing importance on each of these factors. This is commonly called projection. Projection influences some of the best and worst decisions scouts and general managers make. The most basic projections which a scout must make include the player's physical status such as height, weight, age, position, and conditioning. The scout will also study the player's skillset including: shooting and scoring capabilities, ball handling, defensive capabilities, and passing abilities. The scout will also attempt to note the presence or absence of intangibles such as coachability, character, desire, and instincts.
Baseball statistics include a variety of metrics used to evaluate player and team performance in the sport of baseball.
A football player or footballer is a sportsperson who plays one of the different types of football. The main types of football are association football, American football, Canadian football, Australian rules football, Gaelic football, rugby league, and rugby union.
Capture the Flag (CTF) is a traditional outdoor sport where two or more teams each have a flag and the objective is to capture the other team's flag, located at the team's "base", and bring it safely back to their own base. Enemy players can be "tagged" by players when out of their home territory and, depending on the rules, they may be out of the game, become members of the opposite team, be sent back to their own territory, be frozen in place, or be sent to "jail" until freed by a member of their own team.
In professional sports, scouts are experienced talent evaluators who travel extensively for the purposes of watching athletes play their chosen sports, and they determine whether their set of skills and talents represent what is needed by the scout's organization. Some scouts are interested primarily in the selection of prospects; younger players who may require further development by the acquiring team, but who are judged to be worthy of that effort and expense for the potential future payoff that it could bring, while others concentrate on players who are already polished professionals, whose rights may be available soon, either through free agency or trading, and who are seen as filling a team's specific need at a certain position. Advance scouts watch the teams that their teams are going to play in order to help determine strategy.
Game balance is a branch of game design with the intention of improving gameplay and user experience by balancing difficulty and fairness. Game balance consists of adjusting rewards, challenges, and/or elements of a game to create the intended player experience.
In basketball, free throws or foul shots are unopposed attempts to score points by shooting from behind the free-throw line, a line situated at the end of the restricted area. Free throws are generally awarded after a foul on the shooter by the opposing team, analogous to penalty shots in other team sports. Free throws are also awarded in other situations, including technical fouls, and when the fouling team has entered the bonus/penalty situation. Also, depending on the situation, a player may be awarded between one and three free throws. Each successful free throw is worth one point.
Advance Wars: Dual Strike, known as Famicom Wars DS in Japan, is a turn-based strategy video game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS handheld game console. It is the third installment in the Advance Wars series and was released in 2005 for Japan on June 23, in North America on August 22, in Europe on September 30 and in Australia on March 22, 2006. The game is preceded by Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising and Advance Wars and succeeded by Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Advance Wars is the international title of the Wars video game series, which dates back to the Family Computer game Famicom Wars in 1988.
Strategy plays a crucial role in American football. Both teams carefully plan various aspects of their gameplay in an effort to win. This includes deciding on formations, selecting players for specific positions, and assigning roles and instructions to each player on offense and defense.
Hack-a-Shaq is a basketball defensive strategy used in the National Basketball Association (NBA) that involves committing intentional fouls for the purpose of lowering opponents' scoring. The strategy was originally adapted by Dallas Mavericks coach Don Nelson, who directed players to commit personal fouls throughout the game against selected opponents who shot free throws poorly.
Fantasy basketball is a game in which the participants serve as owners and general managers of virtual professional basketball teams. The competitors select their rosters by participating in a draft in which all relevant National Basketball Association (NBA) players are available. Fantasy points are awarded in weekly matchups based on the actual performances of basketball players in real-world competition. The game typically involves the NBA, but can also involve other leagues, such as the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) or NCAA.
Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the understanding of an environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to time or other factors. Situational awareness is important for effective decision making in many environments. It is formally defined as:
“the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future”.
In sports strategy, running out the clock is the practice of a winning team allowing the clock to expire through a series of preselected plays, either to preserve a lead or hasten the end of a one-sided contest. Such measures expend time but do not otherwise have a tactical purpose. This is usually done by a team that is winning by a slim margin near the end of a game, in order to reduce the time available for the opposing team to score. Generally, it is the opposite strategy of running up the score.
This glossary of basketball terms is a list of definitions of terms used in the game of basketball. Like any other major sport, basketball features its own extensive vocabulary of unique words and phrases used by players, coaches, sports journalists, commentators, and fans.
Mock draft is a term used by sports websites and magazines in reference to a simulation of a sports league draft or fantasy sports league's draft. ESPN has run mock drafts on the front page of its website, allowing any visitor to vote towards a specific team's choice. Mock drafts are often found to be helpful to fans because they allow them to speculate on which members of the collegiate ranks will join the fan's favorite team.
PECOTA, an acronym for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is a sabermetric system for forecasting Major League Baseball player performance. The word is a backronym based on the name of journeyman major league player Bill Pecota, who, with a lifetime batting average of .249, is perhaps representative of the typical PECOTA entry. PECOTA was developed by Nate Silver in 2002–2003 and introduced to the public in the book Baseball Prospectus 2003. Baseball Prospectus (BP) has owned PECOTA since 2003; Silver managed PECOTA from 2003 to 2009. Beginning in Spring 2009, BP assumed responsibility for producing the annual forecasts, making 2010 the first baseball season for which Silver played no role in producing PECOTA projections.
Strategy is a major video game genre that emphasizes thinking and planning over direct instant action in order to achieve victory. Although many types of video games can contain strategic elements, as a genre, strategy games are most commonly defined as those with a primary focus on high-level strategy, logistics and resource management. They are also usually divided into two main sub-categories: turn-based and real-time, but there are also many strategy cross/sub-genres that feature additional elements such as tactics, diplomacy, economics and exploration.
A projection augmented model is an element sometimes employed in virtual reality systems. It consists of a physical three-dimensional model onto which a computer image is projected to create a realistic looking object. Importantly, the physical model is the same geometric shape as the object that the PA model depicts.
Basketball is a ball game and team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules. Since being developed by James Naismith as a non-contact game that almost anyone can play, basketball has undergone many different rule variations, eventually evolving into the NBA-style game known today. Basketball is one of the most popular and widely viewed sports in the world.
Patrick Zipfel is an American basketball coach and former college athletics director. He is currently an assistant coach and advance scout for the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Philadelphia native was a part of the Suns' Western Conference Championship title and NBA Finals run in 2021. Zipfel worked as assistant coach/advance scout for the Chicago Bulls(NBA)as well as the Minnesota Timberwolves. In October 2015, Zipfel accepted an interim coaching position at Mansfield University, located in Mansfield, Pennsylvania to help restore the program.