Creating a Draft File

From SSBA Knowledge Base

Entering Draftees

Go to Draft > Draft Preview
We're going to take the computer-generated draft file, and edit the good players the computer generated to be based off their historical counterparts. You want to take the better players so that the draft doesn't produce 40 stars as it would if you edited the bad computer generated players (the real life players + the good computer generated players). The way I typically do this is sorting by defense, then making any good defensive players that have a pulse offensively the real players.
Select a good player, then click Edit
Go to Basketball-reference > Draft, and select the year.
Click on the player to import. Change the player in FBB's Name, Position, Height, Weight, College and Age to match the real life player.
On the bottom of the player, there is a "Statistics" Section. Enter in the players first year totals from their rookie year. Use totals, not per game averages. Leave "Stat Level" to be NBA.
Once everything has been entered (they're in the same order on basketball-reference player pages as they are in the Edit Rookie page of FBB, so you should be able to tab and enter them in order), click "Generate Attributes".
There is one attribute we are going to edit, particularly for guards/sf's in the 80's area. 3 pt shot. If you don't edit this, ALL guards will be C- or worse outside shooters, with 3 pt shot ratings in the single digits. This is because the 3 point shot wasn't used heavily. To make it more realistic, edit the rating to what you think it should be.
Click Save.
Do this for all players in the first round of the draft (plus any notable 2nd+ round picks you wish to include)
Save the roster file when finished.

Randomizing Potential

This process is a pain in the ass. If you don't feel like doing it for the first draft, then just keep the potentials as the computer generated. They're still random, as long as you're not selecting which computer generated player to use for a real-life counterpart based on the potentials. Just don't look at the pot's when entering the data! If you do skip the randomizing potentials, just skip down to the 'Uploading to the website' section.

Download this add-on for excel to produce random numbers. Simply download it, unzip it, and run setup.exe. http://www.ablebits.com/excel-random-generator-assistant-free-addins/index.php
Go to tools > CSV output. For Output Type, select draft file. Select All players. Click Output CSV
Go to your fastbreak basketball folder, then the output folder. In here will be a file called savenameDraftFileYear.txt. Rename it to savenameDraftfileYear.csv.
Open up the file with microsoft excel
select all the values under potential. Click on the top value (in row 3), hit shift, then select the bottom value (should be row 102). Go to the AbleBits.com menu, and select Random Number Generator for excel. We're going to use the Integer numbers, and From 30 to 100. Then click the "Integer" button. This will give all draftees random pot between 30 and 100.
It now takes some reformatting of the columns to get it to import correctly. FBB is expecting them in the following order:

FNAME, LNAME, POS, AGE, G, MIN, FGM, FGA, FTM, FTA, 3FGM, 3FGA, OREB, REB, AST, STL, TO, BLK, PF, HT, SchedStr, Pot, College

- rename FirstName to FNAME, LastName to LNAME, etc.
- Then, re-order the columns so they're in the right order
Go to File > Save. If it gives you a warning, don't worry about it, Click "Yes". Excel will want you to save it as a .xls, not csv, but we won't lose anything if we do.
rename the file from .csv to .txt. Copy the file over to the "Import" folder of FBB.
Go back to FBB, then go to Draft > Import Rookies. Select your file name and click Import.

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