Statis Pro Basketball Reviewed

If you read my last post, you will see I started playing Statis Pro Baseball as a Freshman in college. Well, after discovering Statis Pro Baseball, I heard there was also a Statis Pro Basketball.  Being almost as big a basketball nut as a baseball fan, I decided to spend some of my hard earned money to get this game.

Unlike Statis Pro Baseball, I never was part of a Statis Pro Basketball league.  But that doesn't mean I didn't have fun with the game.  On the contrary.  I played this game a ton.  I played with at least four different people from my dorm.  One friend and I started a replay of the season.  Unfortunately we never finished it, but we had a blast.

Well, after cleaning out my garage, I found my old copy and it was pretty beat up, but everything was there.  I decided to play a game to see if the game was like I remembered.

Statis Pro Basketball, like it's baseball counterpart, is driven by a fast action deck.  The game flows quickly and is probably the fastest tabletop basketball game I've played.  Everything runs quickly and smoothly, but it feels like it's simulating most of the results well.  If you are coaching a team with outstanding rebounders, but poor defenders, you will find yourself yelling at your players to play some defense so you can take advantage of your rebounding.

I replayed an early season game between the Knicks and Celtics from 1988 and was pleased with the result.  The Knicks won 109-100.  The score was a bit low, but there was probably a good reason for that.

Each team had a starter injured.  Robert Parrish and Johnny Newman both got hurt and are also scheduled to miss their next games.  Additionally, Trent Tucker and Danny Ainge got into a fight and were ejected.  Finally, there is also a mechanic that forces you to sometimes rest players for the remainder of the period.  That occurred four times including twice right at the beginning of a quarter.  There were a lot of minutes played by subs.  I love these rules, however the amount of roster juggling I had to do to play this game was extreme.  I'm going to chalk this up to chance and say it won't happen anywhere near this bad usually.

There is a home field advantage chart that allows you to ignore or change certain results depending on how strong your team's home court advantage is.  It seems like a good innovation that allows teams to have records more reflective of how they actually played at home and on the road.  Every once in a while there's a team that actually performs better on the road, however, so maybe they should have home and road ratings to balance things out for the road warriors.  Overall, I'm a fan of this mechanic regardless.

What would I change?  Well, I'm not a huge fan of the stamina rules.  It's based on shots attempted.  So if you have a guy that is gunning because the FAC deck keeps calling his number, you might have to sit him a lot longer than he'd regularly have to sit.  I much prefer a minute based fatigue system such as the one in Strat-o-Matic.

There are a few other aspects that Strat-o-Matic did better than Statis Pro.  First and foremost, there's not a system in place to get the ball to your highest volume shooters.  On occasion you get to choose who gets the ball, but there's no mechanism in place that gets the ball to your shooters.  Second, the assist system is practically non-existent.  The rules as written will get you nowhere near the number of assists the players actually made.  Finally the only distinction between shot types is two or three point shot.  There's no differentiating between outside shots, inside shots or penetration.

Even with these flaws, the game is still a ton of fun to play.  If I was going to teach someone how to play a tabletop basketball game, I'd pull out Statis Pro.  It's easy to play and much quicker than some other games.  The Home Field Advantage mechanic actually gives the home coach some extra strategic choices to make.  Additionally it will make teaching other basketball games a bit easier.  It's not a slam dunk or a three pointer - just a nice soft mid range jumper.