1981 vs. 1993

Frisco del Rosario, a basketball writer and Statis Pro fan, pointed out that the game doesn't give you the option of ignoring a foul on some players and letting the player take the foul on other players - once you get a drawing of "Defense Foul" against your team, you can't decide, "oh, I'll see who took the foul, and if it's someone good, then I'll burn the Index Point, else not". You either have to spend the point to ignore the foul regardless of who the foul belongs to, or you take the foul.

I didn't see this rule in my copy of the rules or written on the game board. The game board lists how Team Index points can be spent:

two points: call for a steal
two points: ignore a forced rest
one point: rebound to high player on your team
one point: ignore a defensive foul (what we're talking about above)
one point: ignore a charging foul

..but it says nothing about how to ignore a defensive foul.

Then I realized...there are actually two sets of rules for Statis Pro Basketball. One came with the first version of the game, and the second comes with the game versions sold after 1993.

As it turns out, I have both versions of the rules stored as .pdf files. And sure enough, in the 1993 rules, it states that when spending points to burn off defensive fouls, you have to burn the point without finding out which player was fouled.

Frisco also pointed out that the team index points have to be proportionally spent for each half - if you have six total home index points, you need to spend three in the first half and three in the second half. (This is an alteration of the NBA rule which states those points have to be divvied proprotionately per quarter.) As it turns out, this rule isn't in the '81 rules, but it is in the '93 rules.

In the future, I'll be using the 1993 rules for both ignoring defensive fouls and spending team index (home field advantage) points.

I'm wondering if I should be altering UTEP's team index to create a Home Index and a Visitor Index. There was only one index in the 1981 rules; there are two (a Home Index and a Visitor Index) in the 1993 rules. I'll be posting about trying to determine the right amount of Home Index points for college basketball in a future post.