Can an asst.coach "quit"? Can I "hire" one mid-season?

About a third into my new season, my oldest assistant coach "disappears" with three more days of training Serge Ibaka left! Nothing seems wrong with the game except that; I can trade, I can edit players, I can see my hires, I can reassign my Training staff among the two injured players I currently have... but if I try to see the coach that disappeared, the game exits on me. Why is this happening exactly, and is there a way around it?

After the debacle of the draft, I haven't edited anything except the appearance.DBF file, so I'm not sure what I did to "kill" this coach. I can remove them from my team so I don't accidentally scroll to their entry and cause the game to crash. But that leaves me down a coach. I can re-hire them at the end of the season (they only had a year left anyway), but is there any way to add a coach to my team mid-season?

The other two (younger) assistant coaches are fine, and can finish their assignment (and will appear in my PDA as "done, twiddling thumbs") -- the disappeared coach never sends anything. The weird thing is, if I assign players to the other two coaches and then trade Serge Ibaka (the guy my old coach was working), my PDA rings with one of the other two saying "twiddling my thumbs" even though I just reassigned them someone else for 4 weeks. Their assignments haven't changed, but it's weird that my old coach doesn't even show up on my PDA. (If anyone's ever traded away someone their assistant coach was working on, your PDA will ring indicating they are free.)

If I try to see the old coach's assignment, the game quits. If I simulate some extra days so everyone finishes (I assign all three assistants to start and end on the same days) and try to assign someone to the old coach... if I scroll past my two young coaches, the game will exit. This behavior is similar to that of my first attempt at a Dynasty -- I tried to use DBC to add a 3rd assistant into my team mid-season; I had the space, I had the budget... so I changed the team value and loaded my game. My GM Roster list showed the coach was hired, but if I tried to go to their assignment window, the game would exit.

I've compared Staff.DBF files from various saves and it seems like somehow the "assignment" value for my old coach was given the incorrect player number (it was a player on another team) -- I'm not sure how this could have happened, or when this could have happened, but like I typed earlier, is there a way to "hire" a coach mid-season or do I have to wait until the end of the year to hire new coaches or restart this year?

Not in-game, the only way you could change those assignments is to edit staff.dbf.

Well, then my question would be, how do I edit the STAFF.DBF correctly.

I did it in one game to disastrous effects. I flipped a staff member's team from Free (50) to mine (3)... while they showed up on my staff list (I had an added assistant coach and 4 staff members total), I could never have that coach give out an assignment -- the game would crash every time I scrolled to their name. This felt like the only time the game allows you to hire staff was during the off-season (the same thing happened when I added a trainer -- no trainer assignments possible.)

I'm also curious how this could have happened.

Assuming you didn't do anything with staff.dbf in the first place, it could just be a bug. Staff don't quit midseason in Dynasty Mode, staff hiring and firing is restricted to a phase in the offseason. Something's gone amiss there.

It's possible that the game doesn't like it if you add staff during the season through DBF editing, since it's not meant to happen. It might have something to do with the TASK field, try setting that to zero if it isn't already (and probably make sure all free agent staff are set to zero or blank as well).

If fooling around with those assignments can't fix things...does the problem correct itself if you sim through to the next season? If so, perhaps you could do that, save the Dynasty under a different name and copy the staff.dbf file over (be sure to make a backup of the current Dynasty save first, of course).

Well, I was examining the Staff.DBF file, and like I said, my head trainer was training someone from another team. Not sure which other file that ties into, but it borked that file up good. I mean, the tasks are always set to "0", and even 0-ed the player field, but whenever I scroll to the coach's name, game crashes. Randomly they will still train my team, but come end-of-the-month, crash. (workingDB/Player.DBF and not Staff.DBF though -- not sure how badly this bug hit)

The only way to fix this bug was to "fire" my coach (turn his team data from my team to FA) so that the game wouldn't quit at the end of the month (and then re-hire them in the off-season) or load my last save from the end of last season. I figure if this bug is that deep, if I plug the hole by removing an assistant coach, something else is probably going to go wrong between now and the end of 2012. Hell, it was only Jan. Three months, a new set of rookies, that'll be worth avoiding this bug. (Still have no idea how this happened...)

Three side notes.

First, if you assign your coach to train player... say, Taj Gibson for 4 weeks, then edit the Staff.DBF to remove Taj Gibson from the Staff.dbf, the game will still note the coach training "player" for the remainder of the 4 weeks.

Second, for some reason, my Draft Picks are still off -- because SEA is now OKC, OKC gets ORL pics, ORL gets PHI's picks, etc. However, come draft-day, the correct team will get the correct picks. e.g. OKC won the playoffs, and ORL won the draft. ORL would get first pick and not OKC.

Third, the new draft class... is 90% the same draft class from 2 years ago. Might as well try to change the names to match the real-life draft.

Yeah, that sounds pretty messy to try and fix. Probably best to either wait it out or if simming through to the next season gets you a fixed staff.dbf file, try copying that file over and see if you can continue the season with it.

It might have come about due to other changes in the database or it might just be a very rare bug; I don't ever recall encountering it in NBA Live 06 myself but if it's rare we probably didn't end up talking about it much.