Apologies for the late reply. I originally saw this topic when I was quickly checking in while I was out of town the weekend of the 14th, and meant to reply when I got home. Unfortunately it slipped my mind and I ended up overlooking it.
It's generally better to assign assistant coaches for shorter periods of time, and constantly throughout the season. The most development takes place during the offseason, but constantly having your assistants work with players for a week or two on a specific area tends to be better, and allows you to focus on more players. The gain you saw is usually the maximum you'll get, depending on a player's hidden potential rating (it's the DESTINY value in players.dbf). As I said, the most improvement comes between seasons, and again depends on the player's potential. What you're seeing is normal, though. Otherwise it'd be too easy to beef up a player's ratings during the year.
You can change the various play related values (PRIM_OFF, SECON_OFF, etc) in teams.dbf. There's some more info here:
https://www.nba-live.com/nbalivewiki/in ... ting_GuideIt's a little bare unfortunately (it's been a while since I've done any work with it, and there might be some inaccuracies), and you'll have to refer to the plays.dbf file for the values, but that's basically how it works, changing the values relating to plays and playcalling. That's what you'd be playing around with in the DBF, though.
Generated rookies appear in player.dbf during the season, and should be assigned to TEAM number 39 (the Rookie Pool). You can change their name and other attributes to essentially create a custom draft class. There's some more information here, which applies to NBA Live 2005 through 08:
viewtopic.php?f=114&t=24168Looks like you've resolved the issue with simulated stats, but for anyone else who is wondering, I definitely advise keeping the Sim Quarter Lengths at the regulation 12 minutes for the best results. As you noted, sliders can usually allow you to have more realistic stats during gameplay with shorter quarter lengths.