I used to employ the playoff tank long ago. When it happens to me now, I do not care. I think it’s part of this game. It is a spreadsheet numbers crunch and it’s just a creative way to maximize your peak performance. The game is already unlike real life basketball so to me this is just another variance.
However, I have an idea for a compromise. At the start of the series before any games have simmed, you must declare which game you are going to rest your starters or “tank” or play duren 48 minutes. Whatever you call it, if an owner declares it, it allows the other owner to matchup and prepare for it by resting their players too.
? And this seems like a good place to talk about minute targets. We all know by now that 19,300 is the total minimum you want to keep everyone at 100%. With playoff minute stretching, I see that 18,250 is all you need for the playoffs for you to keep everyone at 100% health. This is why you see so many teams take scrubs like duren, garner, and Collins because they are the cheapest per minute players to fill the minutes not needed in the playoffs but that you do need for the regular season.
To take this one step further, if you were going to tank 1 playoff game, you could multiply 18,250 by 6/7 to get 15,650 minutes. That means that all you need is 15,650 minutes of your top quality players. This is only valid if you have at least 5 players to play all 48 minutes of the “tank game”. Most of the time those scrubs foul too much and don’t play the full 48. So i might recommend a midway target of 17,000 minutes of your top quality players and 2,300 minutes of your scrubs. This will make making the playoffs much harder, but that’s one of the reasons why you see 5 and 6 seeds beating 1’s and 2’s to win championships.