tarheel, if you are short on time you could ask pex to help you

something I've discovered that may have been common knowledge before but I never saw anyone talk about: Clear the Bench. I always assumed it sat your starters and took the lowest minute guys on your depth chart, but that is NOT how it works AT ALL.

It takes the lowest minute guys on your team and just throws them in, even if they're starting. Kept happening to me last season with Tyson Chandler on two teams and is happening to me with Brent Barry now on three of them. It's quite frustrating to try and get the minutes right of a low-minute starter anyway, and I'm guessing this is part of the issue.

Was this common knowledge?

Posted by ashamael on 11/10/2022 2:18:00 AM (view original):
something I've discovered that may have been common knowledge before but I never saw anyone talk about: Clear the Bench. I always assumed it sat your starters and took the lowest minute guys on your depth chart, but that is NOT how it works AT ALL.

It takes the lowest minute guys on your team and just throws them in, even if they're starting. Kept happening to me last season with Tyson Chandler on two teams and is happening to me with Brent Barry now on three of them. It's quite frustrating to try and get the minutes right of a low-minute starter anyway, and I'm guessing this is part of the issue.

Was this common knowledge?

I assumed that this was how it worked, but I don't think I ever read that explicitly. May remember it from observing that from the old days and it somehow became part of my "institutional knowledge." Lord only knows why I would remember than, and not how to draft or field a reasonable team.

It was not common knowledge to me. I'd have to analyze a bunch of PBP data to validate it.

I assumed that the player who has last on the depth chart would get the clear the bench minutes. This is good to know.

Yeah I'd found that before - which is quite annoying. It's definitely true, in my experience. In Savage, if I have an eligible player season to use which I am sure will not see the floor at all in normal situations, then I double-check to make sure the season I plug into the roster is in the bottom 5 MPG on the team, otherwise they won't get used in garbage time at all. It's worth using a "worse" season that's low minutes than having a better backup season which is too high mins to get pulled into bench time and just ends up being totally worthless.

Overall because of this effect I don't think it's worth spending any real $$$ on any player at ~10 minutes or fewer (I know cost isn't relevant here) because pretty much all of their time is going to get burned in garbage. It's even worse if they're a starter - if you have a 9 MPG player starting then good damn luck. I'm sure some Timelord owners can relate, I'm running into that with Gafford on my current squads.

I've heard that listing a player at the bottom of the depth chart also makes a small difference, but sim's handling of weird minutes is so strange that it's tough to tell what works and what doesn't.

It would be nice if we had options for starters, crunch time, garbage time, and overtime.

Posted by raggedclaws on 11/10/2022 12:57:00 PM (view original):
Yeah I'd found that before - which is quite annoying. It's definitely true, in my experience. In Savage, if I have an eligible player season to use which I am sure will not see the floor at all in normal situations, then I double-check to make sure the season I plug into the roster is in the bottom 5 MPG on the team, otherwise they won't get used in garbage time at all. It's worth using a "worse" season that's low minutes than having a better backup season which is too high mins to get pulled into bench time and just ends up being totally worthless.

Overall because of this effect I don't think it's worth spending any real $$$ on any player at ~10 minutes or fewer (I know cost isn't relevant here) because pretty much all of their time is going to get burned in garbage. It's even worse if they're a starter - if you have a 9 MPG player starting then good damn luck. I'm sure some Timelord owners can relate, I'm running into that with Gafford on my current squads.

I've heard that listing a player at the bottom of the depth chart also makes a small difference, but sim's handling of weird minutes is so strange that it's tough to tell what works and what doesn't.

If you don't use "clear the bench" then no risk of having a lower minute, but useful player, being used on garbage time?

That's true dontburnearl, but I usually find bench clearing mins to be so useful that unless 2-3 of my best players are bottom 5 in MPG - which basically only happens in high cap leagues like Savage - I'm gonna try to clear the benches as much as responsibly possible.

Like yeah losing some Gafford minutes hurts, but I'm still sure as hell going to do it if it lets me maximize studs like Barkley and Capela

If you don’t use clear the bench, your starting lineup will be in the game for most of garbage time, as that’s the lineup the sim tries to put in at the end of the game, as it assumes it’s your best.

Sub logic has always been ******, but this takes it to a new level.

Posted by raggedclaws on 11/10/2022 1:51:00 PM (view original):
That's true dontburnearl, but I usually find bench clearing mins to be so useful that unless 2-3 of my best players are bottom 5 in MPG - which basically only happens in high cap leagues like Savage - I'm gonna try to clear the benches as much as responsibly possible.

Like yeah losing some Gafford minutes hurts, but I'm still sure as hell going to do it if it lets me maximize studs like Barkley and Capela

This.

From my experience I'd say clear the bench mins are dictated 70% by player's total mins, and 30% by their position on the depth chart. Maybe how many mins were played so far or how many target mins were allocated have some role, but I'm really not sure

Like my W3 Beal hasn't been allocated any mins at all and has a high total MPG but has played some garbage time - 18 mins. But not as much as lower MPG James Johnson, who also isn't scheduled to play at all, and has gotten 24 clear the bench minutes. They're both at the bottom of the depth chart for 1 position. Does it make sense? I'm not sure. But the patterns are fairly consistent, though if anything Beal has played a bit more than I would expect.

Maybe there's foul stuff, who knows. If you stare too long at garbage mins they'll start staring back. Like OG playing C on offense with Tree at PF??? At some point you just have to walk away.

Posted by dontburnearl on 11/10/2022 12:21:00 PM (view original):
I assumed that the player who has last on the depth chart would get the clear the bench minutes. This is good to know.

This is also what I assumed, and if you didn't have a player listed it then went with random bench players. I think I've observed it generally works, subbing in guys who aren't starters and saving my starter minutes. I have noticed the rotations, if you're not careful how you list them - can sub in key back ups who are starters at other positions.

Posted by raggedclaws on 11/10/2022 2:32:00 PM (view original):
From my experience I'd say clear the bench mins are dictated 70% by player's total mins, and 30% by their position on the depth chart. Maybe how many mins were played so far or how many target mins were allocated have some role, but I'm really not sure

Like my W3 Beal hasn't been allocated any mins at all and has a high total MPG but has played some garbage time - 18 mins. But not as much as lower MPG James Johnson, who also isn't scheduled to play at all, and has gotten 24 clear the bench minutes. They're both at the bottom of the depth chart for 1 position. Does it make sense? I'm not sure. But the patterns are fairly consistent, though if anything Beal has played a bit more than I would expect.

Maybe there's foul stuff, who knows. If you stare too long at garbage mins they'll start staring back. Like OG playing C on offense with Tree at PF??? At some point you just have to walk away.

" I'd say clear the bench mins are dictated 70% by player's total mins, and 30% by their position on the depth chart. "

This feels extremely made up (most stats like this are). Without fail, Brent Barry is playing garbage time minutes on three teams when Jason Terry, Wes Person, and Goran Dragic have fewer minutes on the Depth Chart but more minutes available. Also Brandan Wright in a pair of leagues is really annoying. This also continually happened with a pair of Tyson Chandler seasons for me last Savage. I'll go through and find specific examples later.

I think it's consistently the case that for clear the bench time the sim pulls your 5 or so players with the lowest total mins for their season - why Barry and Wright play more than planned - but that there's also some preference for the players who are listed at the bottom of depth charts. If the depth chart didn't matter at all my W3 Beal would have never played a minute - that Beal has never been "given" a minute and has quite high total mins but is still seeing some garbage time, 4-5 minutes in 4 different games, presumably because he is bottom of one depth chart.

The two priorities seem to be how many total minutes the player had on the season, and where they are on the depth chart. I don't know why total minutes is weighted so heavily, maybe it was a lazy way to implement garbage time logic into the sim, but it's definitely a major component. I ran a small test to compare these two factors by looking at minutes over expected for my low minutes players (the lowest 6 MPG on each team) in Savage this year, I got 2.4 MPG. I looked at minutes over expected for players who were slotted at the bottom of depth charts, and got 1.1 MPG. Admittedly, a lot of caveats like small sample size, team management changing a bit, and so on, but the ratio has been consistent across teams this year, and matches my expectations from previous seasons.

So while I don't necessarily trust the precision of the numbers, they're not made up at least. I think there's too many variables like foul trouble to suss out the full clear the bench logic without looking at the engine itself or running some fairly labor intensive numbers crunching over a large number of seasons - it's particularly tricky to track variations from game plan since your "target minutes" isn't recorded anywhere and also varies mid-season. But once you know what to look for you can proactively plan to only give 15 TMs to the 17-18 Delon Wright with 17.5 min/82, for example, since that seems to be roughly the right equilibrium with an aggressive clear the benches strategy.