i use getting tired fairly often on starters too, in man and zone. its always targeted though, i feel like you have to have a reason - or at least, you want to have one? i would not be on the same lines as any of the posts about running GT for the whole starting lineup, i don't think i've ever done that, and i can't really imagine a scenario where i would (press - not in a million years - other sets - minutes is better). i could occasionally see the use of a single strategic GT here and there on a press team, but there'd have to be a really good reason - i generally am straight fatigue fairly fresh for press.
the central challenge to me in all this rotation stuff is the same. the penalty for slight fatigue is slight, and the penalty for moderate fatigue and up gets severe real quick. ideally, we want the best players to play as many minutes as they can without getting out of the safe fatigue ranges.
on fairly fresh in lower pace games, the best starters don't play as many minutes as we want - but getting tired and tired settings function poorly. ideally, we'd say ok just add a few more minutes to the guy, and spread that fatigue out nicely. the game doesn't do that though. it delays the first sub until the player hits that higher fatigue threshold, front loading all his minutes, putting him behind on fatigue for the entire rest of the half (as he tends to sub in before being fresh - soon as he's fairly fresh, he takes precedence again). as a result, GT and down fatigue settings tend to be ones i am not a huge fan of. still, the penalty isn't that severe - as long as its a low pace situation - and using GT to get a key player or two extra minutes, i can get behind. but if its an entire team who i want to do that to, i am going to go to minutes and deal with the extra operational overhead that comes with running minutes, because minutes is better at spreading those extra minutes out.
i guess there's really two challenges, and the second is just generally getting the rotation to flow, where you always have a good amount of offense, that sort of thing - where you are always running 5 man lineups that work, or as close to always as possible, if you will. if you have 5 good scorers and they are all on the floor together and sitting together, its going to be a disaster - that sort of thing. straight fairly fresh can impede complex substitution patterns - anything but hockey style, really. what if you have 3 starter caliber players and want them to play 25m each, almost completely covering 2 positions? fatigue is awful for this. minutes is way better. but using GT on potentially 1/2 starter and sometimes also the backup, is another way to accomplish it.
anyway, IMO, you can strategically deploy either getting tired or minutes, to make your rotation work better and/or to get a couple key guys extra minutes. however, the baseline is that using those options gives up something meaningful - GT setting just functions mechanically poorly - and minutes deals with fatigue and foul trouble very poorly. so, my take is - good coaches can justify using those tools, but they should be used for specific purposes, to accomplish specific goals - and the baseline, the default case absent a reason to deviate, is fairly fresh.
lot of valid opinions on this stuff, lot of ways to handle it. plus rotations are definitely one of the trickiest and most complicated subjects, sometimes i feel like it takes me all season to beat a team's rotation into submission. between all the stuff here and the detailed depth chart stuff (making sure desired substitutions happen by deliberately setting the lower parts of the depth chart in accordance with how the game does subs, in its minimum sum of positions with left to right tie breaker algorithm) - there's really a lot that can be done to affect the rotation. a lot of coaches just kinda sit there and let whatever the game does happen - i definitely encourage folks to do the opposite.
12/24/2020 4:06 PM (edited)