fatigue or target minutes

Fatigue -- spares you from the trouble of a player getting into early foul trouble and then trying to play all of his minutes in the second half and spending a lot of it at very tired.

Minutes is good if you've made a high-level minutes promise (20/25) to a kid during recruiting and need to make sure you hit it, but in the majority of cases I've evolved into thinking that fatigue combined with a careful tweaking of your depth chart [ETA: and take out quicker/leave in longer settings] is definitely the way to go barring some extreme pressing need.

Fatigue is best. I agree with rednu.

One thing I also use target minutes for is if I have a great backup upperclassman that I want to play more and I had to offer a freshman the start and 15 minutes in that spot. Might use it in this case to limit the freshman's minutes and give more time to the upperclassman.

I've been running minutes most all year with my ole miss team. It's been much easier to get the true time I want players on the floor. I've been able to keep my scrubs from playing too much and it's fit THIS team really well but it may not always be that way. So don't discount minutes if you know your starters slightly weak are better than your backups not fatigued.

For me, the few times I've had minutes work 'ok' it's generally been on a zone team, for what it's worth. Not that I've used them much.