Does setting to getting tired or tired for a star player with good stamina make them play worse?
Should all players be fairly fresh

It’s all relative to your team, and the replacement options. All players definitely play best at fresh, so subs set to fairly fresh keeps your most important pieces at peak performance longer. To what extent there is a drop off is a matter of interpretation, of course. If your team is short handed, or going up against a team that pushes tempo or presses, or if there is a large discrepancy between your starter and your reserve at a position, it can be advantageous to lean more heavily on starters. Many coaches do this primarily through the slowdown option. But you can also set some guys to something other than fairly fresh, to limit exposure to weaker players or walkons. This also works well when you’re using a reserve at multiple positions, to stagger substitutions a little, and reduce the amount of time you have a team full of backups on the court, which can be times of great peril for your club.

Take some extreme cases - if your team has 12 players ALL of equal capability, you should set everyone at freshest setting - avoid fatiuge as best you can

On the other hand, if you have a superstar starter and crap subs at a position, set the superstar at getting tired or maybe even tired....AND also reduce the propensity to take him out for fouls

Thanks guys

i would generally consider all players on fairly fresh to be the baseline, especially on a short rotation. there are sometimes justifications to put guys at getting tired, definitely some wiggle room there, i use getting tired on a player or two sometimes and there's definitely some wiggle room there. but i would steer clear of anything past getting tired.

the way the fatigue rotation subs players is to have starters play until their fatigue setting, then come out, and they sub back in fairly quickly - so players on deeper fatigue settings tend to play a lot to start each half, then play the remainder of their half decently fatigued. they get a couple extra minutes, but those minutes aren't spread out throughout the half like one would normally expect, they are front loaded, which is the least desirable way for them to be. the net result is that the penalty of those deeper fatigue settings exceeds the returns in most cases.

I have never been able to explain how the logic gets to this, but my observation is that if I have a guy at say #2 on the depth chart at a position - and if I want to get him more minutes (like for a promise), seems to ramp up minutes a smidge if I move him to "tired"

I have always assumed that the question was whether the #1 guy was no longer fatigued, but I see some effect from tinkering w #2 guy

i think it is because the starter is going to play on fairly fresh at times in a normal flow, especially against press and stuff. a fresh starter will always play, outside foul trouble (and end game situations). those times where the starter and backup are both fairly fresh, you are instructing the engine to play the backup, which is pretty viable. i actually use getting tired on backups more than starters, partly for such situations. there's a healthy variety of scenarios where i'll play a guy on getting tired really.

the other thing is that it could also help the backup take more minutes from the down-chart guy. in a straight 10 man rotation, this is an issue much less, but in any other scenario that is pretty meaningful too. and even in straight 10 man rotations, there's often a down-chart guy who would play non-0 minutes against a fb/fcp at least, or something like that. so it can still be a factor, albeit a small one, on those even 10 man rotations. and also whenever the starter is in foul trouble, you'll get extra minutes from that, too.

that's all assuming you are comparing a backup on fairly fresh to tired. getting tired should get you the large majority of the extra minutes that tired would get you, without the potential disaster that will occur with a tired backup who has a foul trouble starter in front of him. that's really the 1 scenario of the 3 above where getting tired and tired on a backup will yield significantly different minutes, but its usually in a bad way.