Is there any merit to bringing starter-caliber players off the bench in the name of keeping a balanced level of talent on the floor at all times?

Or should I stop overthinking and simply start the best players? Interested to hear perspectives

Yes. Absolutely.

I have a team-leading scorer who currently is not a starter. (He lacks defense, though, compared to the guys starting ahead of him.)

On other teams, I’ve had big scorers come off the bench as the 2nd guy at multiple positions. One benefit is that they matchup against poorer defenders (non-starters).

Another tactic that I’ve had fun toying with is a sort of whack-a-mole strategy. I might start the guy at the 3 one game, have him play backup at 2 and 3 in another game, start at the 2 one game
(depending how I feel about defense matchups).

It can be tough for opposing coaches to stop a mega-scorer if they don’t know where he’ll be playing.

its very situational. there's definitely merit to the concept in general, but it really comes down to the specific teams. for the most part, the reason not to start your best starting lineup is offense. its important to keep quality scorers on the floor, and to concentrate scoring in their hands. if you had 3 elite scorers on the floor at all times, taking 100% of the shots (except put-backs and tip-ins), your offense would be approximately as good as a team with 12 elite scorers on the team, with 5 on the floor at all times.

so it definitely makes sense at times, like when you have a plethora of starting line scorers, but a dearth of them on the back line, to balance out that scoring.

outside of that, occasionally there might be cases where you are talent-leveling, but those will be rare, and much less important to catch. in general, you want a better rebounder on the floor for 25m rather than playing him for 15m to ensure you have at least 1 good rebounder on the floor. the pg is really the 2nd best argument, i could see benching a slightly better sg in the name of having a much better backup pg, that sort of thing. but for the most part, you want to get your best players as many minutes as possible, while having good offensive balance, and those two things are about all we can manage. there's just not many cases where you violate one of those two reasons for something else - but not zero (the backup pg being the main one).

but certainly, having a good offensive rotation and playing your best players the most minutes are often in conflict, and just blindly going for the most minutes would yield the wrong decision in a good number of cases.

I utilize this with my fb/press teams. I have my best player come of the bench as the #2 option at 3/4 positions and the results are pretty good.

I mentally breakdown game planning to 4 factors: team rebounding, team assist-turnover ratio, team defense, and team scoring.

On one of my current teams, the top rebounder doesn’t start (because I start a better defender). On another team, the guy I regularly start at SG is my backup PG; however, the top team distributor is weaker on defense and I will swap them in some games when needing to defend a high-scoring PG.

The point I’m reaching is starter-caliber can vary depending on your team’s needs in a specific game.

I go back and forth on this and am usually not brave enough to bring any of my studs off the bench come NT time. I would hate to lose a game where one of my best players only got 15 minutes vs. a role player who got 20 because of how the sim worked out. Might be wrong on this one, but it seems like subs end up being staggered throughout the game anyways so you can't guarantee that certain players are always playing with the 2nd unit or anything like that.

I do like bringing great offesnive players who are weak defenders off the bench as it seems like they are less likely to be attacked by the opposing coach, but a great offensive player who is also a great defensive player will always be in the starting lineup imo.

Posted by Baums_away on 6/3/2022 4:01:00 PM (view original):
I go back and forth on this and am usually not brave enough to bring any of my studs off the bench come NT time. I would hate to lose a game where one of my best players only got 15 minutes vs. a role player who got 20 because of how the sim worked out. Might be wrong on this one, but it seems like subs end up being staggered throughout the game anyways so you can't guarantee that certain players are always playing with the 2nd unit or anything like that.

I do like bringing great offesnive players who are weak defenders off the bench as it seems like they are less likely to be attacked by the opposing coach, but a great offensive player who is also a great defensive player will always be in the starting lineup imo.

i think the overall team approach matters a lot, too. in your fb/fcp, you are more able to find offense under a rock, for example. there are fewer clear-cut scorers and non-scorers, like in other schemes, so its probably less important from that standpoint.

but also, these other guys might be trading 28m for 12m, for a regular starter vs a backup, while fb/fcp maybe you are trading 22m for 15m. so that sort of makes me more willing to bench a starter in the press. but i also have played more straight press, which is HD's pinnacle of hockey-style rotations. straight press without foul trouble, its like 5-in, 5-out for quite a bit of the game, it seems. fb/fcp running 11 minimum and preferably 12, where everyone gets used, its just a different ballgame. the more chaos in the rotation, the less hockey style, the less it makes sense to bench a starter, so fb/fcp seems a lot less natural than straight press, in a way? when it comes to benching a starter, i mean.

also, while IMO there's a lot of straight press and man teams where benching a starter can go really far, it also makes things more complicated. a lot of folks run straight 10 man rotations, and that is a perfectly good approach in a lot of circumstances. typically not when benching a starter though, making changes to get them more minutes is important. its almost never worth it to bench a starter at 28m so he plays 12 on the backup line, but if its 28m vs 20m, its a lot easier to stomach.

last thing - its pretty common to have a player who is a better scorer but worse reb/def wise, or whatever else. when you have a clearly best pg, like, you are basically never benching that guy. or an elite scorer and defender, like in your example. but if you have 3 clear team leaders, and then a few guys who can fill those last 2 spots, its a lot easier to trade minutes among those other guys (between what will eventually be lower end starters and your best backups), than between a clear starter and a clear backup. its really around the margins there where the offensive flow tends to dominate my decision making. i haggle with myself between several possible starting lineups all the time, and i assume other folks do that a lot, too. its kinda way easier to bench a slightly better player in those kinds of cases, in the name of offensive flow, and generally doing so in those cases can be hugely valuable!

I think you wanna maximize the effective minutes of any given player.

If you have a starter quality player who has great stamina and can easily play 25 mpg with no fatigue, it might be a waste having him only play 15 min.

But if you have a guy who is a stud in many ways but has bad stamina then bringing him off the bench might make more sense. He will player fewer minutes but he will be very good during those limited minutes.

Posted by gillispie on 6/3/2022 11:14:00 AM (view original):
its very situational. there's definitely merit to the concept in general, but it really comes down to the specific teams. for the most part, the reason not to start your best starting lineup is offense. its important to keep quality scorers on the floor, and to concentrate scoring in their hands. if you had 3 elite scorers on the floor at all times, taking 100% of the shots (except put-backs and tip-ins), your offense would be approximately as good as a team with 12 elite scorers on the team, with 5 on the floor at all times.

so it definitely makes sense at times, like when you have a plethora of starting line scorers, but a dearth of them on the back line, to balance out that scoring.

outside of that, occasionally there might be cases where you are talent-leveling, but those will be rare, and much less important to catch. in general, you want a better rebounder on the floor for 25m rather than playing him for 15m to ensure you have at least 1 good rebounder on the floor. the pg is really the 2nd best argument, i could see benching a slightly better sg in the name of having a much better backup pg, that sort of thing. but for the most part, you want to get your best players as many minutes as possible, while having good offensive balance, and those two things are about all we can manage. there's just not many cases where you violate one of those two reasons for something else - but not zero (the backup pg being the main one).

but certainly, having a good offensive rotation and playing your best players the most minutes are often in conflict, and just blindly going for the most minutes would yield the wrong decision in a good number of cases.

"If you had 3 elite scorers on the floor at all times, taking 100% of the shots (except put-backs and tip-ins), your offense would be approximately as good as a team with 12 elite scorers on the team, with 5 on the floor at all times."

Can someone explain this to me??

Another way to manage minutes of star players you may decide to bench is using the Target Minutes feature… it can get tricky, but it’s effective when properly managed.

Posted by shane182436 on 6/4/2022 12:50:00 AM (view original):

Posted by gillispie on 6/3/2022 11:14:00 AM (view original):
its very situational. there's definitely merit to the concept in general, but it really comes down to the specific teams. for the most part, the reason not to start your best starting lineup is offense. its important to keep quality scorers on the floor, and to concentrate scoring in their hands. if you had 3 elite scorers on the floor at all times, taking 100% of the shots (except put-backs and tip-ins), your offense would be approximately as good as a team with 12 elite scorers on the team, with 5 on the floor at all times.

so it definitely makes sense at times, like when you have a plethora of starting line scorers, but a dearth of them on the back line, to balance out that scoring.

outside of that, occasionally there might be cases where you are talent-leveling, but those will be rare, and much less important to catch. in general, you want a better rebounder on the floor for 25m rather than playing him for 15m to ensure you have at least 1 good rebounder on the floor. the pg is really the 2nd best argument, i could see benching a slightly better sg in the name of having a much better backup pg, that sort of thing. but for the most part, you want to get your best players as many minutes as possible, while having good offensive balance, and those two things are about all we can manage. there's just not many cases where you violate one of those two reasons for something else - but not zero (the backup pg being the main one).

but certainly, having a good offensive rotation and playing your best players the most minutes are often in conflict, and just blindly going for the most minutes would yield the wrong decision in a good number of cases.

"If you had 3 elite scorers on the floor at all times, taking 100% of the shots (except put-backs and tip-ins), your offense would be approximately as good as a team with 12 elite scorers on the team, with 5 on the floor at all times."

Can someone explain this to me??

This is simplifying, but I think he means…

Say you have 3 50% shooters on the floor with 2 0% shooters and you have 30 shots to distribute. You give all the shots to your good shooters. They would theoretically shoot 5/10 each or 15/30 overall.

Now say you have 5 50% shooters on the floor and you divide up the 30 shots equally. They’d each shoot 3/6 or 15/30 overall.

yup, that's what i meant. in this game, there just isn't the penalty for having a 'black hole' offensive player, like you'd see in real life, where they just let the guy shoot and therefore defend the rest of the team better. it makes offense pretty extreme, an extreme curve, where your first couple really good scorers are incredibly important, the most important thing there is - but then once you have enough scoring, more is essentially superfluous. if you coach it right, that is.

concentrating scoring in your best players is just easier and more effective than real life, basically.

I know nobody does this anymore. But it works if using targeted minutes. It can be very advantageous. High stamina would be a nice bonuses. You can get 26-29 minutes off the bench. He be your district guy more of the time. It’s a also a bonus if he’s your first sub at multiple positions— again high stamina be a big deal here. I had a guy scoring over 18 points off the bench…. Caused many matchup problems, if you have a veteran coming off the bench I feel at times it easily offset any extra fatigue bc he so much better than whoever is guarding him much of the time. Fatigue of course could be an issue, I always weight it out on a game by game basis. ( I know I only have a handful of season under this name, but I have Kaye’s several teams from season 5-65 or something like that. You be surprised how little has changed with the engine, like nothing or next to it. I left w the mass exodus when recruiting changed. Kap the Cub was my USername, was at Carnegie Mellon in Naismith the whole time along with other worlds. Just thought I’d clarify, bc could see someone be looking at my history and be like wtf is this guy)

Posted by gillispie on 6/4/2022 11:36:00 AM (view original):
yup, that's what i meant. in this game, there just isn't the penalty for having a 'black hole' offensive player, like you'd see in real life, where they just let the guy shoot and therefore defend the rest of the team better. it makes offense pretty extreme, an extreme curve, where your first couple really good scorers are incredibly important, the most important thing there is - but then once you have enough scoring, more is essentially superfluous. if you coach it right, that is.

concentrating scoring in your best players is just easier and more effective than real life, basically.

Jumping on what Gil says, in HD the sim engine and real life often do not add up as this is a game after all and then yeah updates and that. But in real life, when you have a guy like Andre Roberson on the recent/oldish? OKC Thunder teams, he couldnt shoot to save his life but was considered an elite defender. That killed OKC though because when KD and Russ were facing double teams, theyd swing the ball to the corner and watch as Andre Roberson built a small community with the bricks he shot. They could never quite get that perfect combo of defensive wing/shooter to help those guys out.

In HD, you can set an Andre Roberson to 0 and you'll be fine, thats just how the sim engine works. Just make sure you surround those guys with scorers and they will give you that immense defensive benefit without the extreme real life negative of not shooting.

One of the big differences in the sets, from what I’ve found, is in how much you can lean on your best scorers, ie how high distribution% you can give them before they start taking a hit; and to a slightly lesser extent, where on the floor is the optimal place for you to get scoring from. In flex and triangle, I think you can have those leading scorers up very high, even 40%, before starting to feel any negative effects (not getting into doubleteams of course). You can go even higher if you don’t feel worried about doubles, because the penalties don’t hit hard until you push up past 50%. In flex it works better if a lot of that is from perimeter based scoring - doesn’t have to be 3pt shooting, but distribution from players with higher perimeter. LP is utilized more in triangle, which is not to say you don’t want perimeter or 3pt shooting - of course it’s always good when you can get it - but extreme LP players are at their best in triangle, hands down, in my experience. So that’s the set where they can handle a high distribution load the best. Motion and FB both tend to favor a little more balance, to varying degrees (FB moreso), so you can feel the pain from pushing distribution too high for any one player a bit sooner. I stick close to 30% there.

So in terms of bench rotations, I agree with gil in that you do want to be sure you have enough good scoring options on the floor at all times for the sets you are running (at least 2 in flex and triangle, at least 3 in motion and FB; add 1 for each to be best prepared for doubleteams). Beyond that though, the overriding concern for games you are trying to win is normally that your best *players* get the most minutes on the floor.