Posted by Benis on 7/9/2019 5:09:00 PM (view original):
Posted by franklynne on 7/9/2019 12:56:00 PM (view original):
"When i ran zone, all my players complained because there weren't enough minutes to go around when I'd carry 12 (using fatigue settings)."
why not use 'target minutes'? that's what i do..
Target minutes is worse than fatigue. It can cause some crazy substitutions and totally screw you. I'd advise against it personally.
just to try to add something to this thread that isn't totally worthless -
i think the OP's choice to use minutes actually could be fine, with him running zone. in general, i definitely agree that the baseline is to run fatigue. it does the work for you, is way less complex, and is usually better. but fatigue definitely has its limits.
in general, where fatigue is fantastic, is when you have a situation where you have good depth and good depth of talent, where you can play all your players in a 'normal' HD rotation (top 10 players all appear 1x in the 1-2 spots). in that scenario, what you really want is to minimize fatigue penalty, and the fatigue settings are really good at that.
where fatigue is awful is where you have the opposite case, you don't have the depth or depth of talent to want to play guys on fairly fresh only, and its an extreme version of that. if your fairly fresh stud plays 25m, and you want 30m, fatigue is awful for that. you can raise the setting, but the management of fatigue is horrible. to see why, let's simplify and suppose you could sub any time. let's say fatigue is 100 for full, 0 for can't stand, and its like 81-100=fresh, 61-80 = FF, and 41-60 = GT.
if you have a guy set on fairly fresh, with infinite subbing, your starter would go out at 80 and come back in at 81 like 2 seconds later, then come out at 80 like 2 seconds later, and so on forever. this isn't great, because you regenerate at a constant rate - so you'd really much rather see something like, come out at 80, go back in at 99, come out at 80, go back in at 99. suppose the player ends the game at 80, then he's going to play the exact same minutes with the better way of subbing, than with the ****** way - but he'll play those minutes less tired on average.
with fairly fresh, the fatigue penalty is so close to 0%, that its kind of fine that the fatigue settings tend to have players oscillate around that 80 mark. but with getting tired or worse, where the penalty matters, you REALLY don't want to be subbing in the instant your fatigue has improved back to 61 - you really want to be playing basically evenly from 60 to 100, with an 80 average, or something like that.
with minutes programming, if you say hey, i want my guy to play 30m, it tries to spread those out evenly. so, the minutes way of doing it basically usually leads to players who need to play at higher fatigue levels / more minutes, getting rotated more evenly/better.
on the down side, minutes doesn't account for things like fouls, tempo, etc, and you can just get wrecked by the subs in certain situations. you also get limited control with the ranges, and on the whole, you still end with imperfect control.
with press, i think its not even close - its fatigue always, no exceptions. but with zone, especially if you have a few really good players you want to play more, and then you have stuff like a primary guard backup you want consuming as many minutes as possible instead of having 2 backups just each taking 1 of the 2 guard spots, minutes can offer significant value. i am fairly convinced that there are real world situations where minutes is better, but i do think its the minority, and its a lot harder to get it right.
another time i hate fatigue is that primary backup scenario, where i want 3 guys taking up the lion's share of the minutes, maybe 75/80 minutes. if you were smart about it, you could do it - quickly sub out a starter, then have the backup in, and then sub out the first starter for the second, and so on. you'd basically plan your rotation such that the 3 players were naturally splitting time. with fatigue, the starters stay in until they are tired, so they frequently come out together. if your depth chart is like PG starter / backup 1 / backup 2 and SG started / backup 1 / backup 2, backup 1 plays not that much more than backup 2, at least in many situations (if you have a 99 stamina starter and a 70 stamina starter, the fatigue way of rotating works OK, but if they are even, its awful). you can leave the backup 2 off the chart completely - but that destroys you in serious foul trouble or high fatigue situations. with minutes, you can basically say hey, i want those 3 guys to rotate, and they more or less will do so. far from perfectly, but definitely better than how fatigue does it.
all in all - i would strongly recommend fatigue for anyone who isn't able to easily maintain a+ prestige - but i think coaches trying to compete at the top tier of competition should consider minutes, in some cases.