I was listening to "The Saturday Show" over at Salt City Hoops this last week and they had a good discussion on rotations. One point that Andy brought up was that there is a difference between allocating the number of minutes a player should get, and actually planning the rotations that will get those minutes.

I thought that was a very good point, so I started playing around with the rotations. I started with the assumption that all of our players are healthy, so Marvin is getting regular playing time. I think these rotations still work (for the most part) if you substitute Williams with Jefferson (Evans for when I have Marvin at the 4). Here's what I came up with:

This gives Hayward and Favors 30 minutes each. Kanter, Burks, Burke, and Rush each play 28 minutes. Williams, Lucas, Evans, and Gobert all play between 12-14 minutes, and Jefferson and Biedrins are under 10 minutes per game. Clark would play garbage time in this scenario.

I wasn't completely happy with these rotations, but I thought they were alright. I started wondering if I could do better and came up with the following (In this scenario Williams and Jefferson are interchangeable):

I found there wasn't much difference in minutes for a lot of guys. Hayward and Lucas play 2 more minutes, Rush plays 24, Williams/Jefferson split 16 minutes, Gobert only gets 10 minutes, and Evans gets bumped up to 20 minutes a night. Clark still gets garbage time.

I decided that I preferred my first attempt.

While I was constructing these I realized how hard it is to always have a decent lineup on the court without playing guys all twelve minutes in a quarter. I tried to limit players to no more than 8 consecutive minutes in a quarter, but then found it hard to make sure we had scorers and defenders on the floor at the same time. It gave me a different perspective on how difficult it must be to do this on the fly during a game while also taking into account how well a guy is playing, how tired a player is, and matchups.

If you get a chance, I recommend sitting down and coming up with your own lineup rotation.