Starters, rotations & out-of-position play

Your rotation is built by hand on the Lineups page. It isn’t a setting you fill out on a form: your five starters take their spots on an actual court, your bench lines up beneath them in the order they’ll check in, and the deep reserves mostly stay put unless injuries force the issue. Where a player sits in that pecking order drives how many minutes they get and when they enter the game. (There’s an auto-sort if you’d rather let the front office rank your roster and take it from there — it works for you, and everything it does can be overridden.)

Positions are assignments, not handcuffs. Basketball has five positions — point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, center — and every player has a primary position, plus sometimes a secondary one they can also cover. When you set a lineup, the game doesn’t force you into a rigid PG/SG/SF/PF/C grid; it looks at your five starters and finds the best-fit assignment across those slots. And if you disagree with it, you’re the boss: pin any starter to any slot you want, and the fit indicator on the card tells you exactly how happy — or unhappy — that player will be there. But whether the game picked the assignment or you did, “best fit” doesn’t mean “any fit is free.” Playing a player out of position costs you.

The penalty scales with how far out of position someone is. A player at their primary spot takes no hit at all. Slide them to their listed secondary position and the cost is small — barely noticeable. Push them further from home, though, and the penalty grows fast. The worst-case scenario is exactly what you’d expect from watching real basketball: a point guard forced to play center. That’s about as far across the positional spectrum as you can get, and it shows — a small, quick guard trying to battle bigs on the block is not going to hold up, and the game reflects that with a much steeper penalty than a small forward sliding over to shooting guard for a few minutes. Keep this in mind when injuries thin out your frontcourt or you’re tempted to run a small-ball look for matchup reasons — it can work, but it isn’t free, and the further you stretch a player from their natural spot, the more it costs you.

Two levers control minutes. They aren’t just a byproduct of rotation order — you get one lever for each half of the roster. Starters carry a minutes slider: set a target and the game works to hit it. Bench players carry a Playtime setting instead — dial a reserve up or down and you’re capping roughly how much run they see behind the starters, while the exact number stays emergent from how the game unfolds. Together they’re a light-touch way to manage a veteran’s workload or push a young player for extra development minutes without rebuilding your whole rotation around it.

Fatigue and foul trouble pick the floor in the moment. Two more things affect who’s actually out there at any given time. Fatigue builds up over the course of a game as players rack up minutes, and tired players play worse — which is part of why a deep bench matters even if your starters are clearly your best five. Foul trouble is the other lever: rack up too many personal fouls too early in a game and you’ll find yourself pulled to the bench to avoid fouling out entirely, with the threshold tightening as the game goes on. Both systems mean your bench isn’t just an emergency reserve — it’s part of how you survive a long season and a long game.