Starters, rotations & out-of-position play

Building your rotation

Your rotation lives on the Lineups page. On larger screens you get a quick read-only court summary showing your five starters at their assigned spots, but the real work happens in one rotation table covering starters, bench, and deep reserves together. Where a player sits in that table drives how many minutes they get and when they enter the game, and reordering is click-to-swap: pick two players and swap their spots in the pecking order. (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 and best fit

Positions are assignments, not handcuffs. Basketball has five positions: point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and 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. The Scheme sheet next to your lineup breaks the fit down stat by stat, showing exactly where your five run a surplus or a deficit against your coach’s scheme demands. 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 out-of-position penalty

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 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 for minutes

Minutes 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.

Injuries

Injuries persist, and playing hurt has a price. An injury isn’t a dice roll that resets at tip-off: severity, days remaining, and games missed all carry forward across the season. Anything serious sidelines a player automatically until it heals; the mildest knocks leave him available but playing hurt, performing below himself until the injury clears. A thin rotation is exactly when the out-of-position penalties above start compounding, which is why depth is a roster-building priority and not a luxury.

Fatigue and foul trouble

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.