San Antonio Spurs: Finding the analytically perfect rotation

Timeline and strategy

When creating the timeline, some interesting things happened when attempting to follow the rules. Firstly, Rudy Gay functionally ended up staggered with DeMar DeRozan, since I needed one of them to play the 3 at all times.

This was useful because it meant that in all the Aldridge-Cunningham bench lineups, Rudy Gay was there too as the secondary playmaker. That meant that the DeRozan-Bertans-Poeltl bench lineups mostly all included Patty Mills as well.

This essentially created two types of bench lineups for the San Antonio Spurs. One type is super small lineups with DeRozan at the 3, Poeltl at the 5, and three snipers around them. The other type encompasses bigger ones featuring Aldridge flanked by two strong wings in Gay and Cunningham.

(Click to expand)

In retrospect, there are still some things that aren’t perfect. Belinelli has one two-minute stint, and I try to avoid those short bursts, but so be it. There are some pretty long stretches for some players too: DeRozan plays the first 10 minutes straight, and Belinelli plays 12 out of a possible 14 minutes over one stretch (although there is a quarter break in there as well).

Perhaps I should have included White as a 10th man, or tried to slide Cunningham up to the 3 more to give him and Bertans some more minutes at the expense of some of the backup guards. All in all though, it looks good so far.