It's about maximization of your resources. I'm not saying that Fox/Monk/Keegan/.../Sabonis isn't a *better* lineup than Fox/Duarte/Keegan/.../Sabonis, it is a better lineup. But since each of these guys can only play so many effective minutes per game before getting tired, you have to either stagger your rotation, or do hockey line shifts. Hockey line shifts are probably a bad idea.
If you have four clear top offensive players, the hockey line shift plays them all together (only one ball) and then puts out five complementary (non-primary scoring threat) players together. In six minute intervals, the number of top players on the court might look like this:
4 4 0 4 half 4 4 0 4
That's 12 minutes of junk ball and 36 minutes where your top players are competing for shots (giving our top players 36 minutes each, which is...optimistic).
In the staggered rotation scheme (again 36 minutes per top player) those minutes can look like, for example:
3 3 2 3 half 3 3 3 4
That's the same amount of minutes for the top four players. Now you've got none of those dead minutes. The idea is that because the ball has to be shared the following approximate relationships hold:
4 > 3
4 >>> 2
4 >>>>>> 1
4 >>>>>>>>>>>>> 0
So the staggered rotation avoids the horrible "0" and "1" lineups and minimizes "2" lineups to get a lot of "3" lineups. This is at the expense of "4" lineups, but "4" lineups aren't much better than "3" lineups - you'd rather have [3 3] than [4 2]. You save your "4" lineups for the end, when it counts. So you sacrifice it at the beginning. Sure, you could start Monk to have a "4" lineup on the floor to start, but then you'd have to run more minutes of "2" lineups, which you don't want to do.
Obviously these are toy numbers, but I hope they illustrate the point.
Perhaps Barnes starts so that he *doesn't* close, and Brown can pick the best complementary player to fill out our "4" lineup based on how guys are rolling and who the opponent is using. I know I'm one of the biggest defenders of Barnes on this site, but it's not because I think he's one of our top four. He's not. He's a complementary player, and we should expect complementary play from him.
If you have four clear top offensive players, the hockey line shift plays them all together (only one ball) and then puts out five complementary (non-primary scoring threat) players together. In six minute intervals, the number of top players on the court might look like this:
4 4 0 4 half 4 4 0 4
That's 12 minutes of junk ball and 36 minutes where your top players are competing for shots (giving our top players 36 minutes each, which is...optimistic).
In the staggered rotation scheme (again 36 minutes per top player) those minutes can look like, for example:
3 3 2 3 half 3 3 3 4
That's the same amount of minutes for the top four players. Now you've got none of those dead minutes. The idea is that because the ball has to be shared the following approximate relationships hold:
4 > 3
4 >>> 2
4 >>>>>> 1
4 >>>>>>>>>>>>> 0
So the staggered rotation avoids the horrible "0" and "1" lineups and minimizes "2" lineups to get a lot of "3" lineups. This is at the expense of "4" lineups, but "4" lineups aren't much better than "3" lineups - you'd rather have [3 3] than [4 2]. You save your "4" lineups for the end, when it counts. So you sacrifice it at the beginning. Sure, you could start Monk to have a "4" lineup on the floor to start, but then you'd have to run more minutes of "2" lineups, which you don't want to do.
Obviously these are toy numbers, but I hope they illustrate the point.
Perhaps Barnes starts so that he *doesn't* close, and Brown can pick the best complementary player to fill out our "4" lineup based on how guys are rolling and who the opponent is using. I know I'm one of the biggest defenders of Barnes on this site, but it's not because I think he's one of our top four. He's not. He's a complementary player, and we should expect complementary play from him.
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