Tangotiger Blog

I think it’s a more complex question for basketball than for baseball.  Assuming the playoffs are still in reach for all teams:

Baseball - I could not see the argument for scheduling a rest day for your 2-3 best hitters on the exact same day. 

Basketball - typically, the interplay of your top 6-7 players will ultimately decide your playoff success, when rotations tighten and starters play heavier minutes.  So if Bosh and Wade are already sitting this game out, perhaps there’s a stronger argument for sitting Lebron as well - there won’t be much long-term gain from Lebron learning to mesh cohesively on the court with his 11th and 12th best teammates. 

I also think that it’s acceptable for a team to punt a regular season game in basketball.  Road game, 3rd game in four nights, your players are banged up, other team is better on paper than your team anyway - that’s a great game to have a scheduled rest day for your top 3 players.

I don’t that presents itself in MLB.  The single-game talent disparity between two teams is small enough that every game is winnable.  Thus I can’t rationalize a scheduled rest day for 3 of your top regulars on the same day (again, assuming playoffs are within reach for all teams still).

The Heat have only played 273 minutes (492 Possessions) this season without Wade, Bosh, and leBron on the court. That is a small sample. It usually only happens in garbage time or when 1 or 2 of them are injured.

http://nbawowy.com/query/yqlvek5y34xqolxr#/yqlvek5y34xqolxr

Jacob: I was more thinking that the three of them are in the same game, but are all sitting on the bench at the same time.

Otherwise, it’s not common to for players to be healthy scratches in basketball is it?  Hockey only does that with the star players who are old, have made the playoffs and they want to rest them up for the playoffs.  I was presuming the same thing applies in basketball. 

So, healthy scratches was not what I was talking about for basketball (or hockey), but is what I was talking about for baseball.

“Otherwise, it’s not common to for players to be healthy scratches in basketball is it?  Hockey only does that with the star players who are old, have made the playoffs and they want to rest them up for the playoffs”

It’s pretty much the same way in the NBA. The only guys who get healthy scratches are players over the age of 30 and during a back to back night (ex: Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett). late season playoff situations too. Other than that, its a rarity. Sometimes a player might get a rest and say he has a minor injury even though he could probably easily play with it. The Heat did that with LeBron for 1 game this season.

When a healthy scratch happens in the NBA, its an unusual situation. Last week, the Indiana Pacers benched their whole starting 5. The coach was so angry at his teams recent performance that he didn’t allow his starting 5 players to play for a whole game. They eeked into a 2 point victory that night.

pm: that is fascinating!  If you have a link or two to post, please do so. 

Here is the article on LeBron missing a game with “back spasms”

http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/03/19/lebron-james-will-not-play-wednesday-vs-celtics-officially-its-back-spasms/

Pacers starting 5 getting benched after a poor month of play

http://nba.si.com/2014/04/09/indiana-pacers-rest-starters-paul-george-roy-hibbert-david-west/

You rest your regulars because (I have found from research) players who are not rested have worse performance. I think someone did similar research a few years ago with respect to Cal Ripken (how much it cost in performance to continue his streak). Obviously that varies from player to player. Older players probably need more rest and perhaps players nursing an injury need more rest. You also need to keep your bench players fresh and happy.

Given that, you certainly want to rest your regulars in games against non-rivals and against pitchers that are poor matchups for you (platoon, etc.). It doesn’t matter how good or bad the opponent or pitcher is, only that the games are more or less meaningful in terms of making the playoffs, and the pitcher is has the platoon advantage (in handedness and GF ratio) over your hitter.

I would not think that it matters whether you rest a bunch of your starters at one time or spread them out over several games. Baseball tends to be a “linear game” in that regard.

Tango, you like the article. I didn’t. I’m not really sure of the point. I thought that the article might get interesting. Then it ended.

The best example is baseball is when you had to rest Mauer, Posey, and Molina.  You know you have to sit them 15-25 games, so, you simply pick and choose the ones that make the most sense (day game after night game, off day, platoon splits with your backup, etc).

The Cal Ripken study was in one of the STATS Scoreboards.  It was a terrific little study, from a terrific set of annual books.

I absolutely loved the old STATS Scoreboards. They were many an inspiration for a lot of my work including UZR.

Tango #3, my stab at a better response to your initial inquiry, about basketball teams potentially resting their best 2-3 players simultaneously in a game:

The short answer is it’s fascinating how every NBA team handles it a bit differently based upon their coach’s preferences and personnel. 

http://grantland.com/features/nba-awards-season/

Here’s an excerpt below from Zach Lowe’s piece yesterday, praising Dirk, Curry, and Love as individuals capable of carrying an NBA offense all by themselves…and the different ways their coaches handle substitions. 

“Minnesota’s scoring drop-off when Love sits is nearly as dramatic as the Curry Cliff. The Mavs’ offense sustains well in comparison when Dirk hits the bench: 110.3 points per 100 possessions with Dirk on the floor, and a very healthy 106.3 when he rests. It’s easy to read that and argue Dirk is less “valuable” than Curry and Love. But those numbers really highlight the importance of coaching and roster construction, and the impossibility of disentangling individual player achievement from those variables.

Rick Carlisle, a Coach of the Year candidate again, has long lifted Dirk early in the first and third quarters. The strategy allows for more rest, but it also engineers creative staggering into the Dallas rotation in which the rest of the starters soldier on without Dirk, and then Dirk returns to carry bench-heavy units.

The Warriors and Wolves, on the other hand, have been Exhibits A and B in the case against sending out five-man bench units and expecting those lineups to score against competent defenses. The Curry Cliff and Love Letdown wouldn’t be as severe if Mark Jackson and Rick Adelman distributed minutes the way Carlisle does.”

Deciding how much to play, and how much to rest, the starters has long been a question in basketball.  What’s interesting is that the question is still unsettled—and even controversial.

Spoelstra in Miami and even more so Popovich in San Antonio have been at the forefront of providing more rest for their starters.  So much so that Popovich was literally fined by the NBA last year for not playing his starters.  The league office thought he was cheating the fans by not letting them see Duncan, Parker, and Ginobili on the court. 

But I think that the NBA is gradually seeing the wisdom of Popovich’s and Spoelstra’s innovative coaching decisions.  I haven’t seen any criticism of Spoelstra having his players sit out entire games.

Seems like it would make most sense to rest your starters en masse in a game you have a low probability of winning to start with. Going from the article’s premise, if resting Trout when you have a 50-50 chance of winning costs you 6%, then if you have a 65% chance of winning (based on opponent, opposing pitcher, home/away), resting him costs you 7.8%. If you only have a 33% chance of winning, resting him only costs you 4%.

So playing in Detroit against Verlander or Scherzer with your #4 or 5 starter on the mound would be the perfect opportunity to rest 5 starters. You aren’t going to win that game anyway, so you lower your odds from 20% to maybe 10%. You’d pick a better spot to “rest” your left-handed hitters with platoon splits, but those guys are already getting rested when a lefty pitches.

In reality, I think there’s too much machismo and too much concern about “the honor of the game” for manager to do that. Imagine you spend $$ to see the Yankees when they’re in town and Jeter, McCann, Texieria, Gardner, and Soriano are all sitting. And while the goal is to win as many games over the season, managers already have a tendency to try to win every game.

“Seems like it would make most sense to rest your starters en masse in a game you have a low probability of winning to start with. Going from the article’s premise, if resting Trout when you have a 50-50 chance of winning costs you 6%, then if you have a 65% chance of winning (based on opponent, opposing pitcher, home/away), resting him costs you 7.8%. If you only have a 33% chance of winning, resting him only costs you 4%.”

I don’t think that’s true, but I am not nearly certain. I think the amount you lose in WE is nearly the same regardless of the actual WE against a particular team. It could even be the other way around.