A different way to think about minutes

We can look at something other than raw totals and per-game averages

Photo by Dylan Buell/Getty Images

Yesterday, I was reading

Jonathan Macri

’s excellent

Knicks Film School

newsletter and came across an interesting question, courtesy of one of his readers named Neil:

I'd love to see a deep dive on the Thibs minutes / injuries question. Everything I've seen has been anecdotal on both sides of the argument. Does he actually play his players more? What's been the impact on injuries? Is there actually any correlation here? Incorporating other factors like practice intensity would be challenging, but I would think there's enough data since he's been a coach to be able to see if there's anything there.

Macri’s newsletter focused on the injury half of the question, but here I want to focus on the other part: Does Thibs actually play his players more? And jumping off from there, which teams play their players the most minutes?

Typically, when answering this question, most people just look at the total minutes and minutes per game leaderboards. And that’s obviously the most literal way to answer question, but I also think it’s perhaps a bit too narrow.