“I would say I have a lot of understanding for the players who say this. I think a lot of players have been conditioned throughout their career to play in longer stints and to go find that rhythm, and basketball, just like every other global team invasion sport, is evolving, and the demands on the intensity are higher and higher and we are looking to also adapt to the times. A lot of planning, a lot of feel goes into planning the sub patterns. I think what’s often forgotten is what comes out — the actual sub pattern — it’s the optimized results in the short, medium and long term. That is the only goal of the sub pattern, to find a competitive advantage from it. Like it’s a good question to ask because you could say, OK, what are you maybe not getting if you’re getting intensity and pace — pace being one of our key components — especially here in the early season? You might be sacrificing some chemistry within the units because they might play shorter times together or it might be more substitutions in an NBA game that already has a lot of stops in it, so I understand the concern. We’re after the best overall result, like I said, in the short, medium and long term.”
