Deep bench, short rotation

JT3 subs in five players - documented! (Joseph Silverman / The Washington Times)

Alan's excellent post about likely minutes for the upcoming season got me thinking about John Thompson III's reputation for playing a short rotation.  I think this rep was developed in his first two seasons, when the cupboard was mostly bare beyond the first 6 or 7 players on the roster.  But now that he's been coaching the Hoyas for six seasons, I wonder if this reputation is myth or reality.

But before I can dig into the question of whether JT3 goes with fewer players than he should, I need to work through some basics and find a reasonable measuring stick.

First, we need to decide what constitutes being part of the rotation for a player, rather than just playing garbage minutes.  Next, we need to have some meaningful comparison of the size of Georgetown's rotation versus what other coaches/teams run.  Finally, we'll need to consider what to do about injured/suspended players and their effect on the rotation.

More after the jump

Minutes Breakouts

There is (was?) a discussion on HoyaTalk about predicted player minutes for the upcoming season.

This - in and of itself - wasn't all that interesting to me, but a comment by a particularly angry fellow over there piqued my interest:

Just to demonstrate how pointless this is - could any one even produce a chart . . . for the actual minutes played this past season?

Perhaps needlessly, I said that it wasn't actually that hard to make a chart of player minutes. The grumpy fellow still babbled on about how it was truly impossible.

I pointed out that you only need to make an arbitrary index of players (for example, simply rank them by height), and you're off. There's no need to get hung up about whether Julian Vaughn was playing center or power forward (as if those positions have meaning in Georgetown's offense), but just call him position "5" if he was the tallest player on the court, or player "4" if he was the second-tallest.

This seemed to sail past our moody friend.

But, in the interest of proving I'm not just all talk, I went ahead and made the table.  

A couple of caveats and the table, after the jump.