I spent the entirety of my Wednesday the way any sane person would during the middle of July: mapping out an entire 48-minute rotation for an NBA team.

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The Sixers have three standard NBA roster spots that have yet to be filled, but they likely have eight rotation players locked in with three players on the bubble. We have a pretty good sense now for what their new-look rotation will be once the season kicks off in about three months.

Anyone who has followed my coverage in writing and on social media is familiar with my at-times painful focus on lineup construction and substitution patterns. Last season, I charted every substitution Nurse made in each game in real time to develop a strong sense for how he operates.

So now that the members of the Sixers' rotation heading into 2024-25 appear to mostly be set, I decided to put myself into head coach Nick Nurse's shoes and try to assemble a specific rotation. This will not just be minutes totals for each player adding up to 240, but a game's worth of substitutions and lineups that coalesce into a sensible strategy for attacking 48 minutes of action.

The players

As I said, there appear to be eight players locked into Nurse's rotation. 

• Tyrese Maxey, Paul George and Joel Embiid will be the centerpieces of this team. All roster decisions for the time being will be made through the lens of how various players fit with those three All-Stars.

• Kelly Oubre Jr. will likely slot in between Maxey and George as the team's shooting guard (though he can slide up to the three at any time and up the four on occasion), and Caleb Martin should be considered the heavy favorite to occupy the power forward slot in between George and Embiid.

• Kyle Lowry will serve as the Sixers' backup point guard, though he will also share the floor with Maxey at times, a pairing that worked well during the stretch run of lat season. Andre Drummond has made a triumphant return to Philadelphia and is going to be the backup center. Within hours of free agency beginning, the team signed veteran sharpshooter Eric Gordon, and he figures to be a fixture of the team's second unit to open the season.

Nurse typically goes with nine players in the regular season, and that leaves one spot up for grabs. Many expect Ricky Council IV to take the opportunity and run with it, so I opted to select him as the ninth and final rotation piece. I do think that KJ Martin has a very real chance of opening the season ahead of Council on the depth chart, but ultimately chose Council. If KJ had been the choice here, it would not change a ton about the rotation I put together, as the two players check (and do not check) similar boxes. 

Rookie Jared McCain looms as a potential rotation option at some point, but that may require an injury or considerable step backwards from a perimeter player. Fellow rookie Adem Bona figures to be in the picture when Embiid misses time barring the team signing a fourth center, but he will not be a rotation regular for the time being.

Without further ado...

The rotation

What a nice graphic! Thank you to TheHoopsGeek.com, whose rotation planner I used to visualize all of this.

Take a quick look through and digest as much as you can, and then I'll break down my initial thought process entering this exercise and contextualize it all with the minutes totals and lineups it yielded.

The methodology

I entered the process with a some fundamental principles both in terms of substitution patterns in a vacuum and in terms of personnel-specific judgements -- some stemmed from what I have come to learn about Nurse's tendencies, and some stemmed from my own takeaways on the best way to construct a rotation.

Some general philosophies:

• This is a regular season rotation specifically. Once the postseason begins, Nurse will surely lean more on his starters than he already does and perhaps trim his rotation to eight players, as he did last season.

• I aimed to avoid too many one-for-one substitutions as to give lineups a bit more time to breathe. No unit other than a starting lineup is ever going to play more than four or five minutes at a time before it is interrupted by a substitution, but I prefer bringing three players in at once rather than one by one by one over the course of three minutes. I did avoid Mark Jackson-esque five-man substitutions, though -- there are never more than three players who check into a game at a time.

• Most Sixers games last year featured somewhere between 15 and 20 lineups within a game -- foul trouble and garbage time being the two factors that often increased that figure. I hoped to end up with close to 15 and landed at 13; this is perhaps a bit fewer than ideal, but I would prefer being closer to 10 than 20 if I was forced to choose.

• The substitution patterns in the first half and second half should not be identical, but they should be at least somewhat similar as a result of tangible priorities in terms of preferred groupings of players. If possible, players should not see considerably more action in one half of a game than the other.

And Sixers-centric guidelines:

• In 2021, Doc Rivers -- then the head coach of the Sixers -- said that he was "not scared" to play Embiid and Drummond together. I would be. Drummond is on the floor whenever Embiid is resting in this rotation, but the two centers never share the floor.

• I ensured that one of Maxey and Lowry was on the floor at all times to initiate the offense as its point guard, but also constructed a few lineups featuring both guards. Nurse has an affinity for units featuring multiple ball-handlers, and these units allow Maxey to be weaponized off the ball in a pinch.

• I attempted to have at least two of Maxey, George and Embiid on the floor as much as possible. It is nearly impossible to pull this off for 48 consecutive minutes while giving Embiid a reasonable minutes total, so there are two brief stretches in which Maxey rides solo -- I made sure those units also included Oubre, who is fully capable of serving as a secondary scorer when needed. The three stars do not all share the floor at any point other than the beginnings of each half and the end of the game, but it is a worthy trade-off to avoid units that are starved for offensive firepower.

• Just about any player is naturally going to have a better chance of succeeding when sharing the floor with Embiid, but there were two players I tried to tie to the former NBA MVP the most. The first is Council, whose driving ability will be limited in lineups with Drummond clogging the paint -- and will be enabled to take more risks on the defensive end of the floor with such a terrific rim protector behind him. The other is Gordon, whose outstanding three-point shooting range can improve the team's spacing around a player who commands so much attention from interior defenders.

• As two starters, Oubre and George frequently share the floor, but I made a point to have one of them on the floor at all times so that the team was never without a wing who could create their own shot.

• Embiid has often played three long stretches over the course of a game rather than a handful of shorter stints. I decided to flip that here -- he plays one long stretch to open the second half, but is otherwise playing in bursts of five or so minutes at a time. This could help his fatigue, particularly near the end of games. Instead, it is Maxey who plays one long stretch in each quarter. I split the difference with George -- he plays the entirety of the first and fourth quarters, but only around half of the second and third quarters.

• Caleb Martin might be a small forward by trade, but until the Sixers add a prototypical power forward, the four is going to be where he logs most of his minutes. In this iteration of the rotation, all of his minutes come as a power forward. If Martin plays well, Council takes a step forward and the play of someone like Oubre or Gordon warrants fewer minutes than anticipated, Martin could log some minutes at the three alongside Council.

The numbers

The final minutes totals for each player pretty closely resembled my target numbers. Here they are, also broken down by minutes per half:

Part of my calculus here was Nurse's reputation for relying on his key contributors for more minutes than the average head coach might ask them to play. I fully anticipate some trepidation with Embiid's 34 minutes per game and George's 35 minutes per game, which is fair given the former's injury history and the latter's age. 

For what it's worth, Embiid played 68 games in 2021-22 and 66 games in 2022-23 averaging a combined 34.2 minutes per game. George played 74 games last season -- his most in more than half a decade -- logging 33.8 minutes per game, but will have a lesser offensive burden now that he is playing alongside two high-usage players in Embiid and Maxey.

The lineups

Every time I finished a draft of the substitution patterns, I wrote out each lineup being used over the course of a theoretical game to ensure that none of the lineups severely lacked shot creation or were not sensible for reasons related to spacing or defense.

If you want a breakdown of each specific lineup being used, here you go:

The conclusions

Two closing thoughts: first, when the season starts and something about a lineup Nurse is using frustrates you, take a moment before you blame the coaching staff to consider how difficult of a process this is. I am in the 99th percentile of thinking about lineup construction and substitution patterns, and it took me several hours to just map out a rotation for one game without factoring in injuries, foul trouble, matchup-specific challenges or any other factors that can alter these rotations in a moment's notice.

Second, looking at the above list of lineups hammers home why the Sixers viewed the opportunity to add George to their All-Star duo of Maxey and Embiid as such an enticing one. Nurse can go nearly the entirety of any regular season game with two star-caliber scorers on the floor at the same time, all of which can haunt opposing defenses at all three levels.

Can the Sixers be genuine challengers to the Boston Celtics to win the Eastern Conference? I am certainly not prepared to say that, but I would not make that statement about the New York Knicks or Milwaukee Bucks, either. I can say that, on paper, this Sixers team should be terrific in the regular season. But as we all know, that will not satisfy the city of Philadelphia.

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