College basketball endurance is not a big deal when you consider you are playing two games a week and the game is only 40 minutes. Endurance is way more important during conference tournaments, especially if a lower seed team has to play an extra game that week. It is more important in my opinion for the best players to play as much and as hard together than any slight advantage for resting them. Once you hit tournament time most teams tighten their bench rotations way down anyway. It is not like giving your eighth or ninth guy extra experience is useful unless that is part of your SOP, example a team that wants to play pressure defense and absolutely has to play reserves. Example some of the VC teams before Shaka Smart went to Texas. Ideally if your five best players can stay on the court, you want to play them as long as possible. Point taken if you have a lumbering big man who can't handle 40 minutes like Kaleb Wesson(random example for a Big10 school), you gotta do what you have to do. Someone like a Ethan Hap or John Teske, you want them playing 35 minutes in your biggest game. Those guys can handle it providing they do not get into foul trouble. Then again if you intentionally take minutes away in the name of developing a bench, that is a victory for any team playing Wisc or UM when those two are off the court. There is no way some developing guy is going to approach either the offensive production of Hap or defensive production of Teske. Come tournament time your probably going to lose if either of those guys are not on the court for extensive periods of time against top competition.
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