Entering this season, the most players to appear in at least one regular-season game in a single NBA campaign was 540, set in 2017-18 — the first year that saw two-way contracts effectively increase roster sizes from 15 to 17 — and tied last year. Through Monday’s games, 590 individuals have played NBA minutes this season, shattering the old record months before the normal late-season spate of call-ups and journeyman cups of coffee. While many of the players who receive those late-season deals will likely have already clocked in during the “hardship signing” era, the league will easily surpass 600. Similarly, the 120 players who have stepped on an NBA floor for the first time is also a record, eclipsing the previous market of 119 debutants set in 2019-20.
This COVID-induced broadening of the league’s talent pool has led to a relatively unprecedented situation, in that the lineups each team puts out often varied wildly from game to game, as did those of their opponents. To illustrate how much this diverges from a normal season, consider the normal patterns through which teams distribute minutes over the course of a season. For all the complaining about tanked seasons in the recent past, NBA teams, on the whole, have played it pretty straight in terms of the players on the floor for the first 50 or so games of each season.
We can define “sub-rotation players” in any number of ways, but for the purpose of this analysis, I’ve included any player in the top eight of either total minutes played for a team over the course of the season, or in the top eight in minutes per game so long as they appeared in at least 20 games that year as a “rotation player.
