During the 2013–14 season, the Spurs pushed the extreme end of even their own spectrum, but this process of managing minutes has been unfolding for years. The Spurs aren’t necessarily outliers in their extreme mixing-and-matching of lineups, the difference is that they’ve done it by choice rather then necessity.

In their 2013 book, Basketball Analytics, Stephen Shea and Chris Baker defined a new statistic — team lineup entropy — a measure of how much variability there was in a team’s rotations. They found that roughly 16.5 percent of the difference in team win percentage could be explained by team lineup entropy.

It is more common for more successful teams to have a lower TLE and less successful teams to have a higher TLE. We have already mentioned that injuries drive up TLE. Of course, injuries also inhibit success. Also, when things are going well for a team, when they are winning, they are less likely to mix up their lineups.

Teams that had the most lineup entropy were usually those that had made significant trades, had undergone plenty of injuries, or had struggled enough to score wins that the rotations never felt settled. One of the biggest outliers was the Spurs (this refers to the 2012–13 season):

On the other end, the Spurs had the 8th highest TLE while going 58–24. As mentioned above, the Spurs mix lineups often as a result of resting star players.

Historically, there have been other teams to succeed in spite of their unsettled rotations. During their title season in 2011, the Dallas Mavericks had just three players average about 30 minutes per game (none above 35) and used 22 different starting lineups. That said, it sure feels like the recent vintage Spurs, at least in part, have succeed because of their unsettled rotations. Their dismantling of the Miami Heat in last year’s Finals was a product of both precise execution, and the fresh legs required to carry out the plan. The Heat, of course, had talked about resting their Big Three and did so to some degree, limiting Dwyane Wade to just 54 games. Spoelstra did not apply the same strategy to his allocation of minutes for LeBron James or Chris Bosh, however, which accounted for the fact that the Spurs’ Big Three — Tony Parker, Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili — played 5,705 minutes last year compared to 7,208 for the Heat’s star trio.

In many ways San Antonio is an organizational trendsetter in the NBA and, despite some interesting rotations from the Milwaukee Bucks in the early going this year, no one has appeared willing to seriously commit to Popovich’s brand of minutes distribution.

All of which begs the question: If the Spurs have discovered and exploited a clear advantage, why isn’t anyone else doing it, too? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that San Antonio, through its shrewd organizational processes, has leveraged an advantage that simply does not exist for most other teams.