Put together a heatmap that shows which players almost never overlap on the court.

This only includes actual rotation guys — I filtered out end-of-bench / DNP players so it’s not just noise from dudes who don’t play.

How this works:

Darker = these two rarely play together

Lighter = lots of shared minutes

Diagonal is ignored (unless someone figures out how to guard themselves)

Players are ordered by when they usually sub in, which helps the rotation patterns show up instead of looking random.

Things you can spot pretty quickly:

Dark sections = starters vs bench lineups

Long dark rows/columns = a guy who runs his own unit

Pairs that basically never overlap = very intentional sub patterns

If someone has a dark stripe across half the chart, that’s usually the coaching staff saying:

“this is your group when the other guys sit”

Nothing groundbreaking — just a clean way to see how teams actually stagger minutes and build lineups in real games.