So should the Usage % of your 5 starts be close to 100% or is that not what it means thanks

not necessarily.  usage is complicated and many have different opinions on the matter.

My understanding is that your team suffers a penalty (worse shooting efficiency, at least) if the five players on the floor don't add up to at least 100%.  On the other end, my experience is that you're fine up to around 120% without seeing significant signs of wasted possessions.

http://whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?TopicID=360613&Page=1&TopicsTimeframe=0&TopicsPage=2

interesting reading

Posted by longtallbrad on 10/11/2010 5:55:00 PM (view original):
My understanding is that your team suffers a penalty (worse shooting efficiency, at least) if the five players on the floor don't add up to at least 100%.  On the other end, my experience is that you're fine up to around 120% without seeing significant signs of wasted possessions.

"My understanding is that your team suffers a penalty (worse shooting efficiency, at least) if the five players on the floor don't add up to at least 100%."

Not true.  Read the thread felonius bumped for more on this.  You can actually get away with 32.5% (one 32.5% player + four guys at nothing).  That one guy will turn the ball over a ton, however.  Sometimes that's okay if he's a very efficient shooter and/or gets to the line a ton.

right, keep in mind that there are two layers of penalties, individual and team overall

That's 6 guys, so I'm not sure what you're doing.

The way I was building teams toward the end of the last roster (because I haven't put a team together AND run it in a league since), I tried to get one guy with 32.5%+ usage and one guy between 22.1% to 27.5%.  I had a third guy in the 17.5% to 22.1% tier, and the rest lower (or at most like that third guy).  I found this to be the most efficient way to make sure I got every ounce of good out of every player without hitting the usage penalty too much.  I tried with the highest guy being in the 27.5% tier, but I had a lot of personal turnover spikes from everyone (though I still won the whole thing, so I'd say I was okay with it) because they all handled the ball a little more than they should have.

because you can have too much usage - and especially with this new release that mean's overspending for a particular stat category and not getting as much as you could of something else

team penalty ok but some risk of individual penalty

Has it been confirmed recently that the usage tiers are still the same as they were back then?

Seble said that they were not changing anything engine-related in this release.  That might mean something, depending on how much you value his word.