you mean like Roger Federer?
or Schumacher some time ago?
sometimes you just don't need to put too much effort in a game and play relaxed... tie isn't lack of effort, it's just a more relaxed approach to the game, avoiding injuries, avoiding running three feet behind a guy who's gonna dunk a fastbreak and losing stamina and so on...
This is a good point, however the enthusiasm mechanism is not really implemented in accordance to rhis, or at least the effects of the effort (TIE/normal/CT) are not related to your list. Currently teams that TIE gain
enthusiasm independently of the outcome of the game. In reality no team would gain enthusiasm if they lost a game just because their coach told them before the game that
"they should not really care too much". Instead if you lost a game with a few points after putting less effort than you could have, then you ar probably more likely to loose more enthusiasm (as you know you could have done a lot better then you did).
In fact, the reason that coaches in real life chooses to put less effort in some games has nothig to do with enthusiasm, but with other effects, mainly like injuries and game shape as you already mentioned.
The "game shape effect" is already partly availble in the game by other mechanisms (time management and selection of coach type). The same could be said about the "injury effect" (coach type and doctor). However, their is a possibility of adding a dimension to this; if TIE/normal/CT affected injuries and game shape rather than enthusiasm the mechanism would be more logical and tactical appealing in my opinion.
For instance if you tell your players to TIE a game, playing too many minutes would not affect game shape as bad, and the players would be less affected by injuries (and perhaps training would not be as efficient due to the lacj of effort), while if you play CT your players would probably loose more game shape and be more subject to injuries.