Ruckman Josh Fraser has been rested this week because of knee soreness, a move Malthouse admitted was part of the plan to preserve him for the season.
“It’s a fierce contest week by week," Malthouse said on Friday. "The intensity of the game has been elevated, certainly over the last three or four years we’ve seen it go to new levels.
"As a consequence we’ve seen a lot more players fatigued, not necessarily playing consistent football.
“They play a couple of good ones and they play a couple of down ones. What we’re trying to do is eliminate the downward slide and nip it as quick as we can.”
Fraser’s fellow veterans Tarkyn Lockyer and Simon Prestigiacomo will play in the VFL this week while Shane O’Bree has been brought back in for only his third senior game of the season.
But Malthouse said the rotations did not mean the club’s most experienced players were any less valuable to the team.
“It’s not that O’Bree, Lockyer and Presti don’t get a game because they’re not part of our best side," Malthouse said. "They are part of our best side, this is our system of making sure they play at a lesser intensity or they have a week off in preparation for the weeks to come.
“We were never going to progress as a football club if Nathan Brown and Ben Reid continued to play VFL football.
"The jump is enormous and we’re not going to see that jump. We want to expose those players to quality opposition over a period of time.”
The Magpies have been the league’s trendsetters in using a high number of interchange rotations and Malthouse said this selection philosophy was the same principle on a broader scale.
“It is certainly in our thought process if we can have an expanded bench, which is clearly not on the agenda this year, but we’ve got an expanded list anyway, we’ve got 46 or 47 players,” he said.
“To be a good football side you need to understand there are going to be 32, 33 maybe even 40 players used on a yearly basis. I’m not 100 per cent sure all those players need to play 22 weeks.”
