I think there is alot more flexibility than that in how a manager chooses to spend their enthusiasm, and I think that's part of what makes BuzzerBeater interesting. Have you ever used the coachParrot tool? It has an enthusiasm calculator which seems fairly accurate in my experience.
Here's my understanding about how enthusiasm works. You start the season at 5, and there is a natural decay, or boost towards 5. So if your enthusiasm is at 4, it will naturally increase towards 5. If your enthusiasm is 13, it will naturally decay towards 5. The farther away from 5 you are, the quicker it moves towards 5.
I do not know Sounders enthusiasm levels for that game, but for the sake of simplicity let's assume a team plays TIE ever league game and every cup game and that they get eliminated after their 5th cup game. Plugging those numbers into the enthusiasm calculator, they would have been sitting at 8.9 enthusaism for Saturday's game (game 16). With this approach here would be their enthusiasm levels for the rest of the season up till the first round of the playoffs.
game 17 - 9.4
game 18 - 9.2
game 19 - 9.6
game 20 - 9.3
game 21 - 9.7
game 22 - 9.3
1st round playoffs - 9.7
Now if you run the same situation but instead do a CT on Saturday (so every other game is a TIE) then you get
game 17 - 4.5
game 18 - 5.8
game 19 - 7.1
game 20 - 7.9
game 21 - 8.7
game 22 - 8.8
1st round playoffs - 9.4
Game 17 and 18 the team is definitely at a severe disadvantage and game 19 a minor one, but for the enthusiasm level at the playoffs, a CT on Saturday would make only a very minor difference in the playoffs.
The reason in my mind to spend the enthusiasm is to try to earn HCA for the playoffs. Home court is very valuable and for two evenly match teams, it can be hard to overcome. Now obviously you can go over board and spend too much enthusiasm, but to me it's a balance.
Your approach is definitely working for you so I am not knocking it, I just think it's selling the enthusiasm system short if you say the only way to be successful is to TIE every game.