Basketball GM is a completely free sports management simulation game. You are the general manager of a basketball team, tasked with building your roster to compete for a championship while managing your finances. As of now, your goal can be whatever you want: winning the most championships, making the most profit, developing players from rookies to stars, etc. You can make an unlimited number of different leagues from the dashboard, each one with a different set of random players.
From within a league, the most important user interface element is the Play Menu, which you can access with the big blue Play button at the top of the screen. Any context-dependent action, like playing a game or moving from one phase to another, is done from the Play Menu. Everything else about the user interface should (hopefully) be self-explanitory.
Each season of the game is divided into several phases:
League rules are generally modeled on the NBA, but simplified.
The salary cap is $60 million. This is a soft cap, in the sense that even if you are over the salary cap, you can still:
The maximum contract amount is $20 million per year and the maximum contract length is 5 years.
The minimum contract amount is $500 thousand per year and the minimum contract length is 1 year (or, until the end of the season, if the season is already in progress).
When a contract expires, you have the opportunity to negotiate a new contract with the player. If you don't come to an agreement, the player becomes a free agent. This is important because, based on the salary cap rules, you can go over the cap to resign your own players but you can't go over the cap to sign a free agent.
The maximum roster size is 15. You can never exceed this, except during the draft. But right after that, you'll have to release or buy out enough players to get under the limit.
The minimum roster size is 5. You must be above this limit to play games.
Player ratings for a variety of categories (shooting, rebounding, passing, dribbling, etc.) are on a scale from 0-100. The whole scale is used, so a typical value for a rating is 50. Roughly, the overall (average) player ratings mean:
However, the overall ratings aren't a guarantee of performance. The particular mix of ratings plays into success (e.g. a short player having a 100 shot blocking rating doesn't do much), as do a player's teammates (e.g. a good rebounder doesn't help your team as much if you already have a few other good rebounders).
There are no accounts, no passwords, no nothing. All the game data is stored locally on your computer using IndexedDB. This has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that it is really cheap to run this game, since simulations can occur in your web browser rather than a central server; this is what allows the game to be free and unlimited. The two main disadvantages are (1) doing simulations in your web browser incurs some performance restrictions (but it's not that bad), and (2) since the games are stored on your computer and not on a server, you can't access the same leagues on different computers (eventually this will be possible though).
Game simulation can be taxing on your computer, particularly as additional seasons are simulated and the database grows. There are a couple of tricks you can use to speed this up:
By default, all players are completely randomly generated. Click here for more info about custom rosters.
Basketball GM is open source. That means you can copy/edit/improve/redistribute the game. The code is on GitHub, avaliable under the GNU Affero General Public License. If you want to help make Basketball GM better, there are tons of ways you can help. You can start hacking on anything you want or send me an email if you want to discuss things first.
If you have a question or think you found a bug or you want to request a feature, either send an email (commissioner@basketball-gm.com) or submit an issue on GitHub.