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:
If you are above the salary cap, you have to pay a luxury tax penalty equal to 150% of your excess spending. This is based on your actual spending, not just your payroll at the end of the year. So if you trade away a player with a big contract right at the end of the season, everything you paid him throughout the year still counts towards the salary cap.
There is also a minimum salary limit of $40 million. If you are below this limit, then you have to pay a penalty equal to the difference between your payroll and the limit.
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 re-sign 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 enough players to get under the limit.
The minimum roster size is 10. 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 ("ovr") 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).
The potential ("pot") rating is also important. This is an estimate of the ceiling of the player's future overall rating. Just like in real life, most players never reach their ceiling, but some do reach it and some even exceed it. As a player with high potential grows older, it becomes less and less likely that he will ever reach his potential.
Also, you might notice that the height ("hgt") rating is not always proportional to the height in feet/inches of a player. So you might see a 6'8" player with 100 hgt and a 7 footer with 80 hgt. The hgt rating is what's used in the simulations. The heights in feet/inches are just for show. So hgt is really meant to also include things like wingspan and standing reach - basically how much a player's height/length impacts the game.
The displayed ratings are not the real ratings. They are estimates from your scouts. Increase the scouting budget to see more accurate ratings.
Finally, little symbols you see next to a player's name like 3ABDiDpPoPsR represent the key skills a player has. This is designed so that you can just glance at a player and easily take in that information. To see what a symbol means, hover your mouse over it or consult this list:
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.
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 make a post on Reddit.