How to play

You take over one real club, in one real season, and run the league forward from there. Everyone on the list is a real player. The grade at the end is how you did against what that club really did.

Start a run

On a phone, setup is three screens. A wide window shows the same three steps on one page, in the same order.

First the year. You pick a decade, then a season in it. You can start in any season from 1976-77 through 2020-21. Later years are in the file, through 2025-26, but a start year has to leave room for a five-season run, so 2021 and after are not on the menu. A one-season run is offered inside the years that already qualify. It does not open extra years on its own.

Then the length. The labels are The One-Off (one season), The Sprint (five), The Build (ten), The Long Haul (fifteen) and The Full Epic (twenty). A button is shown only when the file still has that many seasons left. Twenty is there for every start year through 2006-07, because a twenty-season run from 2006 ends on 2025-26, the last season in the file. From 2007-08 that button is gone. If more seasons remain than the longest of those names, the menu also offers The Whole Story, which is every season left. A 2018 start has eight seasons left, so you see one, five, and those eight, not ten.

Then one screen for the rules and the club, together. Contracts come first on that screen. They start on, and the choice is fixed for the whole run. On means deals that run for years, a salary cap, and trades. Off means no cap and no trades: the best eight stay, and the rest go. Under that, you pick the club. The game names clubs by city, and by the city they used in that season. A club that moved is Seattle in the years it was Seattle, and Oklahoma City in the years it was Oklahoma City. Where two clubs share a city, the screen shortens them to LAL, LAC, NYK and NYN so they cannot be mixed up. There are no nicknames and no logos.

The squad you inherit

You do not build from an empty gym. You get the players who were already on that club and are still there for the season you start. In this file that carry-over is small. A lot of a real list turns over every summer, which is why there is room to draft at all. Everyone else who played for the club that year arrived in the off-season, so they are in the pool, not handed to you.

A club that had no previous season in this league keeps the men who played, up to the roster limit. That is how the four clubs that came over in 1976 are handled, and how an expansion club is handled. The limit itself changes with the era: twelve men before 2005, fifteen from 2005 on. The game will not start you over that limit.

The number in the header, TEAM, is the starting five. The five spots are added up and divided by five. An empty spot counts as zero, so a hole makes the number worse, not better. The words beside a team rating run from ELITE at 70 down through STRONG, SOLID, AVERAGE and WEAK to POOR below 57. The same number is used on the squad screen, in trades, and in the season history.

A year, in order

You land on the squad. If contracts are on and the summer has a trade window, you can open it before the draft, or go straight on. Opening it is optional. Skipping it closes it for that summer. You will not get the window back later in the same off-season.

Inside the window, other clubs call. You get up to three offers, and declining one costs nothing. A rival is not shown the future. It can use a man's best rating from the last three seasons, his age, and whether he fills a hole on that list, plus the club's own record and payroll. It cannot use a season that has not happened yet. A traded man keeps the salary he already had. His money moves with him.

The draft board is that year's real class, listed in the order they were really taken. It is not sorted by rating. That is the whole point. The best player is often not the first name, because the real draft was often wrong, and you are allowed to know what the league did not. Sam Bowie really did go before Michael Jordan, and the 1984 board still says so.

You only pick in the slots your club really held, including the case where it held none. A pick the list has no room for is not a pick you can use. Releasing a man frees a spot. It does not buy an extra pick. The computer can take the rest of a draft for you if you ask it to.

A man with no rating in his own draft year is still on that board, at his first recorded rating, for that one season. That is how Larry Bird can be taken in 1978 and how Nikola Jokić can be taken in 2014. The ratings page explains the rule, and the guides show what it does to a few real classes.

Free agency comes after the draft. The draft itself does not include veterans and undrafted men. They are signed here, if they are actually in the league that season and still unrostered. Other clubs claim through the same pool. You can sign the ones you want, or hand the rest of the summer to the computer. Handing it over asks you to confirm first.

Then the season. Every season in the game is 82 games, even in a year the real league played fewer. The score of a night comes from the gap between the two clubs, plus some randomness, and the scoring level follows that season in the file. It sits at 110.7 points a game in 1985, 91 in 1998, and 115.3 in 2025. You are not watching a replay of the real results. You are watching this league, with your list in it.

Sixteen clubs make the playoffs when the league is big enough, eight from each conference in seasons that have conferences on file. A series is a best of seven. The better side has a larger edge in a series than it does on a random night in January, because a playoff rotation is shorter and nobody is resting. If you miss the bracket, the year goes to the review.

The review is the year you just played: the record, where you went out, and the state of the list. Then the next off-season starts, until the run's length is used up.

Who leaves, and when

A player is in the league in a season only if the file has a rating for him that year. Retirement happens when his real career ended. A man who is hurt, or simply absent, for a season is absent, apart from the one draft-year exception above. If he has a later season on file he can be listed as away, with the year he comes back. He is not deleted, and he is not replaced by a fictional player. There are no made-up names on a board.

The computer clubs draft and sign without being allowed to see a later year. If you draft the man who is about to become great, you are using something they do not have. If you draft the man who is about to fall apart, that is on you as well. Over one season, the grade is mostly the side you inherited and what you did with it. Over five or more, the draft has time to show up in the record.

The grade, the save, the ads

When the run ends you get a letter from A+ down to F, compared with that club's real record over the same seasons. How the sum is built is on the ratings page. The summary also keeps a few moments from the run: your best pick, a man you left on the board, and your best season.

The run is stored in this browser. It is not an account, and clearing the site's data deletes it. Abandon, in the header, throws the run away after you confirm. You can leave and come back. A finished run can be started again with the same club, or the same year and a different club.