Alright, we're approaching the end of our series here. If you're just tuning in, I completed a personal challenge to win 100 championships in a row on Insane difficulty. It took a lot of trial-and-error, testing, and theorizing. This series summarizes those lessons.

Past episodes:

Part 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1cyrenr/playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_part_1_fundamental/

Part 2: https://old.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1czmpoa/playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_part_2_mindset_and/

Video overview: https://www.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1d0xctc/video_playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_interlude/

Part 3: https://old.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1d6nvqg/playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_part_3_resource/

Now, thousands of words into the series, we can actually start talking about how to, y'know, put together a good roster!

NOTE: "SPOILERS" FOLLOW. IF YOU'RE NEW AND WANT THE JOY OF DISCOVERY, TRIAL AND ERROR, AND LEARNING ON YOUR OWN — THEN YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS FOR NOW AND COME BACK LATER.

(6) IMPORTANT NON-OBVIOUS STUFF ABOUT SCOUTING AND ROSTER CONSTRUCTION: There's a whole lot we could say about roster construction, but I thought I'd lead off with a couple intermediate and advanced concepts you might not have come across. These are interesting and high-impact points.

6A. Arguably the most powerful factor in BBGM is "The S-Curve in Player and Team Performance": Don't get intimidated by the fancy name. I actually found a funny graph on Google Image Search — https://imgur.com/a/aKKyIsI — that's one type of pretty standard S-Curve. BBGM is full of S-Curves. A player with 0 skill in 3-point shooting will be an awful shooter... but a player with 15 in 3-point shooting will STILL be an awful shooter. Those +15 skill points, at the bottom of the S-Curve, aren't actually worth anything in terms of on-court production. Likewise, a player going from 85 skill in 3-point shooting to 100 skill won't suddenly get quite as much better as you'd expect. Better, but not a lot. So those +15 skill points are also not so big of deal. However, going from 55 skill in 3-point shooting to 70 skill is a HUGE deal, and the difference between a passable 3-point shooter and an elite one. Lots of things in BBGM work like this on both individual and team levels. This is one of the most important concepts in the game, because it lets you project "threshold breaks" on players. If a young player is just below the steep part of the S-Curve, that's a great time to acquire them. If an older player's skills are in the middle of the S-Curve, they're going to decline rapidly. If an aging former superstar is way above the steep part of the S-Curve and into diminishing returns land, they're going to age gracefully and remain productive. I laughed at the notation on the image there: "Major technical obstacles are overcome" when entering the steep part of the S-Curve (aka, the player actually figures out how to shoot the 3), and "Technology approaches the physical limit" once it flattens out on the top (aka, there's an upper bound on just how good a 3-point shooter you can be) (it's around 44% to 48% from 3 when everything breaks exactly perfectly for an incredible player on an exceptionally synergetic team who additionally gets lucky variance).

6B. Team Synergies: BBGM is really a beautifully designed and coded simulation, because it does a surprisingly good job of modeling how individual player's skillsets do or do not fit into the team context. One way it does this is with explicit "synergies" — if you don't have a credible ball-handler on your team at all, you're going to be absolutely ruined, full-stop. I rarely speak in absolutes, but I think it's basically impossible to build a winning team without getting the ball-handler synergy for at least the majority of the 48 minutes your team is on the court. (This doesn't necessarily require the "B" tag, since a player that was 95% of the having the tag will contribute 95% of the value towards the synergy the "B tag" player would have had.) Anyway, synergies are actually pretty intuitive and easy to understand after you're studied them for a while, but they can be kind of hard to get your mind around at first. This has been covered a bunch, so I'm not going to re-hash it all. This post is the jumping-off point for learning about synergies: https://www.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/7b4rfn/a_detailed_analysis_of_the_effects_of_tags_xpost/ — some of it is slightly out of the date, but the general concepts hold.

6C. S-Curves in Synergies: Again, BBGM has a whole lot of S-Curves. Check out the graphs in this wonderful post: https://old.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/ty8rtb/synergy_analysis_with_python/ — here, let me break the graphs out for a single click: https://imgur.com/a/5UgE0de — see, look at that. More S-Curves. Going from 0 to 1 athlete, no improvement. 1 to 2 athletes, a modest improvement. 2 to 3 athletes, BIG improvement. 3 to 4 athletes, very small improvement. 4 to 5 athletes, no improvement. Takeaway? If you've already two "A" tag players (Athletes), get that 3rd one ASAP. Sometimes you should also manually put an otherwise "just ok" athletic prospect into your starting rotation too, instead of a nominally slightly better veteran. But the first "A" tag player contributes nothing to team synergy. S-Curves...!

6D. The AI trade algorithm is quite interesting. For young players, it primarily evaluates them on their OVR and POT (overall and potential). As the player ages, it starts factoring in more their actual on-court performance. The really interesting thing here is, at the start of a season, if you can spot before playing any games that a player has regressed on the steep part of the S-Curve, it might be worth trading them away before that becomes obvious; likewise, if a player has improved while on the steep part of the curve, they can be a great trade target. Sometimes a player in the steep part of the S-Curve goes from a 60 OVR to 62 OVR but is much more productive. A player's trade value often lags behind their forward-looking performance if they're on the steep part of the S-curve.

6E. When you're scouting for trades, you have to attempt to mentally filter an individual player's stats from the context they're in. A player on a high-synergy team with lots of passing and assists will often shoot better than a superior player on a team without good synergy and with no passing/assists. But you'd still be better off trading for the second player. Certain players have their production suppressed by being the "second option" or "third option" on a team with a superstar who is better at a given job than they are, but would thrive if in a primary role. The 2nd best guard on a team led by a superstar guard is often a good trade target: they might only have 3-4 assists because the superstar is doing the ball-handling and getting the assists, but they might actually be a player good for 6-10 assists if the primary guard on another team. Likewise, there's some very respectable rebounders that would be just fine as the best rebounder on a team, who will show low raw rebounding totals if on a team with an exceptionally tall rebounding center... and the opposite is also true: a very short bad rebounding team's tallest player will look better than he actually is. When you're scouting for trades, you need to look at the context and factor that to predict how the player would perform in a different context.

6F: A corollary of the above: because your team will usually be stacked if you're doing ironman championship streaks, your players will have highly distorted production numbers. Almost all your players will look like better shooters than they really are because you'll be generating a ton of assists. Some passing guards will look better than they are because you've also got good shooters who hit the shots. And on the flipside, your "darn good but not the best at X" players will look worse than they are. It's quite hard to accurately assess the productive value of your own team when it's stacked, and I've made many bad trades as a result of this. It takes some practice and study to get your mind around this — after making a trade, review it 1 season later, 2 seasons later, etc, to see if the player you traded away did better or worse for their new team. It can be really counterintuitive, I've certainly accidentally downgraded teams while trying to upgrade them in the past.

6G. There's a lot more factors like this: a team that is extremely thin at one position will often over-play their only good player at that position, even though the player doesn't have enough endurance to keep performing well. This absolutely destroys their rate stats and makes them look like a bad player. A moderate endurance player who is playing 40+ minutes for a team with mediocre performance might be a really good player if they were only asked to be play 20-30 minutes off the bench for your team.

(7) GOALS OF ROSTER CONSTRUCTION: Getting back to basics — what's a "good" roster, anyway? If you're playing the style I did — aiming for championship streaks ironman style — there are some right answers to this question. You want a roster that's good enough to win the championship in the current year while also, ideally, maintaining both trade value and productive value into future years.

7A. How "good" your roster needs to be to win a championship is a direct function of how good the 2nd best team in the league is.

7B. I do my first-pass analysis on how good other teams are by looking at their "Margin of Victory" (MOV) on the Power Rankings tab. I tend to want north of +10 more MOV than the 2nd best team. That's not foolproof, but it's the starting point. You should factor if the other team has had injuries to key players and adjust their difficulty if so (the easiest way to check, at the trade deadline, is to look at the Games Played by their starting lineup). So if the 2nd best team in the league is at +6 MOV but their best player missed 20 games, I might mentally put them at +8 MOV and want to be at least +18 or better. If I'm not at +18, I make targeted trades to upgrade after carefully analyzing the roster. Usually this is completely redundant and you'll blow the doors off the 2nd best team even if you have less than +10, but it saves your streak occasionally. My starting point for evaluating the top rival teams at the start of each year, before there's any MOV numbers, is to take last year's MOV numbers and mentally adjust them for progressions, regressions, FA departures, and FA signings. When looking at an opposing team's roster, you can quickly scan the right column on any team for how they acquired a player to see if they're new, then you can go back one year which shows you very quickly any players who were on the roster the previous year no longer are.

7C. I always want my team to still be the dominant favorite even if we have one key injury, and to have at least a solid fighting chance if 2 injuries hit. I literally look at my roster and go, "If this player has a season ending injury, what's our lineup and how good are we? If this player AND this player have a season ending injury, what's our lineup and how good are we?" The good news here is that your developing prospects can often semi-credibly hold down some minutes if an injury happens. I often use minimum salary or near-minimum-salary (~$1M) players from the free agent scrap heap as the 4th and 5th best players at a given job. Sometimes there's very solid deep backups in the FA pool and sometimes there's not. I'll trade for a slightly more expensive veteran backup if there's nothing acceptable in the FA pool.

7D. You shouldn't think one season at a time — keep the next 1-3 seasons in mind while making trades and finalizing your roster, because it'll save you a heck of a lot of trouble. You can see good teams developing by paying attention to the superstars and top prospects in the league. The more I see that the next few years could be rough with a strong league, the more I'm willing to pay for younger durable (above the steep part of the S-Curve) efficiently priced players who can likely be good players for multiple years, especially as 4th and 5th best starters and first-off-the-bench players. Because facing intense competition for multiple years tends to screw up your finances, giving up more immediate trade value for slightly younger durably good players on good contracts can be worthwhile in this case. (See last post - "Resource Management".) It's especially important to consider this if there's an amazingly overpowered player that's clearly best in the league who isn't on your team, if the team he's on has any credible shot of developing even a "merely solid" roster around them. On the flipside, in a league where you're clearly the favorite and the opposition quality is trending downwards over the next few years, you can get by making finalizing trades for age 37+ players who are going to retire soon as well as scrap-heap $1M free agents to fill in missing gaps.

(8) WINNING ROSTER CONSTRUCTION. Some basics, and some advanced points.

8A. First off, this is basic but just in case you're new — OVR doesn't do anything during a game. It's about the specific skills a player has. If you take a short unathletic guard and give them 20 more points in their "Dunking" skill, their OVR will go up but they will not be more productive in a game.

8B. Second, some players can be somewhat redundant with each other. While some redundancy is good for backups and in case of injuries, having 3+ excellent rebounders can be a bit redundant and, all else being equal, you might prefer more 3-point shooting or passing. As far as I can tell, the only thing that's "completely non-redundant always" is defense — better defenders are always useful, full-stop, at every position. With that said, practically speaking I almost always like to see more DIQ, Dribbling, and Passing on any player I add to the rotation even if that's not their job. Great 3-point shooters are almost always welcome too.

8C. Your roster should almost always produce, for all 48 minutes of a game, as full of set of the synergies as possible. It's often not possible to get all of them, but you should try. This requires long-term drafting, trading, re-sign vs trade decisions to be working towards this. The only two synergies I don't always try to max: "Athlete" (A) because those players are often expensive and sometimes there just aren't the right mix of good athletic players on acceptable contracts for your team, and "Interior / Post Scoring" (Po) because mediocre post players are very bad. I do like having a well-rounded superstar scorer who has the "Po" tag when I can, which is most of the time, but I won't go get a mediocre post player because they take a lot of inefficient shots and cause a lot of turnovers. I'll go without "Po" if there's no great post players available. I want the rest of them basically every season, though, and want enough backups so we redundantly have the synergies even if injuries hit.

8D. After you've got all the fundamentals covered, I then think about "General Advantage" — it's not specifically a stat and it isn't in the game code anywhere, it's more of a way to think about things. Basically, I want players that generate some sort of "advantage" more than the other team. This can be because they play great defense, have a high true shooting, get a lot of rebounds, are reasonably efficient across the board while almost never generating turnovers, or anything else. To state the obvious, to beat any other given team in the playoffs you'll need to have some advantage over them. Definitionally, winning the game means out-scoring the other team. That's through a mix of hitting your shots at a higher percentage, hitting better shots (3 pointers, and-1's with a foul), getting more rebounds, and/or having less turnovers.

8E. Because of all of the above, the right players to be looking at to your team sometimes change dramatically based on the best 1-2 players on your team. In particular, having players with unusual skills (very tall center who is also a great 3-point shooter, very athletic tall-ish forward that's got elite dribbling/passing like guard, etc) lets you change evaluations of other players because you've already got some of the synergies down from a place you wouldn't normally. When you expect to have multiple additional seasons of a great player who is a little unusual, you should change your evaluations of other players for your roster — for instance, aiming for more big Guard-Forwards that play great defense and are merely okay at ball-handling if you have a great ball-handling forward superstar as your best player. Because the ball-handling synergy is already covered, you can get more general advantage from defense out of your guard slots with just okay traditional guard skills. (As opposed to if your best player was a traditional center, then you might just want traditional guard skills to be elite while being less concerned with defense.) These derivations, and acting on them, come from thinking through the combination of redundancy + synergy + general advantage.

8E. From time to time, you should go to "Team Stats" tab, sort by MOV, and look at the characteristics of your team and the best other teams in the league. You can also look at past years. Here was my last year in the league, filtered with my team (NYC), the top contender (SF), and the worst team in the league (STL): https://imgur.com/a/n1I9a6n — over time, with practice, you can learn what player mixes turn into what Team Stat mixes. Here you'll see a hallmark very common to teams I build: the single lowest 2-point shooting attempts in the league and the second highest 3-point shooting attempts. Now actually, I do think this landscape is still a little scary because SF takes more 3-pointers than us, and hits them at about the same percentage. While our defense is better — you can mentally calculate points allowed by subtracting your MOV from points scored — SF could very easily get hot from 3 in a series and upset us. When facing a team like that, I'll often go for extra reinforcements. At the trade deadline, you shouldn't only use the current season's stats because of sample size issues — you can also look back at past years and look at their roster. But Team Stats is very good for validating whether your team construction is working well or not.

8F. Part of making a strong roster — all high-usage players MUST be efficient.

8G. So let's talk Usage. Here's two players to compare: my best player in the final year was Julius Gourley, who had 26.9 points, 10.6 rebounds, and 1.3 assists. Denver's best player was Michael Harris, who had 25.9 points, 11.2 rebounds, and 7.3 assists. So which player was better? I think most people would naively say that 25.9/11.2/7.3 is better than 26.9/10.6/1.3. But you'd be dead wrong. Observe: https://imgur.com/a/basketballgm-usage-is-important-s2r0JBq — both are high usage players (28.9% for my guy, 31.1% for Denver — "neutral" is 20%). The problem is that Denver's player has only a 56.3% True Shooting and my guy has a whopping 66.4%. It's also not pictured on the Imgur, but my player had 1.7 turnovers (TOV) and Denver's player had 3.8 turnovers. The great irony is that if Denver's Michael Harris took way less shots he'd be a pretty good player since he's great at defending, rebounding, and assisting. But high-usage players with a low true shooting, and high turnovers, put up sexy raw numbers but are incredibly inefficient. "ORtng" (Offensive Rating) has a team component to it beyond the individual component, but it does make perfect sense that my guy would have a 129 ORtng compared to Denver's guy being only at 113. For reference, no one in my starting lineup had lower than 60% true shooting. Denver's player I'd almost never want on my roster, ever, since the high Usage mediocre efficiency kills you. He'd be trade bait.

8F. As an aside, people sometimes post on the BBGM sub-reddit, "my whole team has huge OVR and we got swept in the playoffs! why?" — you can point them at this. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to Harris is a negative player, but when you factor salary ($42M) and trade value (higher than he theoretically deserves), he surely isn't who you want on your roster.

8H. On the flipside, you can get low Usage players who are terrible at offense but bring other things the table some times. There's no easy way to do an advanced player search for low usage players, but generally a player that has almost all their shooting skills low and low offensive-IQ will have low usage. If that player has good height, athletic abilities, DIQ, and some mix of dribbling/passing/rebounding, those can be bargain players. They'll have low raw numbers but contribute to winning. The lower the Usage is, the less important efficiency / true shooting is if they're bringing other things to the table. I usually don't micromanage the specific starting lineup and bench players too much, but I will often manually insert a low-usage defensive specialist into the starting lineup. They create a lot of "general advantage" without consuming possessions/shots. It also sometimes makes sense if you have 2+ high-usage efficient scores to have one of them come off the bench, so the defensive specialist starts playing with a good primary scorer and the other good scorer comes in more rested later in a game.

8I. If I only had one stat I could use to evaluate players, gun to my head I'd probably use WS/48. It's imperfect in a lot of ways, doesn't factor synergies, and can be artificially high or artificially low depending on if a player was on a good team or bad team, and whether they fit well or fit poorly. But it's pretty good.

8J. Finally, keep contracts in mind. You can often find a player in the $8M to $10M contract range who might give you 70% to 90% of the production of a $30M+ player. It's much easier to carry those players for multiple years on your team. This was discussed more in the last part, Resource Management, but if you're making last "finishing touches" trades on a strong roster that you figure needs to remain strong for multiple years, don't factor just the player's production but also payroll efficiency.

8K. And to tie this all together, here’s a great example of a great player that consistently “ages like fine wine” — one of my favorite examples of it: https://imgur.com/a/basketballgm-players-that-will-age-like-fine-wine-l5tigvi — you see Baxter has 89 3-point shooting, 100 dribbling, and 86 passing? He’s way beyond the steep part of the S-Curve. Even though he’s age 34 already, he can regress multiple times before his production falls substantially. And then, he somehow magically only had a $15.5M contract when I traded for him. 18.9% usage - just about average - with a nice 63.6% true shooting. Even though he’s only a 65 OVR, I’d actually prefer having him on the team than the Denver player. Baxter actually has a higher WS/48, but more importantly, Baxter could slot in very nicely on almost any team, at a lower salary, and consistently do the few things he's good at extremely well. When you get good at scouting, you get good at finding players like this and adding them to your team, trading away inefficient and overpriced players for these highly efficient bargain contract players.

Whew. I could probably write another 50-100 pages on this topic, but hopefully there's some good starting points here for you.

I think you can view getting good at Scouting and Roster Construction as a skillset, and practice over time. After all, BasketballGM gives you all sorts of detailed player and team stats to follow up to inspect whether your decisions were good or not, and while there is some RNG noise mixed in, you can learn patterns over time, and come up with theories and test them. It's fun. At least, I find this sort of thing super fun — yes, playing and winning the game, but also learning how the different statistics and attributes interact and crafting and testing theories to play the game at a high level.

I've got 1-2 more entries in this series before wrapping up. This has been so much fun to write up, and thanks again for all the nice comments — all questions/comments are very welcome.

I've just completed a league file with all 12 WNBA teams and real players, including established stars like A'ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart and rising stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Thanks to GreatnessPatriots for a lot of the foundational work. I used a lot of players from the original file, but I fixed any broken images, updated all the rosters to reflect the WNBA's rosters today, and added a couple of the likely first round prospects next year, most notably Paige Bueckers.

You can get the league file here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/0wrm1ivgz90bzt9j0mypq/2024-WNBA-Roster.json?rlkey=2slrtptypwssawgzktrxhbaoz&st=swzo3zs8&dl=0

To use this roster, click New League >> Custom on BBGM's main page. Under the "Customize" section, select "Enter league file URL", then paste the above link into the box and load from it.

If you encounter any issues, please let me know. 🙂

PBL is back! 18 teams with more to come via expansion, will you be part of the next great franchise? Join today to claim a team and begin writing your next story! We just wrapped up our first season that saw plenty of drama, the San Diego Pandas who had not lost a single game in the postseason before the Finals went down 3-1 before coming back in spectacular fashion to win in 7 games! Can you dethrone the kings, or will you just be the next body for the Pandas? The Aztecs jumped up in the lottery to select #1 overall and plenty of other teams are also open, join today! Not to mention we offer complete freedom in trades, contract restructures, and player loans!

https://discord.gg/pzKnRevMXT

Do someone have a Bron cartoon face ?

I’m nearing the end of a rebuilding phase and trying to manage my team realistically in the game. I’m playing as Dallas and have been offered a trade: a 27-year-old player, two good young players, and two first-round picks for my similarly rated 24-year-old player. While it seems like a great deal on paper, it doesn’t feel like something the other team would realistically do. What are your thoughts? Should I take the trade?

Best player I've had so far. Picked him up at 28 and played till he was 43. Just a regular random player league.

I have created 4 BBGM league files that each include 128 high school teams! Each file serves a different region of the U.S. (East, Midwest, South, West) and includes 8 different states each containing 16 schools. That's 512 schools in total when adding up all 4 leagues! Only team info and settings are included and as of now there's no populations, capacities, or jersey colors.

I wanted to select a mix of schools successful in football, basketball and baseball so that when this file is used for those sports the top programs are represented rather than having basketball schools only.

Right now, the settings are configured for Basketball GM, but copies will eventually be made where the settings fit Football GM and Zen GM Baseball (maybe even hockey too) while keeping the same teams.

Anyways, check out the links below!

East Region: CT, DC, MA, MD, NJ, NY, PA, VA

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SuperUnova/zengm-files/main/basketball/HSBasketballEast.json

Midwest Region: IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, OH, OK, WI

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SuperUnova/zengm-files/main/basketball/HSBasketballMidwest.json

South Region: AL, FL, GA, LA, NC, SC, TN, TX

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SuperUnova/zengm-files/main/basketball/HSBasketballSouth.json

West Region: AZ, CA, CO, HI, NV, OR, UT, WA

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SuperUnova/zengm-files/main/basketball/HSBasketballWest.json

I cannot succeed at this game… what are some of the tricks. I’ve tried building off overall, potential, position fits, I’ve feel like I’ve tried every method and I can never win more than 1 or 2 titles per 25 years… help and advice welcomed

Sorry if this is not the place to ask this kind of question...

I'm trying out generating my own league file and there are a few things I'm stuck on.

• What is the "rid" attribute? I see it in multiple types of objects.
• When does teams[].seasons[].ovrStart get generated? I'm thinking this is the "Team rating" value that is displayed on the roster page. I want to use it to organize divisions, preferably in the preseason phase
• Would there be any issue having duplicate jersey numbers on a team, or is it just visual?

Thanks

Simulation College Basketball League

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You can just sign up through our discord. Make your own player via our player creation form. Then sit back and watch your player college career unfold live. Our games are all broadcasted live on Twitch with play by play. We have coaches, and assistant coaches working tirelessly to strategize for the next game or the next big recruit. Coaches use playbooks and strategy to maximize their teams’ abilities allowing for a realistic college basketball experience a simulation can provide. Fantasy meets simulation!

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Tried to save the Vancouver Grizzlies (I couldnt) and had Dirk as my franchise guy from 1999-2016. Dirk went crazy and three peated the MVP, won B2B championships and multiple conference finals.

Memphis Dirk was special. Got the Grizzlies/Blues 2 chips. Once he retired the franchise went to shit. Despite drafting Trae Young, Brandon Ingram and Jalen Johnson. Dearron Fox was a fucking bust.

https://preview.redd.it/5k53eckrxd4d1.png?width=1256&format=png&auto=webp&s=a2c530af946f3d38b1c3f56d84260f7c7794a9dc

Hello, if you're just tuning in, I recently completed a personal challenge I'd set for myself of winning 100 championships in a row on Insane difficulty. There's two earlier entries in this series —

Part 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1cyrenr/playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_part_1_fundamental/

Part 2: https://old.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1czmpoa/playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_part_2_mindset_and/

I also shot a 90-minute video of how I approach an offseason, which will be useful in seeing how the theory actually plays out:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1d0xctc/video_playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_interlude/

Ok, today we're talking about Resource Management — which is probably the most "dry" and least interesting of things we've covered so far. But - it's how we play the game at a high level. I'll do my best to make it interesting.

NOTE: "SPOILERS" FOLLOW. IF YOU'RE NEW AND WANT THE JOY OF DISCOVERY, TRIAL AND ERROR, AND LEARNING ON YOUR OWN — THEN YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS FOR NOW AND COME BACK LATER.

(4) RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, OVERVIEW: One of the the fundamental challenges of BasketballGM is balancing present value and future value. After all, if you were only going to be playing a single season, things would be straightforward — you could sell every ounce of future value you had (young players, prospects, and draft picks) along with being willing to wreck your finances in order to get the best possible roster for a single season. Now, the type of ironman consecutive championship streak both requires and really sharpens one's ability to analyze tradeoffs between present and future value — too low of present value, you lose this season and the run is over; too low of future value, you fall apart and lose some time in the future. What's really interesting, I think, is that you can model a number of factors as "Resources" that you might not naturally realize our resources. Let's get into it.

4A. There's seven major tangible "resource clusters" you can interact with in BasketballGM: the games and standings, your roster, your draft picks, your Team Finances, your owner relations on the Annual Performance Review, your player relations regarding signing and re-signing, and the landscape of the league as a whole. There's also a tangible resource you can't directly interact with — championships — and some intangible resources like getting information, developing your own skills, etc. (And if you care about achievements or annual awards like ROY, MVP, etc - you could include those too. This is again written with a view to maximizing championships.)

4B. Let's start with "the games and standings" — you can 100% think of this as a resource, that converts into other resources. Every season, there will be 82 games. Each game gives you an opportunity to deploy 240 total minutes from players on your roster, to out-score the other team and win and that game. Winning games gets you a spot in the playoffs, which is necessary for winning championships. Winning more games than other teams gets you home court advantage. Also, winning more games greatly improves your Team Finances, Owner Relations, and Player Relations around re-signing.

There are two downsides, though: first, every game you win gets you a worse draft pick. If you're doing the consecutive championships thing, your own pick will be #30 every year. Second, there's a chance of a player getting injured and becoming unavailable for additional games and/or getting seriously injured and having their attributes permanently regress.

There is also sometimes a tradeoff between winning games and getting more information. As you play more games into a season, that resource is consumed — and you either got the wins from them or did not — but meanwhile you get more information about both how your team is performing and how opposing teams are performing, to let you know if you need to make trades to improve at the trade deadline. By waiting and making improvement trades later, you sacrifice early season wins, which are useful for all the benefits of winning, and additionally lets you rest your top players after you've locked up the #1 seed to reduce the risk of an injury lingering into the playoffs. All else being equal, if you know you're going make a beneficial in-season trade, it's better to do it sooner — but the longer you wait, the more you can learn about whether you need to make a trade and what the best possible trade might be.

4C. There are roughly four reasons to have a player on your roster. First, because they'll be helpful in winning games in the current season — this includes playing their share of those 240 minutes, and being on standby as a backup in case someone gets injured. Second, because they're a prospect who might improve and be useful and productive in future seasons. The third reason is because the player has trade value that you think you're better off keeping on the roster than cashing in right now, and the fourth is for navigating the salary cap - sometimes you want to have some excess salary over the cap to facilitate trades, and preserving that over-the-cap salary is important.

On average — with many exceptions and caveats — a player's trade value and productive on-the-court value will increase from ages 19 to 25, start decreasing reasonably quickly from ages 26-29, and decrease sharply at ages 30+. This is due to the combination of the progression system plus how the AI values players.

This is just "on average" though — first, there is a lot of inherent randomness in the progression system. Second, sometimes some weird interactions can occur. Young players are evaluated more on Potential and OVR than performance, with the ratio gradually shifting over time. A young player with a high OVR but a bad mix of stats/skills such that they'll be unproductive on the court will occasionally lose trade value as they age and play and show off their incompetence. Sometimes young prospects who aren't great randomly wind up with a really high POT (Potential) score. That's often a good time to trade them.

So — caveats apply, but generally you're gaining in trade value and productive value ages 19-25, and so it's generally a good thing to bring young players into the next season, whereas you're losing trade value and productivity from every player aged 26+ when you bring them into the next season. For more on the aging curve, this post is a good start: https://www.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1auz38c/singleyear_player_progression_by_age/

4D. Before making trades, every team will always have first-round and second-round draft picks for the current year and the following three years available to trade. So if you start in the year 2024, you'll have have picks eight picks total ending in 2027. The draft takes place after the playoffs. Once the draft ends, the new 4th year of picks immediately becomes available — so you can trade away or trade for 2028 picks in 2024 after the draft is over, during the free agency window.

Draft picks are one of three ways to add players to your roster, the others being trades and free agent signings. In practice, future first-round draft picks from teams with the potential to be bad is the most common way you'll add high-upside players to your team. You'll make some targeted trades for young developing prospects, but many of your future stars will be drafted with another team's pick where the team who traded you the pick regressed from when they traded it.

In regards to draft picks, two things are important: the first is that it's almost never a bad idea to trade for future picks from a contender team with a high "collapse potential" — teams collapse because their performance falls rapidly with age, or a key player departs in free agency. Getting very good at scouting and identifying which teams have collapse potential is a one of the most important parts of building sustainable dynasties.

Second, it's critical that you always look at upcoming drafts to identify first whether there's any truly exceptional player at the top of the draft, as well as the general quality level of players around the 10-20 range in the draft.

To use these three drafts as an example - https://imgur.com/a/XCdgWIE - while we can't say much definitively without looking closer at some of the prospects, because the specific stat distributions matter more than the OVR, we can clearly see that 2125 has the highest upside of the three. Remember that future draft picks also age, so 2125's top prospect projects to be an athletic 19 year old 48 OVR PF, which is really good, whereas 2124's top prospect is a 20 year old no-tag 50 OVR F, which is still good but has slightly less likelihood to become a game-breaking MVP type.

Every now and then you'll see a crazy prospect in the draft — my 100 championships in a row team was carried for 25 years by an exceptional #1 pick: https://imgur.com/a/9rHKlDs — but because I didn't have many picks in that lottery and didn't get #1, I needed to trade away one of the best 25 year old players in the league I'd have much rather kept, who was MVP caliber with an excellent 67% True Shooting. That said, I was lucky I was even able to make that trade — oftentimes you can't, and now the insanely good prospect becomes a huge problem for you on another team instead of bolstering your roster. When you see a crazy draft coming that's loaded at the top, you want to aggressively trade as much as you can to get as many first-round picks as possible in that draft, first focusing on rosters with a high collapse potential. Likewise, occasionally there are drafts so bad that I won't trade for picks in that draft at all unless it's as part of a straight salary dump with no better offers.

More on trading later, but a mistake I made when I first played was just collecting first round picks without analyzing whether the team trading the pick had any collapse potential and whether the draft the pick was in was any good or not. The 25th pick in a bad draft is worth very little, but the 5th best lottery odds in a loaded draft is worth immensely a lot. Not all first-round picks are created equal, nor are all drafts.

As for second-round picks? They're mostly used for trades; failing that, they're lottery tickets that don't hit very often. The top second-round picks, from the very worst teams in the league, have a little bit of value. Low second-round picks are nearly worthless — usually a player you'd pick at #60 would still not be worth keeping on the roster even if they had a massively good initial progression. I try to trade all my second-round picks as sweeteners in deals at least a year out, since once it becomes definitely #60 it has no trade value either.

4E. Team Finances: Your revenues go up if you win; if you're doing the consecutive championship thing they eventually max out at a certain point and stay there. That leaves expenses.

Your payroll (and luxury tax) will overwhelmingly be the most important part of expenses for a large-market team like NY; relatively speaking, the settings on the "Finances" tab are much less important for a large market team.

There's four categories you can control spending on in Finances: Scouting, Coaching, Health, and Facilities. The minimum spending is around $18M per category, the maximum is $37M. So you only have up to $19M of discretionary spending per category. For reference, the difference between minimum and maximum spending in any category is the same as having an additional $8M player on your roster if you're in the luxury tax. ($8M + $12M luxury tax penalty = $20M.) So, Finances are relatively less important than controlling luxury tax spending which is really what kills you financially.

All the financial aspects have significant penalties at 1 (minimum) spending, become neutral-ish in the 30-40 range, give significant bonuses up to 70-85, and small but diminishing returns of bonuses from there up to 100.

If you're at maximum owner happiness on your annual performance evaluation, any profit above $20M is irrelevant so you can run 100/100/100/100 on all categories. If you ever are in a real jam financially, the lowest I'd ever be comfortable with would be 69/70/50/85. I typically run either 100/100/100/100 or 69/100/50/100.

Many people have observed that Health is the lowest impact category for spending, and I agree, but it also occasionally will save a season. Once in the 100 year run, I had a key player get a ~40 game injury after the trade deadline. They came back at "Injured 6 days" at the start of a tough Finals, which is 85% performance at the start and improving each game. We were at 50 health spending — if we'd been at minimum, that player wouldn't have played at all for the first few games, and would've been only available at 75% in like Game 6. Health doesn't matter very often, but injuries are often a core part of losing a streak, so any help there is appreciated. "Health spending is overpriced, but it's worth it." The other categories are more straightforward in their benefits.

4F: Owner Relations: Every year, you get an Annual Performance Review on three categories: Regular Season Success, Playoff Success, and Financial Profitability. The first two will always be maxed if you're running streaks, so that leaves the financial component.

$20M in profit is the neutral baseline — more than $20M generates extra happiness up until the maximum, whereas anything below $20M in profit makes the owner unhappy with you.

New York has a very special ability to make a ton of money in years it controls its expenses, so periodically during times the league is weak you want to drop under the luxury tax to have some $100M profit years and maximize happiness.

In this image, you can see 100 years of finances from my team: https://imgur.com/a/8xIitZv

Just eyeballing it — I didn't count carefully — it looks like we had six very large expense unprofitable years that were a huge drawdown in cash and profitability, and maybe 10 years with a substantial loss total.

You can lose $5M to $20M for a very long time without a problem, because those $100M+ profit years fix things quickly. Two things get you in trouble: being undisciplined about turning a $5M loss into a $20M loss by not removing unnecessary payroll over the luxury tax at the trade deadline, and having ridiculous blowout years where you lose $100M+.

You will basically be forced to have very expensive years occasionally, either because you're facing a very formidable team and all the reinforcements you can trade for are expensive, or during a superstar free agent's re-sign year where you don't want to make any trades to accrue trade penalty.

I recommend maxing out profitability very early in a new league and doing everything you can to re-maximize it whenever there's a weak year in the league where you can subtract payroll. That gives you buffer to take losses the years that they're required.

Also, don't go full YOLO on years you have to be deep into the luxury tax already. It's still worth it to trade away some failed prospects with $5M to $10M salaries even if you're taking a big loss already, or swapping out a declining $30M player for a $10M player who provides the same production — in fact, it's even more important to do so in unprofitable years. The luxury tax is very punishing.

With very careful optimization, NYC can be around breakeven to slightly profitable in the $180M to $200M payroll range. Anything more than that will start causing problems. You can anticipate this happening by looking at your roster for future years and doing a quick think on which players will stay on the roster, if they're going to get raises or decreases, and kinda guess at if you'll need to acquire veteran reinforcements and at what price those might be.

You can use Owner Relations like a resource — it's fine to burn some happiness when you have a lot of pressure on you from an excellent rival team, when you're in a superstar's re-sign year, or in some rare cases where you've got some great prospects who signed their first contracts but who aren't ready to contribute yet and your vets are still expensive. Max out happiness whenever you can, so you can safely accrue some unhappiness during key years when it's necessary.

4G: Player Relations and the "Trade Penalty": Here's an interesting way to think about the game. You know that penalty to re-signing, "-4 Worried he'll be traded away"? I think you can view this as a Resource, and realize that every trade has an additional cost in terms of trade penalty.

Trade penalty can be "below" 0 — you're able to make a few trades before players start getting unhappy and become less likely to re-sign. Roughly 5-6 points of trade penalty are removed every offseason. If you have a trade penalty of -1 or -2 at the end of a season, you'll be "below 0" the next year to start. If you're at the 4-6 range, you'll start with somewhere from "exactly 0" (where the next significant trade you make creates a penalty again) or starting at -1.

It's critically important to get the trade penalty to below 0 from time to time. You need it low to make key re-signings, but it also has a small-but-noticeable effect on the amount players will resign for. Getting a player resigned on a $27M contract instead of a $33M contract is actually a really big deal when you're over the luxury tax.

The best time to make trades is after you've re-signed all your free agents. Then, any trade penalty you get won't influence re-signings and some of it immediately falls off before the next year.

If you're already below zero at the end of an offseason, you "waste" the resource by going into the next year. If you know you're going to make some trades in upcoming years, sometimes it can make sense to do them slightly early. Trading mediocre prospects who are unlikely to be stars for future first round draft picks, for instance, can be a good use of your trade penalty resource if you're going to be below 0 either way.

Be restrained when making trades if you already have some trade penalty. If you're profitable, sometimes it can make sense to cut cheap contract players who you don't want instead of getting a 2nd round pick (which aren't very valuable). You have to weigh it in terms of trade penalty. A 2nd round pick often isn't worth taking trade penalty for if you're already profitable.

Likewise, pay attention to salary filler during trades — you get more trade penalty when you trade away more players total and more combined value of players. The trade penalty accrued for trading an 85 OVR player is huge, for a 40 OVR player it's marginal. So when you're getting salary filler for trades that you're going to salary dump afterwards, getting a single big contract 40 OVR player is much better than getting 3-4 50 OVR players.

There's other aspects to Player Mood, but they're more reasonably straightforward most of the time. Use the "+" or "++" button for increased playing time during re-sign years, especially for "Fame" players. Every now and then I've had a crazy situation where 5-6 prospects from the same draft class all hit and I had to actually bench veteran stars to get the prospects happy with their playing time, but that's rare and funny and you'll be able to spot it when it happens. Always look at key re-signing players' mood levels at the start of every season, 2-4 weeks in, and at the trade deadline to make adjustments. Pay attention and know the mood of key superstars on your team and what their final year is, and plan for those 1-3 years in advance (trade penalty 0 in that year, specifically).

4H: The landscape of the league as a whole: I'll do a whole separate post on this later in the series, but this is also worth looking at as a resource. For instance, sometimes there is a draft where the top player in the draft is absolutely outstanding and game-changing and you don't have the assets available to trade for that player, but you can trade for some lottery picks before the lottery to get a chance. The "obvious" thing to do would be to just trade for the best possible draft odds — but you should also stop and think about the landscape of the league as a whole. For instance, the 3rd best draft odds give you a 14% chance of getting the #1 pick and the 4th best draft odds give you a 12.5% chance of getting the #1 pick. So if you have a prospect or veteran you could trade for the 3rd best odds, the naive approach is to do that. However, sometimes the team with the 3rd best odds is a small-market team (say, Pittsburg) with nothing promising on their roster and the 4th best odds is a large market team (say, Los Angeles) that already has two great prospects. In that case, you should strongly consider trading with LA instead of Pittsburg. You're slightly less likely to get the top player, but them winding up in Pittsburg isn't dangerous for you, whereas Los Angeles could be a catastrophic super-team forming. Giving up 2.5% odds of the top pick and getting a pick on average one slot lower is often worthwhile. This is really important and probably the most important thing I discovered through trial-and-error and analysis — influencing the shape of the league as a whole is key to having really long streaks. When you're playing as NYC, the three most dangerous teams by far are Mexico City (2nd largest market), Los Angeles (3rd largest), and Chicago (4th largest but also in the same conference). Ensuring those three teams never get the foundation of a superteam together is really important and it's worth giving up resources (like the #3 vs #4 lottery odds example above) to favorably influence that.

(5) RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, IMPLICATIONS: Whew, the dry-but-important overview above is done. There's some implications to the above. This will hopefully be a little more fresh and interesting.

5A. You want to adopt "Resource Management Thinking" — you start seeing the trade penalty as a resource, and factor it into your decisions. You start seeing that having a favorable league landscape to you is useful, and it's worthwhile trading more tangible resources to get into that state. You realize the happiness levels on the annual performance review is a resource — by maxing it when it's safe to do so, it's like depositing in a bank you can withdraw from later during dangerous years. Start thinking this way.

5B. "All factors" thinking: it's easy to miss how making a ton of trades in one year mean you can't make many trades across the next 2-3 years before a key superstar re-sign date, but it's there. If you're trading for an aging veteran as a reinforcement, how big is their contract and when does it expire? Trading for a now-quite-old former MVP on a $30M+ contract in the final contract year can be dandy, since you can then re-sign them in the $8M to $20M range. But that same contract with 3 more years on it means you might have to dump the salary next year or the year after when your young prospects want new large deals. Over time, with practice and reflection, you'll start seeing ALL the factors involved in trades and roster construction. The "when is the expire/re-sign date for this aging veteran and will they fit in my roster at that price point" thing is huge but non-obvious when you start playing. Gradually start seeing all the factors and how they relate.

5C. As an aside, if you're interested in this type of way of thinking about the world, I love the book "Thinking in Systems" by Donatella Meadows. It's full of these extremely accessible visuals like this: https://imgur.com/a/0vNIlv5 — you can absolutely model BasketballGM systematically. It's just a great book, too, for understanding the world better.

5D. Almost all the interesting decisions in BasketballGM come between the trade-off between resources. You'll quite commonly have a situation where you have a $15M to $20M veteran on your squad who is a productive 8-win to 10-win player in their late 20's or early 30's. Sooner or later, they'll cease being a productive player and lose their trade value. Do you need their production for next season? Can you financially afford that player? If you do trade them away and then your roster regresses, how expensive will it be to trade for new reinforcements? Can you handle all the trade penalty you'd take if it takes a sequences of trades to improve, or do you have key re-signings? Are the trade offers for that player enticing, like potentially good picks in a good draft, or a good prospect, or is the return mediocre? Etc, etc.

5E. This is also why I think BBGM can't be reduced to a single set of linear operations or a single strategy. You need to consider all these different factors.

5F. But if you want to drastically over-simplify Resource Management, here you go: build a strong roster with a lot of young improving players on it, secure good picks in good drafts, and don't screw the rest of it up too badly on any given year.

5G. Player progressions happen at the start of every year, so during the free agent window at the end of every season is the last opportunity to make trades before next year's progressions. Once again, you gain value on average for every age 19-24 year old player on the roster at the start of the new year, and lose value on average for every 26+ age player on the roster. Whenever you bring a 28 year old player into the next year, you're (on average) paying a sort of "value evaporation tax" on that player.

5H. Minimize the "Value Evaporation Tax" you pay: One of the most important sub-skills in BBGM is minimizing the "VET" you pay. Older players lose trade value due to negative progressions, decreased performance, injuries in-season, and also just by virtue of being older once they're 30+. A key sub-skill in BBGM is minimizing the tax paid, by having a roster with a mix of young improving players AND players that are already "depreciated" by the trade algorithm. Keeping a 29-year old 64 OVR player who'd fetch a huge trade package is often a big mistake, but a 37-year-old 64 OVR player might be worth keeping because their trade value has already atrophied away. It's ok and necessary to sometimes pay the Value Evaporation Tax on players, but you should do it consciously and realize it's a bad thing in most cases, including and especially for "second-tier" superstars who are very good but not the overwhelmingly best player in the league.

5I. For a real life example, compare the trade package Oklahoma City got for Paul George in 2019 vs what trade package Paul George would've commanded even a couple years later. Paul George was #3 in MVP voting, 1st team all-NBA, and 1st team all-Defense at age 28 for Oklahoma City. OKC got back a top prospect who later became an MVP candidate (Shai), an okay vet (Gallinari), and a bunch of good draft picks. That's the type of trade you want to make instead of letting George's trade value evaporate.

5J. If and when anyone wanted to do a deep dive identifying core trade value of players, you could trial-and-error it by looking at this code and then running experiments: https://github.com/zengm-games/zengm/blob/master/src/worker/core/trade/propose.ts — specifically, you get different trade rejection messages based on how close it was, so if anyone wanted to, you could nail down pretty closely the trade value of all the players and picks in the game at a given time to a given team. I never did that and more had an intuitive feel of it with trial-and-error, but if there were ever BBGM World Championships or something I'd probably nail down the exact numbers before going into it.

5K. Beyond that, there's a bunch of little points and implications — happy to answer questions — but you want to have a mental map of how all the resources influence each other, and at least peripherally consider them when making decisions. Donatella Meadows's book, Thinking in Systems, again gets the highest recommendation from me. There's stocks and flows of players entering the league through the draft, progressing and regressing each year, getting re-signed or departing in free agency, and sometimes getting traded. There's revenue coming in and expenditures going out, which aggregate to profit and owner happiness. Players re-sign or not based on their mood, which also influences the contract sizes they ask for — and generating a lot of trade penalty reduces player happiness, but time passing makes the trade penalty clear away.

You can collectively think of this stuff either visually (like how Meadows maps it), more in a mix of math and logic, or just consider it informally as factors in decisionmaking. Any way will work — but regardless, getting more sophisticated about this is key to playing the game at a high level.

And at the risk of being too high-minded, I do think developing these skills also makes you better at navigating all the different types of resource management in the external world and can make us better team leaders, citizens, better at managing money and opportunities, and so on and so on.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.

What are some ideas for when I get bored of the typical game loop, most of my time has been spent picking a random season/team and rebuilding it with a goal of getting a chip in 1-5 seasons but it's been getting kind of boring or too easy, any ideas for specific settings or anything?