“Have you ever looked at the decisions made by the front office of an NBA team and thought you could do better? Well, now you can! In Basketball GM, you are the general manager of a basketball team.” – Basketball GM tagline

Basketball GM is a free single-player browser-based basketball simulation game by Dumbmatter. I have been playing it almost daily for around two years now and the amount of depth, yet simplicity of it, keeps me coming back for more. The work the developer has put into this game really shines through and the constant update and additions truly make it one of the premier games of this genre.

Point Guard by day, Brandon Ingram/Snoop Dogg impersonator by Night.

You start off by creating a league which then has the teams filled by either randomly generated players or by uploading one of the many rosters created by members of the BBGM community. There is also a difficulty setting which if increased will make AI teams more reluctant to trade with you, makes players less likely to sign with you, and makes it harder to turn a profit. I found the normal difficulty challenging enough until I got the basics down and nowadays I rarely play on anything less than Hard, just to give the AI a competitive edge as you will soon find ways of exploting the AI trade logic.

Once your league is created and you have selected your team, you are brought to the main dashboard. You will immediately be presented with a helpful yet simplistic layout of all the necessary information you need to get started. From here you can see your starting line up, general stats from around the league (which will be empty as the season has not started) as well as your ranking, upcoming games and one of the most important, finances.

Not the greatest start to the season…

Finances is an interesting element that Basketball GM includes which you will also need to manage to keep your job as GM. The finance system is straight forward and pretty much your own goal is to keep profits high. You can do this by setting ticket prices and how much you are willing to spend on the four expenses your team has. These are Scouting, Coaching, Health and Facilities. Scouting will determine how close to the actual rating their overall is when you are looking at them, for example a player may be 55 rating to you, whereas they are in fact only a 50 rating. Coaching is the most important as it affect how many overall points your players will go up or down. Having a high coaching budget will not necessarily make players improve all the time, however, it will increase how many overall points your players who are improving get and also reduce the amount of overall points your players who are regressing lose. This can be slightly confusing at first, especially you have every member of your roster regress over an off season despite being young, healthy players. Health is relatively straight forward and will basically decrease the frequency of injuries and also how severe injuries are. Facilities is how attractive your team is to free agents and players you are resigning. An example of high facilities would be a team such as the Los Angeles Lakers whereas a team with low facilities would be someone such as the Memphis Grizzlies (Sorry Griz fans).

The simple yet effective finance system.

This addition of finances really helps make the game just that bit deeper, as it brings a new challenge when choosing between small and large market teams. As a small market team, do you overpay a superstar to stay and risk going in the luxury tax, knowing that you probably wont attract another one in free agency? Or do you keep costs low to try and keep your job, whilst risking the chance you get fired for poor performance instead. Its these small little scenarios that really increase the longevity of Basketball GM and truly make it an immersive experience.

As with most sport management games, there really is no objective besides winning, winning and more winning. Basketball GM follows this same path but also has the addition of achievements. An example of these is to win a title with a payroll under half of the salary cap or win a title when your entire team is at least 36 years old. Once you have grasped the basics, these achievements really can be fun goals to try and achieve. Good luck getting the one that requires you to play 10,000 seasons in a single league!

Billy Beane would be so proud

One of the best features of Basketball GM is the in depth history it tracks. Want to know who played the longest without ever playing in the playoffs? You can do that. Want to see who had the most 3rd Team All-League selections? Sure! Ever wondered what college produces the best players? Yep! Want to see what players league died a tragic death before their career had finished? Probably not, but its a feature that is implemented into the game (Yes, it really is) and is tracked along with almost anything else stat related you can think of. As a stat nerd, I often find myself looking over the hundreds of years history for hours. There is so much data packed into every single league which truly makes it feel as though it is a real league full of actual players.

Of course not everything about the game is perfect however. Salary negotiations can be at times very annoying as you are not able to specify how much you would like to pay and are instead forced to select one of the salary options that are available. I can see why the decision to do this was taken but it can often end up with you losing out on a good player as you are unable to pay them the extra $0.5m they want when in reality this would more likely be negotiable, especially if you are one of the better teams in the league. The AI can also at times be very stingy when trading draft picks and can often make ridiculous demands for what in real life would be a perfectly reasonable request. For example, I was looking to trade up two spots higher but the GM was requesting I trade three first round draft picks as well as my star player… for the 10th pick. Once again, I can see why the developer has chosen to do this as in most sports games (looking at you 2K) it is very easy to exploit the trade mechanics to gain tons of draft capital for basically no return but it still feels unrealistic at times.

Any relation to Magic Johnson?

Basketball GM also has a useful God mode that allows you to truly customise the league to your liking. You can do anything ranging from raising the salary cap to increaes the amount of teams in your league or even forcing through trades. This gives the experience a real NBA commisioner feeling and it can be fun to experiment and see what havoc you can bring to the league. It is also useful for people starting multiplayer leagues, in which players take on the role of general managers/head coaches, often through discord or reddit, and make roster changes and trades with other players. I have also seen leagues in which you create your own player and the various players will roleplay with different endoresments deals and media interviews and so the possibilites to what can be achieved with the game are near endless.

Despite this, Basketball GM remains one of my favourite games of all time and the hundreds of hours I have spent playing it have given me more satisfaction that most triple-A titles. There so many features packed into this game that it is hard to describe all of them without this review turning into a feature list so I would suggest you go and play it to really see everything it has to offer. It can be played on your phone, computer and whatever else you use to browse the internet and best of all its FREE! There is an option to pay a monthly subscription fee which only removes the ads which are so non-intrusive you will hardly notice them. I highly recommend you stop whatever you are doing right now and go play Basketball GM which can be found at play.basketball-gm.com. I would also recommend checking out Alexnoobs’s real life rosters, I use them myself and he keeps them regularly updated throughout the season and can be found here.

If there are any games you would like me to check out or maybe you disagree with anything I said? Feel free to drop me an email or leave a comment below…