About DraftHoops

Last updated: October 22, 2026

DraftHoops is a free basketball drafting game. You get a budget, a pool of player-seasons drawn from more than fifty years of pro basketball, and a few minutes to build an eight-man roster. Then your team plays a simulated best-of-7 against a roster someone else drafted. It is an independent, fan-made project, not affiliated with the NBA.

The idea

Most fantasy and draft games show you the numbers while you pick, which turns drafting into arithmetic. DraftHoops hides the stats during the draft. You see a player, a season, and a price, and you decide what that is worth. The budget is the whole game: every roster is a bet that you know which seasons are underpriced and which famous names are not worth what they cost.

That means a 1977 role player and a 2019 superstar sit in the same pool at different prices, and the interesting question is never "who is better." It is "who is better for the money." A roster of solid, cheap, correctly-chosen seasons beats a roster with two expensive stars and six empty slots more often than people expect.

Where the data comes from

Player statistics come from Basketball Reference, specifically the per-game and advanced tables for each season. Every player in the pool is a real player-season with real numbers behind it.

Player photographs come from Wikimedia Commons. Each image keeps its original license and attribution, and the credits are tracked alongside the image files rather than stripped out.

How ratings and prices work

Each player-season is converted into a rating from its box-score and advanced statistics, and the price you see during the draft is derived from that rating. Because eras differ, the numbers are weighed against what was normal for their own season rather than compared raw, so a high-usage guard from the 1970s is not automatically cheaper or dearer than one from last year.

How the ranked ladder works

Every account starts at 1200 Elo. When a best-of-7 finishes, points move based on the opponent's rating at the moment they drafted that team. Saved teams carry a snapshot of their drafter's rating, so you are scored against the strength they actually had when they built the roster, not whatever they have climbed to since. Casual runs stake nothing.

What you can play

The main menu has two ways in: a season on your own, or a draft against other players.

• Season. A full singleplayer campaign. Pick one of three coaches on offer, draft a ten-man roster (five starters and a five-man bench) under a salary cap, then take your franchise through an 82-game season against the league's real 2026-27 teams. Set your rotation, manage your players' conditioning, handle trade calls and front office decisions, and watch your players develop or decline. The top eight teams in each conference make the playoffs.
• Weekly Challenge. One set of Season rules for everybody: the same salary cap, player pool and rerolls, often with a modifier or two. Finished seasons go on the Season Leaderboards, ranked by best season, most titles and best manager. A new challenge starts every Thursday.
• Custom season. Your own rules: the salary cap, any span of years for the player pool, the number of rerolls and which modifiers are on. Custom seasons are just for fun and do not count toward your profile or the leaderboards.
• Multiplayer draft. Pick a coach, draft an eight-man roster on a $180M cap, then take it through a 16-team playoff bracket of best-of-7 series against teams other players drafted. Choose a player pool: All-Time (1971 to 2026), Stern Era (1985 to 2014) or Modern Era (2015 to 2026).
• Ranked or Casual. A ranked run moves your Elo on that pool's ladder. A casual run plays the same way, with nothing at stake.
• Play a Friend. Challenge a friend head to head. You both pick a coach and draft from the same pool on the same cap, then play a best-of-7 against each other. Send your friend the link or your lobby code. Guests can play too, no account needed.

Who builds it

DraftHoops is built and maintained by one person, as an independent side project. There is no studio and no publisher behind it. The game is free to play, and the running costs are covered out of pocket and by anyone generous enough to chip in through the support link in the game.

It is still actively being worked on. Features arrive, get tuned, and occasionally get rebuilt when they turn out not to work. If something seems wrong, in particular a player who feels badly priced, that feedback genuinely does change the game.

Contact

Questions, bugs, or ideas are welcome. Email rami.djema@gmail.com, use the "Report a bug / idea" button in the game, or come find the project on Discord or X.

A note on affiliation

DraftHoops is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the NBA, its teams, or any player. Player names and statistics are facts of public record, used here for a non-commercial fan project. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

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