About DraftHoops

Last updated: July 16, 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. Unrated games stake nothing.

What you can play

• Ranked: All-Time. Elo across every season from 1971 to today.
• Ranked: Modern. Elo, 2000-and-later seasons only.
• Classic or Bullet. Five minutes to draft, or forty-five frantic seconds with unpicked slots auto-filled at random.
• Play a Friend. A live head-to-head against someone you invite.
• Daily Challenge. A fixed budget and a target to beat, the same one for everybody that day.
• Unrated. Casual best-of-7 across all eras, with nothing at stake.

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.

New here? The How to Play guide covers the budget, the draft, minutes and matchups in detail, and the FAQ answers the questions that come up most. See also our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.