How to Play

Last updated: July 16, 2026

DraftHoops gives you a budget and a pool of real player-seasons from more than fifty years of pro basketball. You build an eight-man roster, set your minutes, and your team plays a simulated best-of-7 against a roster somebody else built. This page explains the whole thing, including the parts the game does not spell out while you are playing.

The one number that matters: $800

You have $800 to fill eight roster spots. That works out to $100 per spot, and this is not an accident: the median player in the pool costs $100. The budget is tuned so that a perfectly average team, eight average players, spends almost exactly your whole budget.

Everything follows from that. If you spend $250 on a superstar, you have not simply bought a good player. You have committed to finding real value in the seven spots left, because you now have $550 for seven slots, or about $79 each, and $79 is below average. A star is only worth it if the rest of your roster does not collapse to pay for it. This is the central tension of the game, and it is why "who is the better player" is almost never the right question. The right question is "who is better than their price."

You are drafting blind

No ratings or statistics are shown while you draft. Each pick offers you a set of nine players, and for each one you see the player, the season, and the price. That is it. Your read on what a 1994 Scottie Pippen season is actually worth is the entire skill of the game.

This cuts both ways, and it is where most beginners lose. Famous names are priced by how good the season actually was, not by how famous the player is. A legend's ordinary season, or a season near the end of their career, is priced like the ordinary season it was. Meanwhile a player you may not recognise can be having one of the best years in the pool. If you only draft names you know, you will systematically overpay.

Filling the roster

The eight spots are five starters and three bench players:

• Starters: PG, SG, SF, PF, C. Each takes a player eligible at that position.
• Bench G: takes a point guard or a shooting guard.
• Bench F: takes a small forward or a power forward.
• Bench C: takes a center.

Players are eligible anywhere they genuinely played. A player counts at a position if it was their primary one, or if they spent more than a quarter of their minutes there. So versatile players give you real flexibility, and a combo guard can solve a hole in either guard slot.

Setting minutes, and why depth wins

After the draft you assign minutes. There are 240 minutes to give out, which is five players on the court for all 48 minutes of a game. Each player can take anywhere from 0 to 48.

Nothing stops you from riding five starters at 48 minutes each and benching the rest. It will cost you badly. Every player has a free workload, meaning the minutes they can play at full value. That is their real minutes per game for that season, or 30 minutes, whichever is higher. A star who logged 38 a night plays 38 for free. A role player who logged 22 is still lifted to 30, so you are never punished for playing a rotation player normal starter minutes.

Minutes inside that free zone count fully. Every minute past it is worth steeply less than the one before, and the falloff is severe rather than gentle. A player whose free workload is 34, pushed all the way to 46, keeps those extra 12 minutes at roughly 30 percent of their value. You paid full price and you are collecting a third of the work.

Which leads to the arithmetic that quietly decides most games: eight players at 30 minutes each is exactly 240. A balanced eight-man rotation wastes nothing whatsoever. Riding five players into the high forties burns a large block of minutes at a fraction of their worth, and no amount of talent buys that back. This is also why a cheap eighth man you never intend to play is not a clever saving. It is a hole. You need eight players who can genuinely absorb minutes.

How the series is decided

Your team plays a best-of-7. Talent matters, but so does how the two rosters match up position by position. A team that is strong everywhere tends to beat a team that is overwhelming in one place and empty in another, because the empty spot gets exploited every game.

The simulation is not a coin flip weighted by team rating. Construction matters: scoring, rebounding, spacing and defense all feed into it, and a roster that neglects one of them will lose games it looks like it should win on paper.

Modes

• Unrated. Casual best-of-7 across all eras, nothing at stake. The place to learn.
• Ranked: All-Time. Elo, every season from 1971 to today.
• Ranked: Modern. Elo, 2000-and-later seasons only. A smaller pool, and much less forgiving if you only know the modern game shallowly.
• Classic or Bullet. Ranked comes in two clocks. Classic gives you five minutes to draft. Bullet gives you forty-five seconds, and anything you have not picked when time runs out is filled in at random, which is exactly as painful as it sounds.
• Play a Friend. A live head-to-head against someone you invite.
• Daily Challenge. One fixed opponent and budget, the same for everybody that day.

Ranked and Elo

Every account starts at 1200 Elo. Finishing a ranked best-of-7 moves your rating 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 always scored against the strength they had when they built that roster, not whatever they have climbed to since. Beating a strong team is worth more than beating a weak one, and losing to a weak one costs more than losing to a strong one.

Hall of Fame

You can save up to five teams to your Hall of Fame after a series. Saved teams are also the rosters other players draft against, so a team you save goes on competing long after you built it.

How to actually get better

A few things that reliably separate good drafters from new ones:

• Learn prices, not players. You already know who was good. What you are learning is what the game charges for them, and where it charges too little.
• Do the arithmetic early. Know your remaining budget divided by your remaining slots. The moment that number drops well under $100, you are committed to bargain hunting, so start immediately rather than after you have run out of money.
• Peak seasons over famous careers. You are drafting one season, not a career. The best year of a very good player is often cheaper than a merely fine year of an all-time great.
• Do not leave a hole. The eighth spot bought with whatever cash was left over is how good drafts die. Every one of your eight players is going to play real minutes, so it is usually better to be solid everywhere than elite at three spots and empty at the rest.
• Budget for the rotation, not the starting five. Because pushing anyone far past their normal workload gets punished, your bench is not an afterthought you can leave cheap. Depth is not a consolation prize here, it is the efficient way to spend $800.
• Use the whole budget. Money left over at the end is a pick you did not make.

Still stuck on something? The FAQ covers the common questions, including why a player costs what they cost and why you can lose with the better-looking team. More about the project and the data behind it is on the About page.