The Season Update

This is the biggest DraftHoops update yet. There is a brand new way to play, a full singleplayer season with a weekly challenge and its own leaderboards. On top of that, a round of coach balance changes and a new coach on the sidelines, plus a small change to the draft. Here is everything that changed.

New mode: Season

Season is DraftHoops as a full singleplayer campaign. Instead of a single series, you build a franchise and take it through an entire NBA season against the league's real 2026-27 teams.

Season is still in development, so it may be rough around the edges here and there. If you run into anything that looks off, the Report a bug / idea button on the main menu is the quickest way to flag it.

1. Pick a coach and draft ten. Choose one of three coaches on offer, then draft a ten-man roster, five starters and a five-man bench, under a salary cap. Every pick comes from a board of players at different price points, so each draft is a different puzzle.
2. Name your franchise. Your team takes its place in the standings alongside the other 30.
3. Play 82 games. Set your lineup and minutes, then pick a rotation: Light, Balanced or Heavy. Heavy minutes win more games tonight, but tired players get hurt and fade, so managing conditioning across a long season matters.

4. 

5. Run the front office. The season throws decisions at you: trade calls from other teams, players you can put on the trade block, front office hires, training sessions, specializations for your players, owner's challenges, and setbacks like slumps and locker room drama.
6. Watch your players grow. Ratings are not fixed. Players can develop over the season, or decline, and young players are the most likely to break out. The team you finish with is rarely the team you drafted.
7. Chase a title. The top eight teams in each conference make the playoffs, and every round is a best-of-seven series.

The Weekly Challenge

Every week there is one set of rules for everybody: the same salary cap, the same player pool and the same number of rerolls, sometimes with a modifier or two thrown in. Finish a season and it goes on the Season Leaderboards, ranked three ways: best regular season record, most championships, and best title record. Tap any team on the Best season board to see the exact roster that set it, with every player's development, specialization and season averages, plus the coach, front office and training that went with it.

A new challenge starts every Monday with a fresh leaderboard.

Custom seasons

Want to play by your own rules? A Custom season lets you set the salary cap, choose any span of years for the player pool, pick your number of rerolls and switch modifiers on or off. Custom seasons are just for fun: they do not count toward your profile or the leaderboards.

Coach balance changes

We watch how every coach performs across thousands of real series, and a few were winning a little too often or not quite often enough. None of these changes are big. Every coach still plays the way he did, and his system still rewards the same kind of roster. We just nudged the size of the bonus, or how easy it is to unlock.

Two of these are worth a closer look. Mark Daigneault's Program was the hardest coach in the game to get value from, because it only paid out when your bench was genuinely strong. It now pays out for an ordinary bench too, so a sensible roster gets a real reward without stacking the second unit. Tom Thibodeau gives his starters a little less extra time on the floor than before, though his system no longer punishes you for the bench you play behind them.

New coach: Rick Adelman

Rick Adelman joins the league running the Princeton Offense: constant cutting, the ball moving through every position, and nobody on the floor allowed to be a bystander. In DraftHoops his system rewards offensive players at every position. The better your offense as a whole, the bigger the boost, and it pays the most when your guards, forwards and centers can all score.

That last part is the catch. Adelman looks at your weakest scoring group as well as your team as a whole, so one position that cannot score holds the entire offense back. Draft scorers across the board and he will turn them into one of the most dangerous attacks in the game. Load up on two stars and a hole at center, and he will not have much to work with.

A change to the draft

One last thing: a small change to how the draft deals players. The players you are offered are now drawn more randomly, and the money you have left no longer shapes who shows up. Teams will come out a little weaker as a whole, but every draft should look a lot less like the last one, and you should see far more of the player pool over time.

It also opens up more ways to build. Load up on two or three Hall of Famers and fill out the rest with bench players? Spread it around and build a roster of six solid starters? There are far more possibilities now, so try something different.

Retiring the $800 modes

The original $800 game modes have been discontinued. Almost the entire player base has moved over to the newer modes with coaches, so that is where all of our attention goes from here. Thank you to everyone who played them.

Season is live now from the main menu. Draft well, manage the minutes, and good luck.

Coach photos: Mike D'Antoni, Matt Hickey (CC BY-SA 2.0); Red Holzman, NBA / New York Knicks; Don Nelson, Sean P. Anderson (CC BY 2.0); Mark Daigneault, Getty Images via NBA.com; Larry Brown, Rutgers Athletics (CC BY 3.0); Gregg Popovich, The White House (public domain); Tom Thibodeau, Keith Allison (CC BY-SA 2.0); Rick Adelman, ESPN.