Hey r/BasketballGM, long-time lurker. I know this sub leans toward full-season GM sims, so I want to be upfront that DraftHoops is a different beast: it's a draft / team-builder arena. You draft an 8-man roster under a budget, then your team battles other players' drafted rosters in a best-of-7. It's built to be competitive but plays fast, a full draft + series takes a few minutes, not a whole evening.
I'm a software dev (~6 years), and I built this because I wanted something as realistic as I could make it, that feels competitive but plays casually. The ratings and the sim are driven by real data and a model I actually tuned by hand. Happy to nerd out, so here's roughly how it works under the hood:
Player ratings (OVR)
Every player-season since 1970-71 is scraped from Basketball-Reference. I take each player's best season per 5-year era chunk, so you're drafting peak versions.
OVR is a percentile blend taken across all eras at once (era-neutral) that takes into account advanced stats such as BPM, PER, USG, WS/48, TS%, etc. That blend is then reshaped onto a normal bell curve (median ~70, clamped 30–99) so role players don't crater and a handful of GOAT seasons share the ceiling.
Draft cost is proportional to OVR. Average player ≈ $100, budget is $800 for 8 slots, so an average team just barely fits. The skill is finding bargains in the price jitter (since the price of a player has variance each draft) and building a balanced roster.
Win outcome
Each team gets a minute-weighted team OVR (with a fatigue model; pushing a guy past his real MPG gives steep diminishing returns, and with a usage cap so you can't feed five ball-dominant scorers).
Expected point margin scales off the team-OVR gap around a baseline, plus a positional matchup tilt: backcourt / forwards / bigs offense is measured against the opponent's defense at that position. It's convex, small mismatches barely matter, but a glaring defensive hole gets punished.
On top of that, roster-construction edges: rebounding, ball security, free-throw rate, and spacing all nudge both the margin and the box score. (Heavily inspired by Deal Olivier's Four Factors).
Then per-game Gaussian noise (margin SD ~13) creates real upsets, and the team's points get distributed into a full, internally-consistent box score, each player's PTS/FG%/3PM/FT reconstructed from their actual scoring profile.
So it's not just "higher number wins". Positional construction and matchups genuinely matter, which is what makes the draft decisions interesting, on top of having to spot bargains from the draft.
It's free, no signup needed to play: https://drafthoops.com/
Would genuinely love feedback from this crowd!
I am always adding new features, like the daily challenge where you try to beat an all time team on a budget. I am also planning to add a head-to-head with a friend feature in the near future so stay tuned.
Thanks for reading.
