How to play

Two or three players. Five rounds. One device passed around, or soon a link each.

The draft

• Each round the wheel lands on one roster — a team in a single season ("Bulls, 1995-96") or a team across a decade ("Lakers, 2000s").
• Everyone drafts from that same roster.
• You choose which position each pick fills. Take a centre first and a point guard last if you want; by the end all five slots must be filled.
• A player listed at two positions can fill either — you say which.
• Drafted players are gone. If someone takes Kobe, nobody else can.

Snake order

Round one runs 1 → 2 → 3. Round two runs 3 → 2 → 1, and so on. Picking last in one round means picking first in the next, so no seat is permanently disadvantaged.

The clock

45 seconds a pick. If it runs out, the best available player who fits one of your open slots is taken automatically — you are never left with an empty roster for being slow.

Vetoes

One veto each per game. Spend it before the first pick of a round to re-spin that round’s roster. Once anybody has picked, the roster is locked — nobody can pull it out from under them.

Why every roster works

A roster is only offered when it has at least as many players at every position as there are drafters. That is the worst case — everyone reaching their final pick still needing the same slot — so you can never be stranded with a position nobody on the roster can fill.

How the simulation works

Team strength is the average rating of your five, plus a bonus for balance, driven by your weakest axis. A side that scores brilliantly and does nothing else loses to a rounded one.

Each game is decided by the strength difference plus seeded randomness, then given a realistic scoreline. Two players meet in a best-of-seven; three play a round robin, settled on series record with total point differential as the tiebreak.

The simulation is deterministic: the same draft and the same seed always produce the same result. Nothing is re-rolled behind the scenes.

Reading a player card

The big number is OVR. Beneath it, five axes — scoring, playmaking, rebounding, defence, efficiency — each a 0–99 percentile within that player’s own era. A dash means the statistic was not recorded then, not that the player was bad at it.

Tips

• Fill scarce positions early. There is usually one good centre and several good guards.
• Balance beats a single star — the weakest axis drives the balance bonus.
• Save the veto for a roster that genuinely cannot help you, not merely a dull one.