BasketballCoach in 2026: Two Years of Building a Basketball Sim

Growth

BasketballCoach, a browser-based basketball sim, has come a long way since launching in 2024, and it’s grown. Quite a lot, actually. Here’s what the box score looked like in the early days:

I’d say we’ve come a long way with how the site looks now. The player base keeps growing too, and interestingly, most of that growth has happened in 2026:

The goal for BasketballCoach has always been to build an unparalleled basketball coach game for anyone in the world with a web browser. Shipping four different modes of play (Quick Game, Playoffs, League, and Coach) has been exhausting, but well worth it. I personally love games that offer multiple ways to have fun, especially when each one feels like its own experience:

Looking Back

Coach Mode has been really fun to build, to play, and to make content for. League Mode isn’t far behind, especially when it comes to how long people spend in a single League session. Quick Game is a great option for anyone who wants to play immediately, since you can start a game in two clicks. Playoffs Mode has a small but strong group of active players, who deserve an experience that lets them set up their own playoff storylines.

Alas, growth doesn’t mean the site is anywhere near finished. Ahead of the 2026-27 NBA season, I want BasketballCoach to be a much better experience overall for users. In just about every way.

Working on a project like this for over two years has an unfortunate side effect: it highlights all the flaws and downplays the positives. I constantly see something that needs fixing. Sometimes I receive emails or Reddit comments about bugs and potential features, which I always appreciate.

Knowing that people enjoy your work brings both fulfillment and a heavy dose of motivation. The fulfillment comes from looking back at the growth so far. The motivation comes from all the growth, fixes, and improvements that have yet to happen. Sharing some thoughts on each area of the game, in the order they were released.

Quick Game Mode

Quick Game was the first mode released on BasketballCoach, and it will always hold a special place in my heart. I also play it all the time as an easy way to test sim logic changes. This mode captures the heart of the project: a way to dive right into a game with your favorite NBA team.

What’s Great

• Since I play it the most, Quick Game gets updated pretty often. It’s where I notice bugs and room for improvement most easily.
• You can start a game in two clicks from the homepage. It really is meant to be a mode you can jump into quickly.
• Single games have a lot of variance in shot-making, turnovers, fouls, and ultimately who wins and loses. Earlier versions of BasketballCoach’s sim logic had the better roster winning ~95% of the time, regardless of your adjustments.

What’s Terrible

• The game mode page is pretty bare as-is. It clearly lacks pre-game settings and customization.
• The viewport and coaching controls are different from Coach and League Mode, which makes the experience feel disjointed.

What’s Coming

• More pre-game controls, including rotation settings, foul behavior, and coaching themes.
• A unified interface for coaching, court view, and box scores across all modes, including Quick Game.

Playoffs Mode

Playoffs Mode was the second mode released for BasketballCoach, back in April 2024. I had a blast implementing a tournament format, which is trickier to design than you’d think. The initial release had a ton of bugs to work out, and many still exist today. Honestly, Playoffs is by far the mode I’ve neglected the most. I’d like that to change.

What’s Great

• You can control one team or several teams in a playoff bracket. (The one catch: you can’t coach a matchup between two teams you both control.)
• You can play as many or as few games as you’d like with your teams. For example, you can choose to only coach the elimination games in a series.

What’s Terrible

• The mode lacks any playoff-specific features or customization.
• Home and away games aren’t a concept in the game yet, so home-court advantage in a playoff series doesn’t exist.

What’s Coming

• Home and away games, for sure. I’m still ironing out what the advantages and disadvantages should be.
• More customization options. Maybe you want the first round to be best-of-5, like the old days.

League Mode

League Mode launched on September 3rd, 2024. It was inspired by the Association/MyLeague/MyNBA modes in NBA 2K, and it’s meant for anyone who wants a longer-term coaching experience.

What’s Great

• You can coach any NBA team, and I try to keep the current rosters as up to date as possible. I spent a ton of time coaching the Knicks during the 2025-26 season, pretending I could use Karl-Anthony Towns way better than Mike Brown did (clearly I was wrong).
• You can set rotation plans, playbooks, and roles for your roster.
• The 5-man lineup tool shows you which lineups work on your team, and which ones are horrendous.

What’s Terrible

• The rotation logic is pretty funky. Some stars play too little. Some bench players play too much.
• It’s unclear how rotations and roles affect each other, which makes it confusing to know how to best use these settings.
• Stamina remains tricky to tune, so some players can comfortably play 40+ minutes per game over a full season.
  

What’s Coming

• Rotation logic where players get a predictable number of minutes, at predictable times, in realistic stints.
• New concepts, such as:
  • season-long fatigue
  • in-season trades (within reason, of course)
  • pre-game strategies for each opponent
• CPU coaching personalities for computer-controlled teams.
• More customization options, as with everything else.

Coach Mode

I didn’t believe it when I checked, but Coach Mode 1.0 came out in February 2026. To me, it feels like it’s been at least two years. Maybe that’s because of the frequent, targeted updates I’ve made since then, along with how popular the mode has become.

Fun fact: Coach Mode was partially inspired by Draft Champions in Madden NFL 16. I’m terrible at Madden, but I’d watch content creators play Draft Champions from time to time, and I thought the concept was fascinating. In BasketballCoach, the draft uses a more traditional turn-based format, but that will likely change as the mode evolves.

What’s Great

• Standard Draft is the main experience, where you build a roster within a draft budget.
• Custom Sandbox lets you freely experiment with roster building and take on a real NBA team.
• Daily Challenges, where you go up against teams and keep a record of your best coaching performances.
• Tons of mode-specific features, like in-game coaching hints and postgame coach reports.

What’s Terrible

• Success in this mode is 90% roster construction. That isn’t entirely unrealistic, but it means the experience doesn’t feel centered on the coach.
• Games are largely won by drafting a group of players who play well together, among other optimal strategies players have found. The coaching adjustments available just aren’t enough.
• There need to be more player-specific adjustments, more control over how your team operates in certain situations, and more clarity on why some strategies work and others don’t.

What’s Coming

• A new roster selection format. I haven’t finalized what it’ll look like yet, but I’m workshopping a few designs.
• A rebuilt foundation for coaching adjustments. This is a massive refactor that involves rebuilding a lot of the simulation logic from the ground up. More on that below.
• Some sort of global leaderboard, so you can compare your coaching brilliance with everyone else’s.

The Simulation Engine

The core logic behind BasketballCoach is much older than the site itself. What started as a barebones set of player attributes, plus some wonky calculations and dice rolls for interactions, has become a complicated, multi-layered web of inputs that create outcomes. The more I learn about basketball (and software engineering), the more flaws and shortcomings I notice in this project. My impression is that this constant reflection makes for a better product over time.

What’s Great

• The sim logic has many layers. Shot quality modifiers based on player stats, coaching strategies, set actions, traits, tendencies, etc.
• The stats the basketball sim logic generates have finally reached a semi-realistic point. Some per-game stats in League Mode still feel arcadey, but we’re in a much better spot now.

What’s Terrible

• Many of these layers aren’t aligned with each other, so some factors contradict, ignore, or accidentally amplify one another.
• A lot of the player traits, archetypes, and tendencies were written by me personally. I’d love to say I did a fair and objective assessment of every player, but that’s not accurate at all. Many decisions about how players play were based on vibes.
• Lots of concepts haven’t been built yet, such as:
  • off-ball screens
  • fast breaks and transition offense
  • inbound plays

What’s Coming

• Fixes for everything in the “What’s Terrible” section above.
• A new version of the sim logic that’s more coherent and expressive than ever before, built on a combination of measured player data and high-fidelity basketball references and research.
• Unveiling a new spatial model that better captures spacing and advantage creation.
• A new court display, for a far more engaging experience during games.

What’s Next for BasketballCoach

A lot has been built while I’ve been writing this post. Many systems had to be rebuilt from the ground up. The goal is to stick to my self-imposed principles for the simulation genre:

• Basketball outcomes in the sim should mirror real-life basketball outcomes.
• Every derived stat or attribute needs a clear explanation.

I’m hoping to ship this massive update before the 2026-27 NBA season tips off. There are still a couple more weeks of grinding ahead, but we’re on track for a mid-October release. I truly think BasketballCoach has the potential to be the best basketball coach simulator out there. We’ll see later this year.

In the meantime, you can jump into the basketball sim and see where things stand today. If you’ve got feedback, bug reports, or ideas, post them on r/BasketballCoachGame or send me an email. I read all of it.