Welcome to Hoops Playground!

Brought to you by pennantchase.com

This free online basketball management game was built in just a few weeks to help entertain fans missing basketball during the coronavirus pandemic. This is basketball simulation meaning you draft your team and the games are all simulated based on real-life historical stats. The rules are simple:

1. Join a playground!
2. Rank players for the draft. Best players from 1974-present are available, depending on the league you join.
3. Once the league fills, you'll draft one player every eight hours over the course of 40 hours.
4. Once the draft is over, each team will have a 5-man squad. (PG, SG, SF, PF, C)
5. Set your desired FG shares for each player, and get ready to battle through a 40-game season (one game simulated every eight hours).
6. No subs, no timeouts, just street ball. First team to 80 points wins the game.
7. At the end of 40 games, the top four teams will play in a best-of-3 tourney to decide the champion.
8. Play as many times as you want, rack up as many trophies as you can.
9. Draft up to three teams at a time. (Active site donors can draft 10 teams at a time.)

Sim Info

The game uses player's real-life "Per 36-minutes" stats to determine the likelihood of any given event occuring during a possession, such as a steal, block or turnover. Field goals and three-pointers are determined based on real-life FG percentages (with offensive win-share and defensive win-share based on BasketballReference.com also contributing to the sim results). Players' attributes are not part of the equation. In other words, it doesn't matter how tall a player was, how fast he was, what style he played with. Only his stats matter.

The playground aspect of the game means players with high OWS (offensive win share) can sometimes score a little better from the field, because they won't ever take free throws. Big men sometimes shoot worse from the field than expected, because they are going up against the best defensive centers in the game.

Players will attempt baskets with the same frequency they did in real life, relative to the other players on the court. This helps prevent someone using a player with a high field goal percentage and having them make an unrealistic amount of attempts. Keep in mind, when you have a lineup of all-time greats, every player took a lot of attempts, which means field-goal distribution will be fairly even across your lineup (unless you purposely draft a lineup with one superstar and a bunch of complementary teammates - in that scenario, it's more likely your star will get the majority of attempts.) Managers have some discretion over the share of field goals each player gets.

Because this game was built quickly and meant to mimick a 5-on-5 "street ball" scenario, there is no fatigue, substitutions or game clock. First team to score 80 wins. Players will still get fouled based on real-life stats, but there are no free throws.

Don't forget to try our full basketball sim game!