Changelog

Bug Fixes

• Fixed lottery night failing with “returned 0 seed teams” in every new league after deleting an old one. A deleted league left a note behind saying its lottery had already run, and the next league picked up the same season number and skipped the draw. Deleted leagues now take everything with them, new leagues never reuse old numbers, and existing saves get cleaned up on next load. Thanks to the Reddit report that pinned it down.

Game Updates

• Coaches now show a projected grade, so you can tell who still has room to grow before you hire. Thanks to u/darrellet86 for pushing on this.
• Coaches no longer fade with age. They build toward their ceiling and hold it until they retire.
• Teams protect their cornerstones now. Rebuilders keep their young stars, contenders keep their franchise players, and everyone else charges a massive overpay.
• A trade in progress survives leaving the page.
• Lottery night is an event now. Picks reveal one at a time from 14 up to 1, at your pace, and protected picks resolve right on screen. Thanks to u/firegod699 for the idea.

Bug Fixes

• The lottery now follows the real rules: only the top four picks are drawn, so no team falls more than four spots.
• Coaches no longer lose ratings after their first season.
• A coach’s season record now shows his own record, not his current team’s. Thanks to u/darrellet86.
• CPU teams no longer refuse to discuss a player they would accept a direct offer for.
• Protected picks no longer change hands silently. Outcomes show on lottery night and in the news.
• Protected pick odds are now correct at every protection level, not just top four.
• Your watchlist no longer shows players from other leagues.
• League export no longer fails when a team has an open coaching slot, and if it ever does fail, it tells you why. Thanks to u/darrellet86 for the report and the save file.
• Teams no longer play a whole season short an assistant after a rival hires one away.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where very old saves broke after the draft because a table was missing. (v1.0.4)
• Fixed the re-sign decision buttons sitting off-screen on narrow windows. (v1.0.4)
• Fixed an issue where reloading mid-transition could run offseason steps twice, costing contracts an extra year. Thanks to u/ThrowAYeAccount for the save file that cracked it.
• Added a “Let the rest walk” button that clears any stuck re-sign decisions, so no offseason can hold your save hostage.
• Added a note when you let a player walk explaining that his cap hold stays until you renounce him.
• Fixed deep saves slowing down over time. By season 200, some lookups were scanning entire history tables and reads ran ten times slower. Thanks to u/dumbmatter for asking whether a save could survive 200 seasons.
• Import failures now report what went wrong.

A cleanup patch for saves that run more than one league. The leagues were supposed to be walled off from each other. They weren’t.

Bug Fixes

• Drafts and draft lotteries in multi-league saves could lock up completely while the draft room quietly read a different league’s picks. Every league keeps its own picks now. If you were stuck at “Waiting for draft order,” reload and you’re on the clock.
• The free agency market was one giant list of every league’s free agents, and the re-sign period could count another league’s expiring players against yours. Both now stick to the league you’re actually in.
• Finishing a season in one league could age, expire, and even retire players in your other leagues. Sealed. A repair tool for affected saves is in the works, and most of the wrongly departed can come back.
• Weekly chemistry updates were writing rows for other leagues’ teams, and the news feed occasionally name-dropped teams from a league you weren’t in.
• On phones, the “Offer contract” button in free agency was hiding behind the navigation bar, which made it impossible to sign anyone. It now stands where a button should.
• Single-league saves were never affected by any of the multi-league issues.

Bug Fixes

• The first-season Owner’s Checklist wasn’t counting your trades unless you went through the Propose button. Trades completed by accepting an incoming offer, or by executing once the other team already liked the deal, now tick the box too. Reported on launch day, fixed the same evening

Game

• Rebuilt box scores to be more legible and fit within the container. Font, color, and spacing all updated. The leader in each stat is bolded now as well, so you can find the night’s story without reading every row
• Rest of the tables across the site also updated to fit the same info in less width. This is an ongoing effort and we’ll keep improving table views
• Scheme fit naming updated to be shorter (Perfect, Good, OK, Poor, Wrong). Fits themselves remain the same

Bug Fixes

• On the last day before the trade deadline, the counter said “Deadline in 1 days.” It says “1 day” now
• Players who sat out a game get a cleaner reason line in the box score
• Plus the usual round of minor fixes and small polish across the app

The beta tag comes off today. Front Office Hoops is officially 1.0: a full-featured basketball front office, in your browser, free, no download, no signup. There’s been a ton of new features, optimizations, and bug fixes in the oven baking that I’m proud to have out for everyone.

Game Updates

• Coaches are people now
  • Every coach has an identity, a preferred scheme, a career arc, and a coaching tree you can trace back through the league’s history
  • They have wants at the negotiating table, they get better and worse with age, and their scheme actually moves games: the fit between your roster and your coach shows up everywhere from Lineups to free agency to trade targets
• The offseason grew new phases
  • Re-signing season is its own stop on the calendar, and the whole player economy got rebuilt around it: teams keep their own stars at real prices, the middle class signs multi-year deals, and nobody good walks for free anymore
  • Training camp runs every offseason: allocate focus across your roster, chase the breakout, and live with the years nothing clicks
  • Contract extensions are in: lock up your star mid-deal instead of sweating the walk year, and watch CPU teams do the same to the players you were hoping to poach
• The development league is open
  • Send young players down for real minutes, follow their assignments, and call them up when the box scores say it is time
• The league remembers
  • A full history wing: Hall of Fame, league records, an almanac, head-to-head ledgers, draft history with re-grades, and jersey retirements
  • Full-Court Press grew from a feed into a newspaper: story threads that follow a season-long arc, columnists with opinions, and filters so you can read only the beats you care about
• Deals worth making
  • The trade builder was rebuilt around the Deal Tray: cleaner cards, a real counter-offer flow, and pickers that let you scout while you shop
  • CPU teams got sharper and bolder: expect real counter-offers, honest prices on stars, and the occasional CPU-to-CPU blockbuster that redraws the map without you
  • The Trading Block shows offers as full two-sided deals, so you can see exactly what leaving means before you say yes
• Start your league, your way
  • The new create-league wizard gives you three doors: a fresh generated league, Real Players rosters based on today’s NBA, or import a league file, including Basketball GM exports
  • Multiple leagues, one browser: create, switch, and delete saves without ceremony
  • Every generated league has a seed you can share: send it to a friend, start identical leagues, and race to a ring
• Built for the small screens
  • A long mobile pass: names and team labels that fit a phone, every table scrolls instead of clipping, and the deal tray works with thumbs
  • Add the game to your home screen straight from an in-game prompt, with proper instructions on iOS
• Under the hood
  • Simulation days run about twice as fast, and the draft-to-re-sign jump went from a coffee break to a few seconds on a phone
  • If your browser cannot store saves, the game now tells you loudly instead of losing quietly. Your data, your device, same as always

Bug Fixes

• Free agency offers now sit on your desk for a full visible day before anyone can decide. No more signings you never got to see coming
• Free agency got faster and fairer: actions respond in a blink instead of seconds, the veteran minimum is always on the table, and the mid-level exception can no longer be spent twice
• A restricted free agent can no longer strand unsigned for a whole season, and the re-sign phase can’t wedge shut with every decision already made
• Imported leagues actually field their starters, count Bird rights correctly, price contracts the way the rest of the league does, and develop the full skill set instead of freezing parts of it
• Imported rosters look right too: real team grades instead of a page of D+ marks, player photos that carry through, and no more league staffed by the same eight placeholder coaches
• CPU front offices came to their senses: no more shopping franchise stars at bargain prices, no more trade markets that dry up by midseason, and the CPU contract-extension crash that could kill a sim day is gone
• An incoming trade offer no longer vanishes because you navigated away to think it over
• Stats pages show the whole league now: the player stats page dropped its hidden minutes filter, career tables carry the full stat sheet, and draft history finally lists the round with the pick
• The status bar got honest: no more phantom progress meter, no more stale next-game date, and the pending-offers count only counts offers that are actually pending
• Switching leagues no longer bounces you back to the one you just left, and the season rollover drops you at the Season Preview instead of a random page
• Dozens more across the sim, the offseason, and the UI from three weeks of device testing and a very long bug hunt

Site

• Updated the wiki: every page checked against the 1.0 sim
• Added additional wiki pages, including a full guide to importing leagues

Thanks for playing through the beta. The season starts now.

A small update with a big front door.

Site

• Launched From the Commissioner’s Desk — our new dev blog for the long-form stuff that doesn’t fit in a changelog. The first post is a full tour of the road to v1.0: The Road to v1.0. Roadmaps, behind-the-scenes looks, and the launch announcement will all land there. There’s an RSS feed too.

Game

• Added an Analytics toggle in Settings. We’ve upgraded our anonymous usage analytics to help us see which features matter and where players get stuck — never your save data, and one click turns it all off. The privacy page has the full plain-English rundown.

A small patch focused on the end of the season — getting from the last regular-season game to the offseason should feel as smooth as the other 82.

Bug Fixes

• Rookie of the Year and the All-Rookie Teams are now awarded in your league’s very first season. First-year players from the opening roster are genuine rookies — they were being skipped entirely, leaving the rookie honors permanently empty.
• The trip to the awards ceremony is now guaranteed: “Proceed to Offseason” routes through the Awards page every time, even when the end-of-finals redirect doesn’t fire.
• Fixed a case where the sim buttons could go dead at the end of the regular season, forcing a detour through the Playoffs page to move forward.
• The date of your next game now appears where it belongs during a sim: next to the matchup (“Next Mar 31 vs Archers”), instead of floating beside the progress bar.
• Awards that legitimately have no qualifying player now say “Vacant” instead of pretending the season is still in progress.
• Season rollover and playoff sims now write a backup checkpoint — the biggest sim bursts of the year were the only ones that didn’t.

The deepest engine work since launch — a full summer of it in one update. The short version: the basketball got honest, and the other 29 front offices got smart.

Game Updates

• The sim got a full talent retune. Great teams now win like great teams, tanking teams lose like they mean it, and a 2-seed beats a 7-seed about as often as it should. Playoff rotations tighten to eight men and starters play heavier minutes when it counts
• The league is now NBA-shaped: star density, draft classes that actually mint stars, and journeymen who wash out of the league instead of lingering forever. Win totals spread like the real thing
• A brand-new Re-Sign phase between the draft and free agency: keep your own guys — Bird rights and all — before the market ever opens
• CPU front offices now spend like front offices: market-heat pricing, bidding wars with real overpays, and payrolls that land in the NBA band instead of hoarding cap space
• Contract length is a real negotiation now. Veterans want security, young stars bet on themselves, and teams offer extra years to win a bid
• Every player carries a PROJ badge — a projected future grade built from thousands of simulated careers, aware of your coaching staff’s development chops. And it’s the same forecast the CPU uses to draft, trade, and rebuild, so nobody’s playing with marked cards
• Team grades are now absolute and outcome-anchored: a B roster means a .500-quality roster, whether your league is stacked or starved
• The Transactions page now shows the full league history, grouped by season

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that restricted trading in the offseason — the trade window now stays open through the lottery, free agency, and training camp, and CPU teams deal all summer too
• Fixed the top bar going quiet when a league event arrived: the playoffs, coaching carousel, re-signing period, draft, and free agency now take over the sim buttons with one click straight to the action — and when the finals end, you’re taken to the season’s awards ceremony
• Box scores now run on the actual game clock — team minutes add up to 240, the way arithmetic intended
• Lineup editing works properly on mobile: reorder anyone, move anyone across the starter line
• Re-offering a free agent replaces your old offer instead of stacking a second one
• Rosters have a real floor now: the sim won’t let a skeleton crew take the court, in-season or out
• Long sims show the calendar date as they run, pages start at the top when you navigate, and a stats page that hits a snag says so instead of spinning forever
• Additional minor fixes across trade counters, dead-money bookkeeping, and save persistence

A fast follow-up to Media day, starring restricted free agency.

Bug Fixes

• Declining a rival’s offer sheet on your restricted free agent could freeze the entire offseason. Offer sheets now work like they do in real life: a signed, binding contract.
• The sheet you’re asked to match is now the one the player actually wants — scored by his own priorities, not just the biggest number on the table
• Additional minor fixes across free agency prompts and roster edge cases

The biggest update we’ve ever shipped, just in time for open beta.

Game Updates

• Every player in the league now has a photorealistic headshot — 1,500 unique media-day portraits, assigned at birth and worn for a whole career. Prefer the illustrated look? Classic mode is one toggle away
• An all-new Lineups page: place your starters on an actual court, pin anyone to any position (the fit chip tells you exactly what it costs), set starter minutes with sliders, and shape bench playtime
• An all-new Team hub for every franchise: identity at a glance — team grades, archetype, form, streak — plus a full contracts view with draft assets, so you can finally see which rebuilder is sitting on a war chest of picks
• The Dashboard learned to scout: flip to any team’s dashboard, read-only, and case them before the deadline

Bug Fixes

• The game now has overtime. Yes, really: about one game in seventy ended tied after four quarters, and the win was being quietly handed to the road team. Five-minute overtime periods now play until somebody earns it
• Adjusting a starter’s minutes no longer drags the entire player card around the court
• Additional minor fixes across mobile lineups, player card layouts, and the trade block

Game Updates

• Six months of database patches, retrofits, and updates squashed into one clean foundation
• Old saves from before this cleanup get a polite heads-up at boot instead of being quietly scrambled

Hardwood Heroes is now Front Office Hoops. Development began under hardwoodheroes.net; the new name and domain better reflect the front-office focus. This is the same game and development history—existing saves and version numbering continue unchanged.

Game Updates

• A proper season-end Awards page: champion banner, the full award slate, browsable back through every completed season
• All-Star Weekend moved from a popup to a real page, with an archive of every past weekend

Bug Fixes

• Re-signing your own star no longer lowballs him by 75% — the Bird-rights math was using the wrong number in the wrong formula
• Entering the offseason no longer zeroes every stat page in the game
• A sprained ankle no longer takes 217 days to heal (sports medicine has advanced)
• Matching a restricted free agent offer sheet now actually matches it
• Additional minor fixes across page headers, box scores, and the injury report

The largest stress test we have ever run — and the reason the counter at the top of this page is so big. Sixteen complete leagues, twenty-five seasons each. Then one league pushed fifty consecutive seasons: 65,819 games, 22 different champions, zero failures. And it wasn’t just a stress test — it doubled as our deepest stat-integrity pass yet, auditing every box score deep time produced.

Deep time found bugs that no normal playtest ever could:

Bug Fixes

• Games were occasionally running past 48 minutes without anyone noticing — one poor soul was averaging 54 a night. Physics has been restored
• Three-pointers were too easy and mid-range shots were too hard; both are back in line with how basketball behaves
• The league’s steals leader was putting up numbers that would’ve made actual NBA history blush
• One coach was quietly holding six jobs at once by season 25 (he has been asked to choose)
• Retired players’ salary-cap holds lived forever, eventually starving whole teams into 10-man rosters
• Coaches with better ratings now actually coach better — ten seasons of data said the worse coach kept winning, and the fancy numbers on the hiring screen were just numbers; they now reach the floor
• The star pipeline self-sustains across generations: fifty seasons in, the league’s talent level looks like season one

Our deepest sim-lab expedition yet found something alarming: left alone long enough, the league’s economy quietly died — free agents froze, rosters thinned, and everything slowly stopped. Not anymore. A league now runs itself indefinitely, whether you meddle or not.

Game Updates

• Teams can have an off night now: a small per-game wobble means the league’s best-ever team finishes 67-15 instead of a perfect 82-0 — which, frankly, nobody needed to see happen twice
• Unsigned players keep developing, aging, and staying market-visible instead of freezing in carbonite
• Draft classes now produce more prospects than picks, so the undrafted feed the free-agent pool like real life
• Teams can cut players mid-season, and CPU teams sign replacements when injuries bite
• Retirement rates now match reality — veterans hang it up instead of haunting the league at 38

Bug Fixes

• The league was quietly minting a fresh crop of future legends in every “average” draft class — turns out every class was secretly a stacked one. Star creation now balances star retirement
• Fixed a bug where CPU teams would never actually make any trades… like your fantasy football leagues
• Rookie of the Year now goes to an actual rookie (a 26-points-a-game “rookie” aged 22 with three years of service tipped us off)
• Additional minor fixes across free agency pacing, roster limits, and the waiver wire

A reliability push, compressed.

Game Updates

• The full award slate: MVP, Rookie of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, Sixth Man, Most Improved, Coach of the Year, All-League and All-Defensive teams, and a Finals MVP
• Career pages and franchise history — every season, every banner, every stat line preserved
• Draft classes got hidden personalities: some run deep, some are top-heavy, some are quietly historic, and scouts only find out mid-season
• Players now come from somewhere: colleges and countries across a 60-school, 60-nation pool
• Free agency now runs on a real market instead of a black box
• Automatic save checkpoints after every sim, plus a recovery screen if something goes sideways
• Save export: download your entire league as a single file from Settings, whenever you like
• The playoffs and draft lottery now start themselves — no more hunting for the button

Bug Fixes

• Stats now update live while you sim instead of demanding a page refresh
• Trades actually execute instead of just… agreeing and then doing nothing
• The transaction log uses real team names

To make sure it would all hold up, we ran fifteen straight unattended seasons, nearly 20,000 games, in a headless browser with nobody watching. Nine champions, three dynasties, and a save file that finished at 6.8MB and still opened fine. Nothing broke. We checked.

The bench got a brain.

Game Updates

• A full offseason coaching carousel: fire underperformers, hire from the market, poach assistants off other benches, or promote from within
• Coaches develop, age, and retire — and retired players start showing up in the coaching pipeline
• Team chemistry: six factors, updated weekly, from win momentum to roster stability — toxic locker rooms are now a thing you can cause
• Coaching staffs matter on the floor: styles set pace and identity, assistants bring specialties

A complete visual overhaul, screen by screen — and a brand-new front door.

Game Updates

• New design language: a warm, print-inspired light theme with a dark mode toggle
• Illustrated player faces in your team’s colors — every player rendered, deterministic, and unique to their career
• One smart status bar owns all sim controls and updates live, night by night, while you sim
• Box scores got their own full game pages with four-factors breakdowns and a game story
• Twelve new pages including League Leaders, Transactions, Team History, Injuries, and a searchable player index
• Draft-night trading: swing deals live from the draft room while you’re on the clock
• League-scoped URLs: every page in your league is now bookmarkable
• Automatic save backups: the game offers you a download before any update that touches your save format

Site Updates

• This very website: a proper home page with live screenshots, a knowledge-base wiki, and the changelog you are reading right now
• New create-a-league flow: pick your franchise from 30 team cards — every one a different story — and take the job

First trip to the sim lab with the full GM loop installed. We simmed complete multi-season leagues end to end — season, playoffs, lottery, draft, free agency, repeat — and measured everything against real NBA statistical shapes: scoring distributions, rebound rates, win spreads, contract sanity.

Nine of ten calibration targets landed in range on the first battery. The tenth got fixed. This is also a good time to mention the running counter at the top of this page — it only ever goes up.

Bug Fixes

• CPU teams no longer sign a backup center they don’t need with money they don’t have
• Lottery odds now match the posted table exactly
• Additional minor fixes across the draft room and free agency market

CPU front offices got opinions.

Game Updates

• A two-team trade builder with live feedback — the other side reacts as you add and remove pieces
• CPU teams counter your offers with specific asks instead of just saying no
• Draft pick trading with protections: top-3, top-5, top-10, or lottery-protected, resolved honestly on lottery night
• Every CPU team now runs a strategy — contenders buy, rebuilders sell, and the trade deadline actually feels dangerous
• CPU teams trade with each other too, so the league moves without you

The biggest update yet: the entire front-office loop, in one drop. This is the one the game is named after.

Game Updates

• A full salary cap system: soft cap, luxury tax, Bird rights, cap holds, max tiers, rookie scales, and veteran minimums
• The draft: weighted lottery night, a 60-pick draft room, and prospect classes with real spread
• Free agency: a day-by-day market where players weigh money, winning, loyalty, and role — and sign accordingly
• Players now retire, contracts actually expire, and rosters churn like a real league instead of a class photo
• Restricted free agency, offer sheets, and the right to match

Seasons now leave marks.

Game Updates

• Injuries: five severity tiers, day-based recoveries, and the roster headaches that come with them
• Player development: young players grow, veterans decline, and a full offseason Development Report shows you the risers and fallers
• Potential is real — and playing time feeds it; prospects buried on the bench develop like prospects buried on the bench
• Coaches with a development focus now visibly shape young rosters

The first big engine overhaul. Fresh leagues used to feel suspiciously fair — every team decent, every roster sensible. Real leagues aren’t like that.

Game Updates

• Leagues now generate with real personalities: title contenders, hopeless rebuilds, aging cores on one last ride, and everything between
• Stars can now appear at every position, not just point guard
• Team ratings arrive: offense, defense, and overall grades for all 30 teams, plus an identity label so you know who’s contending and who’s tanking
• Lineups now find each player’s best position automatically — and playing someone out of position finally costs what it should
• The whole simulation moved to a background engine: an 82-game season now sims in seconds without freezing your browser

We also ran our first large calibration battery against real NBA statistical shapes — scoring leaders, rebound rates, win spreads, all of it. The sim lab was born, and it never really closed.

A stat-shape pass on the simulation, because our first box scores were a little too… democratic.

Game Updates

• Assists now funnel to actual playmakers, rebounds to actual bigs, and scoring to the players who can actually score — previously everyone shared like it was youth soccer
• New playing-time controls: mark a player for more or fewer minutes and the rotation adjusts around them

Bug Fixes

• Point guards no longer lead the league in scoring by default
• Additional minor fixes to minutes distribution and the substitution engine

The season became a place you live, not a button you press.

Game Updates

• Sim controls that respect your time: a day, a week, a month, or straight to the playoffs
• Clickable box scores for every completed game, with quarter-by-quarter breakdowns
• Date-driven playoffs — series play out night by night across the league, just like April should feel
• New League Stats page: sortable team and player tables, league-wide
• Player pages: ratings, season stats, career averages, and contract details for every player in the league

Nine days in and the league already taught us a few things.

Bug Fixes

• Re-anchored the grade scale after every team clustered politely around a B- — stars are now actually rare
• Head coach ratings no longer secretly correlated with nothing
• Additional minor fixes to roster loading, standings ties, and the dashboard

Front Office Hoops is live. Thirty fictional franchises, full 82-game seasons, and a general manager’s chair with your name on it.

Game Updates

• A complete 30-team league generated fresh every time — two conferences, six divisions, no two leagues alike
• Possession-by-possession game simulation under the hood; you see the results, the box scores, and the standings
• Letter grades instead of number soup: players rate from A+ to F, anchored to real basketball archetypes — a C is a rotation player, not an insult
• Full season loop: sim your way through the schedule, make the playoffs (or don’t), crown a champion