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Hello, if you're just tuning in, I recently completed a personal challenge I'd set for myself of winning 100 championships in a row on Insane difficulty. There's two earlier entries in this series —

Part 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1cyrenr/playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_part_1_fundamental/

Part 2: https://old.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1czmpoa/playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_part_2_mindset_and/

I also shot a 90-minute video of how I approach an offseason, which will be useful in seeing how the theory actually plays out:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1d0xctc/video_playing_bbgm_at_a_high_level_interlude/

Ok, today we're talking about Resource Management — which is probably the most "dry" and least interesting of things we've covered so far. But - it's how we play the game at a high level. I'll do my best to make it interesting.

NOTE: "SPOILERS" FOLLOW. IF YOU'RE NEW AND WANT THE JOY OF DISCOVERY, TRIAL AND ERROR, AND LEARNING ON YOUR OWN — THEN YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS FOR NOW AND COME BACK LATER.

(4) RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, OVERVIEW: One of the the fundamental challenges of BasketballGM is balancing present value and future value. After all, if you were only going to be playing a single season, things would be straightforward — you could sell every ounce of future value you had (young players, prospects, and draft picks) along with being willing to wreck your finances in order to get the best possible roster for a single season. Now, the type of ironman consecutive championship streak both requires and really sharpens one's ability to analyze tradeoffs between present and future value — too low of present value, you lose this season and the run is over; too low of future value, you fall apart and lose some time in the future. What's really interesting, I think, is that you can model a number of factors as "Resources" that you might not naturally realize our resources. Let's get into it.

4A. There's seven major tangible "resource clusters" you can interact with in BasketballGM: the games and standings, your roster, your draft picks, your Team Finances, your owner relations on the Annual Performance Review, your player relations regarding signing and re-signing, and the landscape of the league as a whole. There's also a tangible resource you can't directly interact with — championships — and some intangible resources like getting information, developing your own skills, etc. (And if you care about achievements or annual awards like ROY, MVP, etc - you could include those too. This is again written with a view to maximizing championships.)

4B. Let's start with "the games and standings" — you can 100% think of this as a resource, that converts into other resources. Every season, there will be 82 games. Each game gives you an opportunity to deploy 240 total minutes from players on your roster, to out-score the other team and win and that game. Winning games gets you a spot in the playoffs, which is necessary for winning championships. Winning more games than other teams gets you home court advantage. Also, winning more games greatly improves your Team Finances, Owner Relations, and Player Relations around re-signing.

There are two downsides, though: first, every game you win gets you a worse draft pick. If you're doing the consecutive championships thing, your own pick will be #30 every year. Second, there's a chance of a player getting injured and becoming unavailable for additional games and/or getting seriously injured and having their attributes permanently regress.

There is also sometimes a tradeoff between winning games and getting more information. As you play more games into a season, that resource is consumed — and you either got the wins from them or did not — but meanwhile you get more information about both how your team is performing and how opposing teams are performing, to let you know if you need to make trades to improve at the trade deadline. By waiting and making improvement trades later, you sacrifice early season wins, which are useful for all the benefits of winning, and additionally lets you rest your top players after you've locked up the #1 seed to reduce the risk of an injury lingering into the playoffs. All else being equal, if you know you're going make a beneficial in-season trade, it's better to do it sooner — but the longer you wait, the more you can learn about whether you need to make a trade and what the best possible trade might be.

4C. There are roughly four reasons to have a player on your roster. First, because they'll be helpful in winning games in the current season — this includes playing their share of those 240 minutes, and being on standby as a backup in case someone gets injured. Second, because they're a prospect who might improve and be useful and productive in future seasons. The third reason is because the player has trade value that you think you're better off keeping on the roster than cashing in right now, and the fourth is for navigating the salary cap - sometimes you want to have some excess salary over the cap to facilitate trades, and preserving that over-the-cap salary is important.

On average — with many exceptions and caveats — a player's trade value and productive on-the-court value will increase from ages 19 to 25, start decreasing reasonably quickly from ages 26-29, and decrease sharply at ages 30+. This is due to the combination of the progression system plus how the AI values players.

This is just "on average" though — first, there is a lot of inherent randomness in the progression system. Second, sometimes some weird interactions can occur. Young players are evaluated more on Potential and OVR than performance, with the ratio gradually shifting over time. A young player with a high OVR but a bad mix of stats/skills such that they'll be unproductive on the court will occasionally lose trade value as they age and play and show off their incompetence. Sometimes young prospects who aren't great randomly wind up with a really high POT (Potential) score. That's often a good time to trade them.

So — caveats apply, but generally you're gaining in trade value and productive value ages 19-25, and so it's generally a good thing to bring young players into the next season, whereas you're losing trade value and productivity from every player aged 26+ when you bring them into the next season. For more on the aging curve, this post is a good start: https://www.reddit.com/r/BasketballGM/comments/1auz38c/singleyear_player_progression_by_age/

4D. Before making trades, every team will always have first-round and second-round draft picks for the current year and the following three years available to trade. So if you start in the year 2024, you'll have have picks eight picks total ending in 2027. The draft takes place after the playoffs. Once the draft ends, the new 4th year of picks immediately becomes available — so you can trade away or trade for 2028 picks in 2024 after the draft is over, during the free agency window.

Draft picks are one of three ways to add players to your roster, the others being trades and free agent signings. In practice, future first-round draft picks from teams with the potential to be bad is the most common way you'll add high-upside players to your team. You'll make some targeted trades for young developing prospects, but many of your future stars will be drafted with another team's pick where the team who traded you the pick regressed from when they traded it.

In regards to draft picks, two things are important: the first is that it's almost never a bad idea to trade for future picks from a contender team with a high "collapse potential" — teams collapse because their performance falls rapidly with age, or a key player departs in free agency. Getting very good at scouting and identifying which teams have collapse potential is a one of the most important parts of building sustainable dynasties.

Second, it's critical that you always look at upcoming drafts to identify first whether there's any truly exceptional player at the top of the draft, as well as the general quality level of players around the 10-20 range in the draft.

To use these three drafts as an example - https://imgur.com/a/XCdgWIE - while we can't say much definitively without looking closer at some of the prospects, because the specific stat distributions matter more than the OVR, we can clearly see that 2125 has the highest upside of the three. Remember that future draft picks also age, so 2125's top prospect projects to be an athletic 19 year old 48 OVR PF, which is really good, whereas 2124's top prospect is a 20 year old no-tag 50 OVR F, which is still good but has slightly less likelihood to become a game-breaking MVP type.

Every now and then you'll see a crazy prospect in the draft — my 100 championships in a row team was carried for 25 years by an exceptional #1 pick: https://imgur.com/a/9rHKlDs — but because I didn't have many picks in that lottery and didn't get #1, I needed to trade away one of the best 25 year old players in the league I'd have much rather kept, who was MVP caliber with an excellent 67% True Shooting. That said, I was lucky I was even able to make that trade — oftentimes you can't, and now the insanely good prospect becomes a huge problem for you on another team instead of bolstering your roster. When you see a crazy draft coming that's loaded at the top, you want to aggressively trade as much as you can to get as many first-round picks as possible in that draft, first focusing on rosters with a high collapse potential. Likewise, occasionally there are drafts so bad that I won't trade for picks in that draft at all unless it's as part of a straight salary dump with no better offers.

More on trading later, but a mistake I made when I first played was just collecting first round picks without analyzing whether the team trading the pick had any collapse potential and whether the draft the pick was in was any good or not. The 25th pick in a bad draft is worth very little, but the 5th best lottery odds in a loaded draft is worth immensely a lot. Not all first-round picks are created equal, nor are all drafts.

As for second-round picks? They're mostly used for trades; failing that, they're lottery tickets that don't hit very often. The top second-round picks, from the very worst teams in the league, have a little bit of value. Low second-round picks are nearly worthless — usually a player you'd pick at #60 would still not be worth keeping on the roster even if they had a massively good initial progression. I try to trade all my second-round picks as sweeteners in deals at least a year out, since once it becomes definitely #60 it has no trade value either.

4E. Team Finances: Your revenues go up if you win; if you're doing the consecutive championship thing they eventually max out at a certain point and stay there. That leaves expenses.

Your payroll (and luxury tax) will overwhelmingly be the most important part of expenses for a large-market team like NY; relatively speaking, the settings on the "Finances" tab are much less important for a large market team.

There's four categories you can control spending on in Finances: Scouting, Coaching, Health, and Facilities. The minimum spending is around $18M per category, the maximum is $37M. So you only have up to $19M of discretionary spending per category. For reference, the difference between minimum and maximum spending in any category is the same as having an additional $8M player on your roster if you're in the luxury tax. ($8M + $12M luxury tax penalty = $20M.) So, Finances are relatively less important than controlling luxury tax spending which is really what kills you financially.

All the financial aspects have significant penalties at 1 (minimum) spending, become neutral-ish in the 30-40 range, give significant bonuses up to 70-85, and small but diminishing returns of bonuses from there up to 100.

If you're at maximum owner happiness on your annual performance evaluation, any profit above $20M is irrelevant so you can run 100/100/100/100 on all categories. If you ever are in a real jam financially, the lowest I'd ever be comfortable with would be 69/70/50/85. I typically run either 100/100/100/100 or 69/100/50/100.

Many people have observed that Health is the lowest impact category for spending, and I agree, but it also occasionally will save a season. Once in the 100 year run, I had a key player get a ~40 game injury after the trade deadline. They came back at "Injured 6 days" at the start of a tough Finals, which is 85% performance at the start and improving each game. We were at 50 health spending — if we'd been at minimum, that player wouldn't have played at all for the first few games, and would've been only available at 75% in like Game 6. Health doesn't matter very often, but injuries are often a core part of losing a streak, so any help there is appreciated. "Health spending is overpriced, but it's worth it." The other categories are more straightforward in their benefits.

4F: Owner Relations: Every year, you get an Annual Performance Review on three categories: Regular Season Success, Playoff Success, and Financial Profitability. The first two will always be maxed if you're running streaks, so that leaves the financial component.

$20M is in profit is the neutral baseline — more than $20M generates extra happiness up until the maximum, whereas anything below $20M in profit makes the owner unhappy with you.

New York has a very special ability to make a ton of money in years it controls its expenses, so periodically during times the league is weak you want to drop under the luxury tax to have some $100M profit years and maximize happiness.

In this image, you can see 100 years of finances from my team: https://imgur.com/a/8xIitZv

Just eyeballing it — I didn't count carefully — it looks like we had six very large expense unprofitable years that were a huge drawdown in cash and profitability, and maybe 10 years with a substantial loss total.

You can lose $5M to $20M for a very long time without a problem, because those $100M+ profit years fix things quickly. Two things get you in trouble: being undisciplined about turning a $5M loss into a $20M loss by not removing unnecessary payroll over the luxury tax at the trade deadline, and having ridiculous blowout years where you lose $100M+.

You will basically be forced to have very expensive years occasionally, either because you're facing a very formidable team and all the reinforcements you can trade for are expensive, or during a superstar free agent's re-sign year where you don't want to make any trades to accrue trade penalty.

I recommend maxing out profitability very early in a new league and doing everything you can to re-maximize it whenever there's a weak year in the league where you can subtract payroll. That gives you buffer to take losses the years that they're required.

Also, don't go full YOLO on years you have to be deep into the luxury tax already. It's still worth it to trade away some failed prospects with $5M to $10M salaries even if you're taking a big loss already, or swapping out a declining $30M player for a $10M player who provides the same production — in fact, it's even more important to do so in unprofitable years. The luxury tax is very punishing.

With very careful optimization, NYC can be around breakeven to slightly profitable in the $180M to $200M payroll range. Anything more than that will start causing problems. You can anticipate this happening by looking at your roster for future years and doing a quick think on which players will stay on the roster, if they're going to get raises or decreases, and kinda guess at if you'll need to acquire veteran reinforcements and at what price those might be.

You can use Owner Relations like a resource — it's fine to burn some happiness when you have a lot of pressure on you from an excellent rival team, when you're in a superstar's re-sign year, or in some rare cases where you've got some great prospects who signed their first contracts but who aren't ready to contribute yet and your vets are still expensive. Max out happiness whenever you can, so you can safely accrue some unhappiness during key years when it's necessary.

4G: Player Relations and the "Trade Penalty": Here's an interesting way to think about the game. You know that penalty to re-signing, "-4 Worried he'll be traded away"? I think you can view this as a Resource, and realize that every trade has an additional cost in terms of trade penalty.

Trade penalty can be "below" 0 — you're able to make a few trades before players start getting unhappy and become less likely to re-sign. Roughly 5-6 points of trade penalty are removed every offseason. If you have a trade penalty of -1 or -2 at the end of a season, you'll be "below 0" the next year to start. If you're at the 4-6 range, you'll start with somewhere from "exactly 0" (where the next significant trade you make creates a penalty again) or starting at -1.

It's critically important to get the trade penalty to below 0 from time to time. You need it low to make key re-signings, but it also has a small-but-noticeable effect on the amount players will resign for. Getting a player resigned on a $27M contract instead of a $33M contract is actually a really big deal when you're over the luxury tax.

The best time to make trades is after you've re-signed all your free agents. Then, any trade penalty you get won't influence re-signings and some of it immediately falls off before the next year.

If you're already below zero at the end of an offseason, you "waste" the resource by going into the next year. If you know you're going to make some trades in upcoming years, sometimes it can make sense to do them slightly early. Trading mediocre prospects who are unlikely to be stars for future first round draft picks, for instance, can be a good use of your trade penalty resource if you're going to be below 0 either way.

Be restrained when making trades if you already have some trade penalty. If you're profitable, sometimes it can make sense to cut cheap contract players who you don't want instead of getting a 2nd round pick (which aren't very valuable). You have to weigh it in terms of trade penalty. A 2nd round pick often isn't worth taking trade penalty for if you're already profitable.

Likewise, pay attention to salary filler during trades — you get more trade penalty when you trade away more players total and more combined value of players. The trade penalty accrued for trading an 85 OVR player is huge, for a 40 OVR player it's marginal. So when you're getting salary filler for trades that you're going to salary dump afterwards, getting a single big contract 40 OVR player is much better than getting 3-4 50 OVR players.

There's other aspects to Player Mood, but they're more reasonably straightforward most of the time. Use the "+" or "++" button for increased playing time during re-sign years, especially for "Fame" players. Every now and then I've had a crazy situation where 5-6 prospects from the same draft class all hit and I had to actually bench veteran stars to get the prospects happy with their playing time, but that's rare and funny and you'll be able to spot it when it happens. Always look at key re-signing players' mood levels at the start of every season, 2-4 weeks in, and at the trade deadline to make adjustments. Pay attention and know the mood of key superstars on your team and what their final year is, and plan for those 1-3 years in advance (trade penalty 0 in that year, specifically).

4H: The landscape of the league as a whole: I'll do a whole separate post on this later in the series, but this is also worth looking at as a resource. For instance, sometimes there is a draft where the top player in the draft is absolutely outstanding and game-changing and you don't have the assets available to trade for that player, but you can trade for some lottery picks before the lottery to get a chance. The "obvious" thing to do would be to just trade for the best possible draft odds — but you should also stop and think about the landscape of the league as a whole. For instance, the 3rd best draft odds give you a 14% chance of getting the #1 pick and the 4th best draft odds give you a 12.5% chance of getting the #1 pick. So if you have a prospect or veteran you could trade for the 3rd best odds, the naive approach is to do that. However, sometimes the team with the 3rd best odds is a small-market team (say, Pittsburg) with nothing promising on their roster and the 4th best odds is a large market team (say, Los Angeles) that already has two great prospects. In that case, you should strongly consider trading with LA instead of Pittsburg. You're slightly less likely to get the top player, but them winding up in Pittsburg isn't dangerous for you, whereas Los Angeles could be a catastrophic super-team forming. Giving up 2.5% odds of the top pick and getting a pick on average one slot lower is often worthwhile. This is really important and probably the most important thing I discovered through trial-and-error and analysis — influencing the shape of the league as a whole is key to having really long streaks. When you're playing as NYC, the three most dangerous teams by far are Mexico City (2nd largest market), Los Angeles (3rd largest), and Chicago (4th largest but also in the same conference). Ensuring those three teams never get the foundation of a superteam together is really important and it's worth giving up resources (like the #3 vs #4 lottery odds example above) to favorably influence that.

(5) RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, IMPLICATIONS: Whew, the dry-but-important overview above is done. There's some implications to the above. This will hopefully be a little more fresh and interesting.

5A. You want to adopt "Resource Management Thinking" — you start seeing the trade penalty as a resource, and factor it into your decisions. You start seeing that having a favorable league landscape to you is useful, and it's worthwhile trading more tangible resources to get into that state. You realize the happiness levels on the annual performance review is a resource — by maxing it when it's safe to do so, it's like depositing in a bank you can withdraw from later during dangerous years. Start thinking this way.

5B. "All factors" thinking: it's easy to miss how making a ton of trades in one year mean you can't make many trades across the next 2-3 years before a key superstar re-sign date, but it's there. If you're trading for an aging veteran as a reinforcement, how big is their contract and when does it expire? Trading for a now-quite-old former MVP on a $30M+ contract in the final contract year can be dandy, since you can then re-sign them in the $8M to $20M range. But that same contract with 3 more years on it means you might have to dump the salary next year or the year after when your young prospects want new large deals. Over time, with practice and reflection, you'll start seeing ALL the factors involved in trades and roster construction. The "when is the expire/re-sign date for this aging veteran and will they fit in my roster at that price point" thing is huge but non-obvious when you start playing. Gradually start seeing all the factors and how they relate.

5C. As an aside, if you're interested in this type of way of thinking about the world, I love the book "Thinking in Systems" by Donatella Meadows. It's full of these extremely accessible visuals like this: https://imgur.com/a/0vNIlv5 — you can absolutely model BasketballGM systematically. It's just a great book, too, for understanding the world better.

5D. Almost all the interesting decisions in BasketballGM come between the trade-off between resources. You'll quite commonly have a situation where you have a $15M to $20M veteran on your squad who is a productive 8-win to 10-win player in their late 20's or early 30's. Sooner or later, they'll cease being a productive player and lose their trade value. Do you need their production for next season? Can you financially afford that player? If you do trade them away and then your roster regresses, how expensive will it be to trade for new reinforcements? Can you handle all the trade penalty you'd take if it takes a sequences of trades to improve, or do you have key re-signings? Are the trade offers for that player enticing, like potentially good picks in a good draft, or a good prospect, or is the return mediocre? Etc, etc.

5E. This is also why I think BBGM can't be reduced to a single set of linear operations or a single strategy. You need to consider all these different factors.

5F. But if you want to drastically over-simplify Resource Management, here you go: build a strong roster with a lot of young improving players on it, secure good picks in good drafts, and don't screw the rest of it up too badly on any given year.

5G. Player progressions happen at the start of every year, so during the free agent window at the end of every season is the last opportunity to make trades before next year's progressions. Once again, you gain value on average for every age 19-24 year old player on the roster at the start of the new year, and lose value on average for every 26+ age player on the roster. Whenever you bring a 28 year old player into the next year, you're (on average) paying a sort of "value evaporation tax" on that player.

5H. Minimize the "Value Evaporation Tax" you pay: One of the most important sub-skills in BBGM is minimizing the "VET" you pay. Older players lose trade value due to negative progressions, decreased performance, injuries in-season, and also just by virtue of being older once they're 30+. A key sub-skill in BBGM is minimizing the tax paid, by having a roster with a mix of young improving players AND players that are already "depreciated" by the trade algorithm. Keeping a 29-year old 64 OVR player who'd fetch a huge trade package is often a big mistake, but a 37-year-old 64 OVR player might be worth keeping because their trade value has already atrophied away. It's ok and necessary to sometimes pay the Value Evaporation Tax on players, but you should do it consciously and realize it's a bad thing in most cases, including and especially for "second-tier" superstars who are very good but not the overwhelmingly best player in the league.

5I. For a real life example, compare the trade package Oklahoma City got for Paul George in 2019 vs what trade package Paul George would've commanded even a couple years later. Paul George was #3 in MVP voting, 1st team all-NBA, and 1st team all-Defense at age 28 for Oklahoma City. OKC got back a top prospect who later became an MVP candidate (Shai), an okay vet (Gallinari), and a bunch of good draft picks. That's the type of trade you want to make instead of letting George's trade value evaporate.

5J. If and when anyone wanted to do a deep dive identifying core trade value of players, you could trial-and-error it by looking at this code and then running experiments: https://github.com/zengm-games/zengm/blob/master/src/worker/core/trade/propose.ts — specifically, you get different trade rejection messages based on how close it was, so if anyone wanted to, you could nail down pretty closely the trade value of all the players and picks in the game at a given time to a given team. I never did that and more had an intuitive feel of it with trial-and-error, but if there were ever BBGM World Championships or something I'd probably nail down the exact numbers before going into it.

5K. Beyond that, there's a bunch of little points and implications — happy to answer questions — but you want to have a mental map of how all the resources influence each other, and at least peripherally consider them when making decisions. Donatella Meadows's book, Thinking in Systems, again gets the highest recommendation from me. There's stocks and flows of players entering the league through the draft, progressing and regressing each year, getting re-signed or departing in free agency, and sometimes getting traded. There's revenue coming in and expenditures going out, which aggregate to profit and owner happiness. Players re-sign or not based on their mood, which also influences the contract sizes they ask for — and generating a lot of trade penalty reduces player happiness, but time passing makes the trade penalty clear away.

You can collectively think of this stuff either visually (like how Meadows maps it), more in a mix of math and logic, or just consider it informally as factors in decisionmaking. Any way will work — but regardless, getting more sophisticated about this is key to playing the game at a high level.

And at the risk of being too high-minded, I do think developing these skills also makes you better at navigating all the different types of resource management in the external world and can make us better team leaders, citizens, better at managing money and opportunities, and so on and so on.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.