About HoopDreams

What HoopDreams is

HoopDreams is a text-based basketball career simulator. You take one player from age sixteen through college or the draft, a professional prime, decline, and finally retirement or a career-ending injury. Everything is resolved from that player's attributes, the team around them, the wear on their body and the decisions you make in front of the simulation.

It is a single-player game with social edges: a global Hall of Fame table, seeded duels where a friend plays the exact same career conditions, and a live chat room. There is no download and no console required — it runs in the browser and installs to a phone home screen as a progressive web app.

Who builds it

HoopDreams is made by a small independent team of two, working on it outside of day jobs because we could not find a basketball equivalent of the football career sims we grew up playing. Everything on the site — the simulation model, the writing in the events, the artwork, the fifteen supported languages — is produced by us. We do not syndicate, scrape or republish content from anywhere else.

Balance changes come from watching real careers played on the site: how often rings land, how fast attributes cap out, how many runs end in a knee at twenty-seven. When something feels wrong, we change the numbers and say so.

How the simulation works

Nine attributes — shooting, handles, passing, court IQ, athleticism, defense, rebounding, durability and hype — feed a per-season model that produces a full box score line rather than a single scoring average. Your team is simulated alongside you inside a thirty-team league with real standings, so postseason access depends on where the franchise finishes.

Awards fall out of that line relative to the rest of the league. Money is a resource, not a score: contracts fund training, recovery, coaching and facilities, each of which raises either an attribute or the ceiling that attribute can ever reach. Body mileage accumulates permanently, and it is mileage — not luck alone — that drives serious injuries.

Randomness is seeded, which is what makes duels possible: two players given the same seed face an identical league, identical draft board and identical clutch situations, so the difference in outcome is entirely down to decisions.

Fictional league, on purpose

Every franchise, player and award in HoopDreams is invented. We use thirty fictional teams in real cities so the structure feels familiar without borrowing anyone's trademarks. Nothing here is affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the NBA, any professional league, any team or any athlete.

How it is funded

Career mode is free and always will be. The site is supported by advertising and by two optional one-time purchases: Ad-Free, and Career Unlimited which unlocks the 82-game Full Season mode and removes the daily career limit. There is no subscription, no loot box and no way to buy a better player.

How our guides are written

Every guide and strategy article is written from the rules running in the current game. We test the advice against live careers, then revise an article when a balance change makes an explanation or recommendation outdated. The byline “HoopDreams team” means the same two-person team that builds and balances the simulation.

Our articles are original. We do not buy posts, scrape other sites, or publish summaries created only to target a search phrase. Strategy claims link back to the relevant mode or guide so players can test them for themselves.