League Start Up

[JimC]

Anyone know the latest word on when or if the league is getting started? Any answer will be appreciated.

[TheMagic12]

I haven't heard anything, but when it does start up, I would like to manage the Orlando Magic.

[Goodell]

Anyone know the latest word on when or if the league is getting started? Any answer will be appreciated.

I still have to write a game simulation script to generate games, and would like to have it ready to go for this season but we'd have to see. It might be something fairly simple to start and getting more complicated over the years like the football one where it was tweaked over time to try for better simulated return results.

If anyone wants to help, doing some research into NBA salary cap rules would be helpful to gather that all up. I have some and some general knowledge of cap impacts on trades, but if people want to gather some NBA cap rules or links to how things are in reality we can talk about incorporating those or which might need bended a little for use here (although keeping it real is a focus generally). I gathered salary data on players before the off-season for player database purposes.

Kicking football off again is a higher priority because already have working leagues and structure now to expand, but I'd like to turn attention to basketball once football going but just takes time to write a simulation script to integrate with the site and work out cap rules, etc.

[JimC]

I'll try to look some stuff up if it will help get the league going faster and if you have any control in it I would love to oversee the Oklahoma City Thunder. Thanks for the clarification.

[Michael D.]

I found a little help for you Troy, but the NBA salary cap is an extremely difficult concept and we'll probably have to edit some rules.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_Salary_Cap

[Goodell]

Thanks. Yeah, that was a difficulty when I thought about doing a quick start up before last season but was a bit complicated.

We'll have to come up with something that meets the spirt of NBA operations and is familiar to those who really follow basketball transactions (and why some trades happen and others can't), if not all the detailed soft cap rules.

[Michael D.]

Yeah, I'm not really sure if you can incorporate all of those soft cap exceptions. The trading rules though seem like something that can be incorporated in to the league.

[Michael D.]

Like I don't like the idea of having a Larry Bird Exception in the league. I think it can upset any balance in the league.

Ex: next offseason, I'm the Knicks and I have 13mil to spend on LeBron James. I don't think it'll really be fair if the Cavs can go all the up to the maximum salary (17mil this year I believe). In real life LeBron might choose to go to the Knicks to be playing in a larger market, but in a league like this where the players aren't truly real (although we can all make believe) there is no incentive to leave Cleveland.

[Goodell]

One good thing IMO is that there are player ratings similarly to what we have used for football from the basketball version:
http://www.pastapadre.com/3936/nba-live ... er-ratings

With NBA Live 10 coming out soon should have up-to-date player rankings. As I'd like to incorporate defense also, we'd probably want to use both an overall grade (converted to our scale) and a defensive grade for each player. Like football there are a lot of different skills graded, but that'll give us the overall relative value of a player (based upon objective opinion) and some defensive worth to go along with whatever offensive stats put up. There are defensive stats too in the game that we could pull in and use, but sometimes can be over-rated compared to judged defensive value shutting someone down 1-on-1 or playing team defensive scheme.

One thing I struggled with getting either a Basketball or Baseball league up quickly are the daily games. I'd like to incorporate that real schedule and have games to check on daily if GMs wanted (but busy guys could also just check in weekly and look at several games at once), but difficult to generate our simulations (for football based upon weekly stats gathering) without bringing in a daily statistical feed or involving too much daily labor. But I was on the track of either some affordable services or scripts that could gather that info needed to plug into the simulator.

I would think we would treat league finances kind of like the baseball sim leagues many here have been in that have both a hard cap you can't go over as well as a softer one that puts you into debt and hurts future finances, restructured around NBA realities of cap exemptions and being able to offer your own stars the max contracts, etc. It's just figuring out all the details of it and scripting the league management tools accordingly, as well as what modifications don't get too far from reality and beneficial for league enjoyment.

[ChrisK]

If you need any help figuring out rules in this league i will gladly help. When this league starts i would like to be the cavs. I am a huge LeBron James fan and i actually want him to go to new york or new jersey if they ever move to brooklyn, but i believe that if the cavs win a championship and they continue to put talent around him, he will not want to leave cleveland