Online Basketball Manager
Full Feature List

Franchise career mode is the core of OBM. You pick an NBA team and run it through full 82-game seasons — making trades, signing free agents, setting lineups, and managing training programs to develop your roster over time. Every matchday your games simulate automatically if you're in an online league, or you can advance the season yourself in offline mode.

Online leagues put you up against other real managers competing for the same championship. Private leagues let you set up a closed competition with friends. Offline career mode is single-player: you control the pace and can play through seasons at your own speed without waiting on anyone else.

The basketball franchise mode tracks full standings, player stats, injuries, and a league news feed across every season. It is the closest thing to Football Manager for basketball that runs entirely in a browser.

Draft Battles is OBM's head-to-head PvP format. Two managers snake-draft from the full NBA player pool — you pick one player at a time, alternating, until each side has a 10-man roster. Then you play a best-of-7 series against each other using the same simulation engine that runs career seasons.

There is a 30-second pick timer to keep things moving. Between games you can adjust your lineup or swap players around. A vs-CPU mode is available if you want to run a draft without a live opponent — the CPU auto-selects the highest-rated available player on each pick.

Draft Battles is where the online basketball draft game aspect of OBM really shows up. The snake format means neither manager has an overwhelming advantage from pick position, and the best-of-7 structure gives you enough games to see whether roster construction actually matters.

The simulator lets you match up any two NBA teams — current or classic era — and run a game or 7-game series. You can reorder lineups, swap players in and out, and see full box scores after each game. No account is required to browse the simulator, though you need to sign up to actually run it.

Under the hood it is a possession-by-possession model that accounts for shot tendencies, assist rates, defensive attributes, pace, and player archetypes. Classic era teams have pace and defensive rules adjusted to their era rather than using modern settings.

The basketball simulator online is publicly accessible at playobm.com/simulator. It is the fastest way to get a feel for how the engine works before committing to a career season.

SimCast is the live play-by-play feed that runs alongside every simulated game. Rather than just showing you the final score, SimCast shows you each possession — dunks, three-pointers, blocks, steals, assists — as a scrolling event log with player avatars and generated audio commentary.

Audio is synthesised in the browser using the Web Audio API, so there are no audio files to load. Each event type has its own sound: a rising arpeggio for three-pointers, a bass boom for dunks, a whistle burst for fouls. A crowd ambience track runs underneath and swells on big plays.

SimCast events are attached to every game result in career mode and the standalone simulator. You can watch a match live or scroll back through the full game log after it finishes. The feature is available on any device that supports the Web Audio API.