Grizzled GM Basketball is a single-player basketball management simulation game. Set your roster, make trades, draft prospects, manage your finances, and try to build a dynasty. Play it in your browser now, completely 100% free!
May 22, 2020 - New Feature
Real players before the 1940 (and back to the 1890s) now have pictures and colleges.
May 21, 2020 - New Feature
I have extended the real player draft classes back to 1895. Now when you play those pre NBA leagues the teams will have real players and the drafts will include real players.
May 20, 2020 - New Feature
It was only 7 years prior to the creation of the National Basketball League (NBL) that basketball itself was created. So to be thorough I added a league type in 1891 that is only two teams and represents the start of it all.
The team names are the Gulick Skins and the Naismith Shirts. That is because while James Naismith did invent the sport it was actually his job to do so because Dr. Luther Gulick, head of physical education at the Springfield YMCA (now called Springfield College), thought he could use an "athletic distraction" for Naismith's rowdy students during the harsh New England winter.
May 19, 2020 - New Feature
Grizzled GM Basketball has now added the National Basketball League (NBL) which was started in 1898. It was the first professional basketball league ever created. In honor of those initial teams I've kept them all even though two of them only played 5 and 7 games respectively that first season (the most any team played was 21) before leaving the league. In fact, the league itself was only around for 6 years and had 23 different teams, but only had between 5 and 8 at one time.
So now you can start in 1899 and watch the NBL convert to the ABL and then eventually to the NBA.
May 18, 2020 - New Feature
Grizzled GM Basketball has now added the American Basketball League (ABL) which was started in 1925. Aside from two years during the peak of the Great Depression in 1931-33, it operated until 1953. Ultimately the NBA did surpass it, but in Grizzled GM Basketball it just becomes the NBA for now.
Scheduling and who was even in the ABL was constantly in flux. I've given it a 35 game schedule which eventually expands to 72 and then 82 as it becomes the NBA.
Teams in the ABL were also constantly coming and going from the league (even mid season). A lot of teams back then were like the Harlem Globetrotters. They just played whoever they wanted. Many also did not survive very long. What I did was take 8 of the top teams through the league's history to use. The teams are:
May 17, 2020 - New Feature
I added two more significant years to the League Types dropdown. I added 1950 because it captures the start of the peak years of George Mikan. I added 1947 because it is where our real player draft classes start.
Here is some background on George Mikan for those who aren't that familiar with him:
May 16, 2020 - New Feature
Extended the real player database improvements from the 1980s to 2020.
May 15, 2020 - New Feature
Across all years there were weaker player that could get excluded from teams. I've rectified this along with doing some other database improvements.
May 14, 2020 - New Feature
I continued to do work on the real player database by including missing players and fixing other issues, such as bad names. This time it was more focused on the 1960s and 1970s.
May 13, 2020 - New Feature
Some people have mentioned missing players. So I have gone back and filled in the gaps in some of our data. For this update there were gaps filled in the 1940s and 1950s. Real players now start to show up in draft classes as far back as 1945. So if you create a 1945 league real players will start showing up in that 1945 draft class.