Background - Hoopplan is a simulation of NBA basketball. You are the coach of an NBA club, taking your team through a 80 game regular season, trying to reach and win the NBA Finals.

In Hoopplan we try to make the game work the same way as in real life, with realistic decisions to be made about team coaching and management. The choices you make are the same as you’d have to make in real life. Sometimes you’ll have to make tough decisions, whether to sign better players, or develop your stadium and income sources to improve your future finances.

In addition to the management decisions about signing and cutting players you’ve also got to shuffle your lineups from game to game. You’ve injuries to contend with, as well as players losing form. You have to decide which players to play, when to play them and who to bring in from the bench when you rest the starters. You also have to decide on tactics for every single game.

Hoopplan is a mixture of a management and a coaching game, featuring "game-day" coaching aspects as well as longer-term roster building aspects, including management of the salary cap. For those looking for a mixture of a coaching game and a roster-building game Hoopplan could be just the game you’re looking for.

How it works - Your objective is to win the NBA Finals against teams run by other players drawn from all over the country (and around the world). Each league contains twenty eight teams (we exclude one of the twenty-nine NBA teams so that each division has the same number of teams in it), divided into two conferences, each of which has two divisions with seven teams in each. During each turn you play five games against teams within your league.

You have to make a mixture of decisions: both "playing" decisions and "management" decisions are both are equally important to a basketball coach.

Each team has as an "active" roster (the players available for selection every game) of exactly twelve players, plus a number of players in reserve, playing in minor basketball leagues, who can be promoted to the active roster when required. Your roster will comprise a mixture of centers, forwards and guards.

Hoopplan is as much about financial management as coaching, mirroring the real life salary cap - you can’t build a "superteam" because you’ve only got limited finances, so the key to success is getting the best value for money out of your roster.

Each turn you have to decide on your depth chart. Your starters cannot play a full game so you have to decide who to bring in from the bench when you need to replace them, and how much to play your starters (if you overplay them they get tired, and become less effective).

You also determine when each player will take the opportunity to attempt a shot. In Basketball most players make 50% of their attempts - the better shooters attempt more shots because they take on the most difficult chances, so a good shooter isn't measured by the percentage of shots he makes, but the number of shots is able to make and still maintain around a 50% success rate.

Your team needs to have a balance of skills. There’s no point in building a team full of superstar shooters. You need to be able to create decent chances for your shooters, play defence, win the ball and so on. Nor can you run your stars into the ground by overplaying them. You have find a balance between winning and leaving your players fresh enough to be successful during the playoffs, so depth amongst your roster is critical, ensuring you've got quality reserves who can come in every game and allow your stars to rest and save their energy without losing the games.

Rosters and the salary cap - In addition to these "game-day" decisions you’ve also got to make roster decisions and financial decisions. You can sign free-agents, or make trades with other coaches. Whilst on the free agent list players’ values (and their wages) drop, so you’ll commonly find you’ll need to leave some of your over-priced veterans on the free-agent list and then resign them when their demands have dropped to more realistic levels. Other teams may sign them in the meantime but if you lose a player to another team you do get compensation.

All of these financial decisions are made within the restrictions of the salary cap, which ensures that a team cannot have a wage bill too high, or restricts who they can sign if their wage bill goes over the salary cap.

 

 

 

With each turn you’ve got decisions to make about signing, trading or waiving players. You can offer your own players for trade, make bids for unsigned players or approach underpaid players from other teams. In all cases you decide how much to bid for a player. If another team decide he's worth more, then they can increase your bid the following turn (though they have to bid at least 50% more than you), otherwise you sign the player.

Playoffs and the Draft - At the end of the regular season the top eight teams in each conference (in fact the two divisional winners plus the six next best teams, known as "wild cards") move forward into the playoffs. These are played over four rounds, the first round best-of-five games and the remaining rounds best-of-seven games, to determine the NBA Finals winners. Teams that fail to make the playoffs, or are eliminated during the playoffs play in a Consolation competition or play pre-season games, readying themselves for the following season.

During the playoffs each team participates in the college draft, signing new talent to their rosters. These are usually "promising" players packed with potential who’ll need a season or two to mature. At the end of each season each player is also assessed for gaining or losing abilities. This is dependent upon a player’s "potential" - a player loses one point of potential each season. A player with lots of potential is likely to gain skills quickly, particularly if his form during the season was good. A player with no potential will start to lose skills. Either way, players’ wage demands increase as they get older so you’ll need to decide whether a player is continuing to provide value for money.

Game reports - Each turn you’ll receive up to a dozen pages of laser-printed reports: a full roster listing with current form, injury details, lineups and so on, plus detailed stats for all of your players. You’ll also receive game reports and full box-scores for all games you played, and outline reports on all games played in your league that turn, as well as details of free agent signings, trades, injuries and all the other news you’ll need from around the league.

There are also many optional stats listings which you can choose to receive, though the extra listings won’t give you an advantage over other coaches (though they may well increase your enjoyment of the game). Many of these stats listings are regularly issued as part of the standard reports.

Hoopplan also has a "quick" version, Hoopplan Coach. The original version is Hoopplan Advanced, and includes all of the features detailed above. Hoopplan Coach is a streamlined version of the game, which is easier to play (with lower turnfees) but has less detail and you don’t have as much control. Some of the more complicated parts of the game (such as the salary cap) are avoided. When you send in your application you can ask for both rulebooks, and look through them before deciding which version will suit you best.

Games and Turnfees - There are a dozen games of Hoopplan already running in the UK, the oldest in their fifth seasons. All run with two week deadlines (so you've fourteen days between turns). We have positions available in most of these games that will allow you to start play immediately (as in real-life, you take over a team and try to turn their fortunes around).

Turnfees in Hoopplan Advanced are £3.25 for one, £13.00 for four, £28.00 for ten and £50.00 for twenty. Turnfees in Hoopplan Coach are £2.00 for one, £8.00 for four, £18.00 for ten and £32.00 for twenty. There are further discounts available if you play in more than one game. You can always switch from one version to another once you've started playing.

Email game reports are now a standard option if you wish to receive your reports via the Internet rather than relying on the post. We are currently developing our systems to also allow you to submit orders via email.

We welcome players from outside the UK, although there is a need to make special arrangements for sending and receiving orders.

Customers from within Europe are charged an extra 10% on all quoted price rates while customers from outside Europe are charged an extra 40% to cover the extra postage costs. These additions do not apply if you receive orders via email.

In addition customers from outside Europe may find air-mail speeds rather slow, and may need to make arrangements to send orders via fax. If you want more information please ask.

To join Hoopplan only costs £5.00 and covers the cost of your rulebooks, team setup and first two turns.

To keep things simple, please email us if you have an interest in Hoopplan or any of the other featured games. We will then email you back with the joining details. This allows us to continue to financially support the relevant UK sports federations. Thank you.

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