Coaching Staff

Every team carries a head coach, two assistant coaches and one scout. You'll find them on the Staff tab of My Team, with each coach's coaching style, personality, contract and grades in six teaching areas: inside scoring, shooting, ball-handling, perimeter defense, post defense and athleticism. Scouts are graded on reading current ability and reading potential.

Most head coaches in the league grade in the B range, and an A- or better is rare. Assistants usually sit between C+ and B+. Scouts' reads mostly run from B- to A-; as teachers they are modest.

The head coach is the one who shapes your team on the floor and in development. Assistants fill out the bench and count against your coaching budget. Every team must have the full staff before the draft opens.

Each coach has one of eight coaching styles:

• Offensive Guru: an offensive system builder; boosts shooting and ball-handling development.
• Defensive Mastermind: builds elite defenses; speeds up perimeter and post defense growth.
• Player Developer: gets the most out of young talent; best for prospect-heavy rosters.
• Player's Coach: earns trust and effort; strong across the board, elite nowhere.
• Tactician: maximizes game-plan execution and can teach any system.
• Old School: a veteran presence; strong with experienced rosters, slower with youth.
• Analytics Wizard: data-driven; best at shooting efficiency and spacing.
• Grinder: demands maximum effort; strong athletic development.

And one of eight personalities: Demanding, Laid-back, Intense, Calm, Motivator, Detail-oriented, Relationship-builder or Disciplinarian. Personality sets how a coach talks to you and how the locker room takes them.

• Schemes: defenses run from simple to demanding: man, then zone, help and trap. The better your head coach's defensive teaching, the more of them run cleanly; past their level a scheme gets shaky, then breaks down. Without a head coach, anything beyond man falls apart.
• Offensive system: Offensive Gurus and Analytics Wizards are built for an outside focus, Old School and Grinder coaches for an inside focus, and a Tactician fits any. A coach running the focus they were built for runs it a little better.
• Development: your head coach's teaching grades and style tilt how your players grow in each area.
• Chemistry: player-friendly styles and personalities (Player's Coach, Player Developer, Relationship-builder, Laid-back, Calm) help the locker room; hard-driving ones (Old School, Grinder, Demanding, Disciplinarian, Intense) can cause friction. Every coaching change is felt in chemistry.

Coaches change too: younger coaches tend to improve, older ones slowly decline, and eventually they retire.

You never see a player's true ratings; you see your scout's read. A better scout's read sits closer to the truth. Current scouting covers how good players are now; potential scouting covers how good they could become, which matters most for the draft. A scout can be strong at one and weak at the other.

Your scout reads your own players more closely than other teams' players and free agents, and every read sharpens as your scout keeps watching over the season. With no scout, you're working from the league's consensus board.

You hire from the pool of free-agent coaches. You can release a coach from the Staff tab.

• During the season (preseason through the playoffs), firing a coach means choosing a replacement at the same time.
• If you fire a head coach and have nobody lined up, the league names an interim at the league minimum so your team can keep playing.
• Coaches whose contracts run out return to free agency after the Finals; the oldest retire.

Staff salaries come out of a coaching budget ($15M per team by default; the commissioner can change it), separate from the salary cap. Coaches are paid by their grades: a head coach earns roughly $2M–$10M, an assistant $0.5M–$2.5M and a scout $0.5M–$1.5M, so a typical staff costs well under the budget and a star-studded one uses most of it. Minimum-salary coaches ($500K) can always be signed. You may go over budget, but the overage carries into next season as dead money. If your player payroll is over the luxury tax, you can only hire minimum-salary coaches, and firing a coach turns the rest of their deal into dead money on next season's coaching budget.

Staff free agency is its own offseason phase, run in up to three rounds that the commissioner opens, closes and resolves. You place sealed bids (salary and years) on the coaches and scouts you want. Each coach weighs the money against your roster, your recent winning, how many teams want them, any past ties to your team and personal fit. Teams that churn through coaches are less appealing. The first round is open to every available coach; the second focuses on mid-tier coaches and the third is open to anyone still unsigned.

Besides your coach and scout, the staff room has advisers who live only in chat:

• Trainer: energy, injuries and medicals.
• Capologist: money, contracts and trade rules.
• League office: the rules and your league's settings.
• PR: media, points and the side games.

They give advice from the same information you can see. They don't know other teams' private plans or any hidden numbers.