Basketball explained
What does a basketball general manager actually do?
A general manager never calls a play. Everything he decides happens before the ball goes up: who is on the roster, what they cost, and who coaches them.
The title sounds like an office job attached to a basketball team, and in one sense it is. But the decisions are the ones that actually determine whether a club is good: not which play to run with 14 seconds left, but who is on the floor to run it, what they are paid, and who is drawing it up.
The job, as the job is actually defined
A general manager handles player transactions, negotiates contracts, decides who the club takes in the draft, and holds the power to hire and dismiss the head coach. Around those four things sits a less visible half of the role: maintaining relationships with other executives, with players and with the agencies that represent them, and being the person who publicly explains a trade nobody liked.
He does not do it alone. Scouting and analytics staff report into the front office, and on many clubs the GM himself reports upward.
Who outranks whom
There is no single league-wide structure, which is why the titles confuse people.
| Role | Typically decides |
|---|---|
| Governor / ownership | How much money exists, and whether to spend into the tax |
| President of basketball operations | Direction: contend now, or rebuild |
| General manager | Roster moves, contracts, the draft, the coaching hire |
| Head coach | Rotations, tactics, everything inside 48 minutes |
Where both a president and a GM exist, the GM reports upward on basketball matters — the Celtics ran exactly that structure with Jan Volk as general manager under Red Auerbach. Elsewhere the GM effectively answers only to the owner. Either way the money question ends at ownership.
What is not the GM's job
Everything that happens after tip-off. Substitutions, defensive coverages, who takes the last shot: all of that belongs to the coach, and the clearest illustration of what happens when the boundary blurs is Chicago in the 1990s, where Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson spent championship seasons in open disagreement about who was building what.
The exception proves the rule. Don Nelson became head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks in 1976 while continuing as general manager, and doing both is now vanishingly rare in the NBA — while being completely normal in a management game.
The rules that make it hard
A GM is not shopping. He is solving a constrained optimisation problem, and the constraints are unusually specific:
- The salary cap. $154.647 million for the 2025-26 season, rising with league revenue.
- Two aprons above the tax. Cross the first and you lose flexibility; cross the second and the penalties stack up — no mid-level exception, no buyout-market signings, no sending cash in trades, no taking back more salary than you send out, and restrictions on trading draft picks.
- Maximum contracts. Capped at 25%, 30% or 35% of the cap depending on a player's years of service, so the best players in the league are, by rule, underpaid relative to their value.
- Rookie scale deals. First-round picks sign a fixed two-year contract with team options for years three and four — the cheapest asset class in basketball, which is why picks are treated as currency.
- Roster limits. Fifteen standard contracts, plus three two-way deals since the 2023 agreement.
- The Stepien rule. A team cannot trade away first-round picks in consecutive future years. It exists because Ted Stepien traded five straight Cleveland first-rounders covering 1982 to 1986, and the league decided nobody should be allowed to do that again.
Why that last one matters. Every "mortgage the future" trade in basketball has a hard floor built into the rulebook. You can sell your future, but only every other year — which is the single most elegant piece of self-defence in American sport, and the reason a badly run club recovers within a decade instead of never.
What a manager game gives you instead
Management games collapse the org chart. In Backcourt you are the general manager and the head coach, which means the whole ladder above resolves into one seat:
- You choose the budget, which sets both your wage cap and the difficulty — see building your first squad.
- You sign, renew and sell, under a cap and a weekly wage bill that will bankrupt you if you ignore it.
- You draft and develop, which in a game is a mechanism you can actually inspect: training, drills and the off-season.
- And then you do the coach's half too — roles, tactics and all 240 minutes a night.
That last point is the real difference between a front-office sim and a management game. A GM in the NBA hands the roster to somebody else and watches. In Backcourt you have to live with what you built, possession by possession, which is a far less comfortable way to find out whether the roster was any good.
Sources for the real-world details above: the general manager role, the NBA salary cap and apron rules, and Ted Stepien, after whom the pick-trading rule is named.
Frequently asked
What does a general manager do in basketball?
He builds and pays for the roster. In practice that means trades and signings, contract negotiations, draft decisions, running the scouting and analytics staff, and hiring or dismissing the head coach. He answers to the team's ownership, and on many teams to a president of basketball operations above him.
Is the general manager the coach's boss?
Usually yes on paper — the GM typically has the power to hire and fire the head coach — but the coach owns everything that happens during a game. The friction between Chicago's Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson in the 1990s is the textbook example of what happens when that line gets blurred.
What is the difference between a GM and a president of basketball operations?
Where both exist, the president sets direction and the GM executes it, reporting upward on basketball matters. The Celtics ran that structure with Jan Volk as GM under Red Auerbach. At other clubs the GM effectively reports only to the owner.
What rules limit what a GM can do?
The salary cap, which was $154.647 million for 2025-26; two spending aprons that progressively remove tools like the mid-level exception and the ability to take back more salary than you send out; maximum contracts capped at 25 to 35 percent of the cap by years of service; a 15-man roster plus three two-way contracts; and the Stepien rule, which forbids trading first-round picks in consecutive years.
Can one person be both general manager and head coach?
It has happened — Don Nelson took the Milwaukee Bucks job in 1976 while also serving as general manager — but it is rare in the modern NBA. It is the standard arrangement in management games, including Backcourt, where you make both sets of decisions.
What does a general manager do in a basketball manager game?
Everything the real job covers — signings, wages, the draft, facilities — and usually the coaching too. In Backcourt you sign the squad under a wage cap, then set roles, tactics and all 240 minutes a night, which is two jobs in one seat.
Try it on your own club tonight
Backcourt is free on iOS and Android. Career mode works offline, and there is nothing to buy that makes your squad stronger.
