Questions, answered properly

Yes. Backcourt is free to download on both the App Store and Google Play, and a full career — every season, the playoffs, the transfer market and the Online League — can be played without spending anything. There is no energy meter gating how many matches you play and no paid item that makes your squad stronger.

It is a basketball management simulation. You are the general manager and the head coach of a club: you sign and sell players, decide who starts, share out the minutes, give every player a role, and then watch the match play out possession by possession. You never control a player directly with a stick or a button — you win by making better decisions than the manager in the other dugout.

Four places, and your progress is the same game on all of them:

• iPhone and iPad — iOS/iPadOS 14 or later, from the App Store.
• Mac — any Apple silicon Mac on macOS 11 or later, from the Mac App Store. The Mac build is not a stretched phone app: it has its own layout that uses the extra width, so the squad list, the court and the commentary feed can sit on screen together.
• Android phones and tablets — Android 8.0 or later, from Google Play.
• Huawei devices — from AppGallery.

The phone build is portrait-first, so it works comfortably one-handed. The game is playable in English, Turkish, German and Spanish.

Yes, and it is a genuinely different layout rather than a blown-up phone screen. On a Mac the extra width is used to put the roster, the live court and the play-by-play feed side by side, so you can watch a game and adjust minutes without switching screens. It is a universal purchase — download it from the Mac App Store on any Apple silicon Mac running macOS 11 or later.

Career mode runs entirely on your device and works offline — on a plane, on the underground, anywhere. The Online League needs a connection, because you are being matched against other managers and the results have to be settled on the server.

That is your call. At 1× a game plays out in a few minutes with a full commentary feed. At 8× it takes well under a minute. If you only want the outcome, skip to result settles it instantly and drops you straight into the box score and the post-game ratings.

No. Plenty of managers watch the games that matter — a rival, a playoff, a night where the rotation is an experiment — and skip the rest. Nothing in the game punishes you for skipping; the same engine decides the result either way.

Every match is 48 minutes across five positions, which gives you 240 player-minutes a night to distribute across a roster of up to fifteen. You can set every player's minutes by hand, or tap auto lineup to get a sensible first pass and then adjust. Minutes drain energy, and tired legs measurably miss more shots late in games.

A role tells the engine what a player is being asked to do, and his performance is judged against that brief. A rim protector is measured on interior defence and rebounding; a floor general on creation and turnovers; a glue guy on the quiet work that does not show up as points. Giving a player a role that fits his attributes raises his output; forcing a bad fit lowers it and hurts morale over time.

Energy is a 0–100 value per player that falls with minutes played and recovers between fixtures. Below roughly 70 you start to see it in the fourth quarter — shooting percentages slip and defensive rotations arrive late. Below 50 the drop-off is steep and injury risk climbs. The fix is boring and effective: rotate ten players instead of eight, and cut a star's minutes in a game you are already winning.

An injured player carries a countdown in days on his card. He cannot be selected until it clears. There is no way to pay to heal him — you cover the gap from your own roster, which is exactly why the depth you built in pre-season matters. Heavy minutes and low energy both raise the chance of a knock.

You get seven a night. A timeout interrupts the opponent's rhythm and gives a small, temporary lift to your side. They are most valuable when the other team is on a run — spend them to stop a 10–0 stretch, not out of habit at the start of a quarter.

Because Backcourt grades against expectation. A 24-point night from a 97-rated star playing 38 minutes is what the club is paying for — it is a 6.5, not a 9. The same line from a 78-rated bench player in 18 minutes is outstanding. The mark answers "how did he do relative to what he should have done", which is how a coaching staff actually talks about a performance.

Yes, and it is one of the few systems that can quietly wreck a season. Praise after a win lifts morale and form; the same praise after a loss rings hollow. Calm review is a small, safe gain in either direction. Blast them can wake up a bad night, but used after a good performance it costs you morale and form. Say nothing is a real option on an ordinary night.

Every player has a value — what the engine thinks he is worth — and an asking price, which is what his club currently wants. The gap between the two is the negotiation. You can make a straight cash bid or offer a player-plus-cash trade. Filters let you narrow by position, minimum rating, and whether the deal fits your budget.

Because clubs do not want to sell. Asking price scales with age, contract length and how central the player is to his club — a 23-year-old with high potential on a long deal will be priced far above his value, and a 31-year-old in the last year of a contract will not. A large gap is the engine telling you this player is not really available yet.

A negative balance is a warning, not an instant loss. You keep playing, but your ability to bid is gone and the wage bill keeps arriving every week. The way out is almost always the same: sell a high-wage player you are not giving heavy minutes to, rather than your best player.

Yes. Player-plus-cash trades are usually the better route when your treasury is thin. AI clubs weigh the incoming player's value, age and wage against what they are giving up, so a fair-looking swap of similar values will often be accepted where a low cash bid would not.

No. There is nothing to buy that raises a player's rating, unlocks a stronger squad, speeds up recovery or improves your odds in a match. Ranked 1v1 and the Online League are decided by squad building and rotation decisions, not by spending.

To be straight about how the game is paid for: advertising is our only income. A few optional rewarded ads exist — refreshing this week's training drills, or the golden option on a weekly decision card that lets you take both good outcomes at once. Ignore every one of them and you can still play a full twenty-one season career.

A season runs 38 league games across a 45-week calendar, with twenty clubs split into two conferences. The calendar is more than league fixtures: it carries the NBA Cup group stage, the Christmas showcase in week 14, the trade deadline in week 26, All-Star week and the draft lottery.

At the end, seeds 7 to 10 in each conference play the Play-In for the last two playoff tickets, then the top eight in each conference contest the bracket.

Twenty-one seasons, from 2026 to 2046. A career ledger tracks your record, trophies and prestige across all of them, so your fourth season is played against the memory of the first three.

An in-season knockout competition running alongside the league. Twenty clubs are drawn into five groups of four, three group weeks are played, and the survivors go to a quarter-final, semi-final and final. The winner takes $6M and the finalist $2M — real money against your wage bill.

The conference leader captains the All-Stars, snake-drafting a twelve-man squad from the whole league before the game is played out live. If you are not a captain you still watch the night — your own stars, the three-point contest, the score and the MVP. Go three seasons without an invitation and the third season makes you a captain regardless. There is a badge and an achievement for it.

Yes, with the full apparatus: picks, a lottery drawn ball by ball on draft-lottery night with the odds and pick changes shown, a prospect board, and draft night itself. Picks are also tradeable assets on the trade desk, so a rebuild can be financed by selling the future or accelerated by buying it.

A fixture-based competition against other real managers. Matches run on a schedule with a countdown on your careers screen, every result moves a persistent global rating, and placement tiers pay out at the end of each online season. Because the fixtures are fixed, you cannot reschedule around an injury — squad depth matters more online than it does in career mode.

Three. Each save is completely separate — its own club, roster, treasury, season and standing — and you switch between them from the careers screen. Many managers keep one serious long-term club and use another to experiment.

It rewards consistency. Beating a much stronger club gives you a larger gain than beating a weaker one, and losing to a weaker club costs more than losing to a stronger one, but the size of any single swing is capped. Over a season, a manager who wins the games he should win will out-rate one who alternates upsets and collapses.

Career saves live on the device. If you sign in with the same account, your Online League profile, rating and placement history follow you — but a local career started on an old phone does not automatically appear on the new one. Sign in before you start a career you intend to keep.

Backcourt is an independent simulation and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by any professional league, club or players' association. Clubs, competitions and branding in the game are fictional.

Write to [email protected] with your device, your app version — it is at the bottom of the More tab — and what happened. Bug reports that name the exact screen and the week of the season get fixed fastest. Feature requests genuinely do end up on the roadmap; several items in the update notes started as player emails.

Constantly. Seven releases shipped between 28 August and 9 September 2026 alone, bringing the ranked 1v1 ladder, achievements and leaderboards, All-Star night, the full 45-week calendar and a rebuilt tactics screen. Every change is written out in full on the update notes page — never summarised as "bug fixes and improvements".