Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2026

I genuinely love this game, anything and everything that this developer puts out is a must play masterpiece. I’ve played college basketball too and I have to say that this is one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. The updated UI is immaculate, the new ai trade logic is amazing, the different AIcoaches/gms all take different approaches to rebuilding teams, the attention to detail and immersion in this game are what seals the deal for me and I think you should too. 10/10

Nice game that has historical teams and stats with it. If you're looking for a historical replay game this is a good way to scratch that itch.

I keep coming back to these games every couple of years because there's so much potential here and there's not really anything else on the market in terms of good basketball management simulation. While DDS:PB has come a long way in many areas, it remains an unpolished mess in many others, and it increasingly gives me the impression that Wolverine Studios isn't putting a lot of effort into improving the game over time. It is with great reluctance that I do not recommend this year's edition, because I desperately want this game - and its future iterations - to be good, but the problems are just too glaring. My single biggest issue with DDS:PB is that the in-game simulation of basketball is not particularly representative of the sport it is trying to model. I can accept the herky-jerky, 2D style. Heck, I still play Football Manager in 2D mode because I really don't care about or for the animations and feel that I get a better representation of the actual soccer in the more abstracted, top-down view that series offers. DDS:PB, however, lacks animation entirely. The in-game representation of basketball is just a series of stills: the ball is here, then it's there. Players move from spot to spot, but they're really just jumping from one fixed possible floor location to another. And they're always attached to each other. While it may be modeled "under the hood", there are no double teams, or pick-and-rolls, or traps, or close-outs visible in the in-game engine. If a team is playing man-to-man defense, then defenders will simply move with the offensive player they are guarding ad infinitum. Help defense is mentioned in the play-by-play log from time-to-time, but you would never be able to tell from the animation. What's doubly puzzling about this in-game stop-motion show you're watching is how time passes seemingly at random from one event to the next. In the most recent game I watched, I saw a series of three passes, each with a full step (complete with players changing location on the floor) in the step-by-step animation, that cumulatively took 1 second off the shot clock. At other times one step in the animation will take 4 or 5 seconds off the clock. All of this would be, perhaps, acceptable given that the overall results the game outputs are very basketball-like. One reviewer points out that even the advanced metrics, at a season level, track well with actual NBA stats. That's great! The problem is, there are glaring issues with both the implementation of basic basketball rules and awful strategic and tactical decision making by in-game coach AI at the game-by-game simulation level. For example: - The shot clock will reset even on a blocked shot if the offense 'rebounds' the ball. I have, in fact, never seen an actual shot-clock violation (or backcourt violation) across the many years I've bought DDS:PB and DDS:CB. - There are times when the clock should be set to 14 seconds, per current NBA rules, when it instead gets set to 24. - There are no jump balls aside from the start of the game. - There are no loose balls mentioned in the play-by-play logs, or represented in the animation. Again, these may exist "under-the-hood," but you can't tell from watching or following the game log. - Teams frequently make substitutions after a made second free throw (when they should not be able to). - Fast breaks only ever occur after a steal. Never after a missed basket, much less a made one. And because of how these are represented it always looks like the entirety of both teams has run down the floor and gotten into position, so it's hard to know whether there was a truly free basket or if the fast break was contested. - Quarters start with the ball being inbounded from the sideline instead of the baseline, for some reason. End of quarter and end of game tactical logic is especially broken. Teams almost never hold for the last shot in a quarter, instead frequently taking shots with 6 or more seconds left. But this is OK, because tea…