The coach decides who plays tonight. The general manager decides who is on the team at all — and lives with that decision for years. Here is the job as it is actually done, month by month, and a free way to try it yourself.
The core task. A pro roster is about fifteen players, and the GM decides every one of them: who to draft, who to sign, who to trade, who to release. The hard part is not finding good players — it is fitting good players together. Five scorers who cannot defend lose to a balanced team, and a lineup with no outside shooting gives the defence permission to collapse in the paint.
Every league has a salary cap, and it is the single biggest constraint on the job. You cannot simply buy the best players; you can only spend what the rules allow, and every contract you sign narrows what you can do next summer. A GM thinks two or three years ahead of the current payroll, because the money committed in year three decides whether you can keep your own young star.
The salary cap, explained by playing with it →
Trades are the most visible part of the job and the most misunderstood. Rival GMs are not vending machines: they value their own players slightly higher than you do, they have their own timeline, and they will not hand you a star for a bag of role players just because the salaries match. Most of the work is listening to bad offers, refusing them politely, and waiting for the one team whose timeline has just changed.
Once a year the GM gets to add talent for free — and has to decide between the safe rotation player and the teenager who might be a star or might be nothing. Draft night is also a trading floor: picks move, teams jump the queue, and a pick three years from now is a real currency you can spend today.
For a few weeks each summer, players choose. The GM's leverage is money, role, the chance to win, and whatever goodwill the franchise has earned. This is where a well-run team gets rewarded — and where a desperate one signs the contract it will spend three years trying to trade away.
The GM picks the person who decides the rotation, the system and the culture, then judges results that are only partly that person's fault. Firing a coach buys time with the owner; doing it twice usually means the GM was the problem.
The last item is the one that ends careers. The owner has expectations, a memory, and a limit, and those expectations are rarely a plan — they are a mood. Explaining that a rebuild takes three years to someone who wants to sell tickets this year is as much a part of the job as any trade.
Hoops GM is a free browser game built around exactly this list: a fictional thirty-team league where you run the roster, the cap, the trades, the draft, free agency, the staff and the owner relationship — and get fired if you handle them badly. No download, no account.
Free, no account needed, saves in your browser.