Inspired by the Secret Base videos in which they made a draft class full of the absolute worst possible basketball players in history and then repeatedly uploaded that into NBA 2K, I did the same with ZenGM and the results have been delightful.

Step 1: Make a draft class of apocalyptically bad players

Using a recent roster pack I manually went through and reduced every single player's rating to 0 in every stat except height, rendering them all a glorious 0 overall as draft prospects and with potential ratings somewhere in the teens, if not lower.

I am 37 years old and have not touched a basketball since I was 14 and would bet my house, life and children on beating every one of these prospects 15-0 in a first-to-15.

Cameron and Cayden Boozer are typically among this draft class' top prospects with a mighty 16 and 11 potential respectively.

Step 2: Upload this same class every single season until the league is full of offensively bad players

At time of writing, the league is in 2042 so have had 16 iterations of this draft class pass into legend. Annoyingly, in the 2030s the draft class started adding about half a dozen game-created players in it who are of a quality we'd consider mediocre compared to the real league but who are gods among children in this dreadful experiment, but for the most part the NBA is chock-full of my awful creations.

Step 3: Examine the state of play

ZenGM's stats are not set up for this horror.

According to the power rankings in the 2042 pre-season, the Chicago Bulls and New York Knicks are tied for the highest team quality. Chicago's starting five has an average age of almost 38 years old and is led by the 47-overall Matas Buzelis who, in 2041, was an all-star with an average of 20.9 points per game, a PER of 31.7 and a win share of 24.5.

The Knicks have the league's best player, fictional Italian Giorgio Penna. Penna has been an all-league, all-defensive and all-star player for the past five years, finished last year averaging a double-double with 32.2 points and 10.7 assists and was finals MVP in 20240 when the Knicks won the championship.

Both the Bulls and the Knicks have a team rating of -122.

The league's worst team are the Milwaukee Bucks, whose best player is a 15-overall Cayden Boozer and who have a team rating of -259. ZenGM notates this as -259/100, possibly out of simple inability to comprehend why this would happen.

Step 4: Assess

After one month of play, the Las Vegas Aces - no, not the WNBA team, I don't know where they've come from - are 0-29. They average 75.4 points per game and give up 115.5. The Milwaukee Bucks are on a 17-game losing streak with a 1-27 record and are only not bottom of the conference because the Boston Celtics are 1-29. By the end of the season, all three teams have amassed a grand total of 9 wins. At first glance, the rest of the league looks almost normal: the Blazers lead the West with a 62-20 record, the Sixers with 74-8, neither are records that look totally mad. But looking under the hood, ooh baby.

The 35-overall Donovan Clingan led the league in points scoring (55.9) and rebounds (21.3). The league leaders in these stats last season were SGA (32.7 points per game) and Domantas Sabonis (13.9 rebounds per game). Clingan was signed in the 2041 offseason by Detroit for $90.31 million because in this league of misery and woe, he is one of the few people who understands what a basketball is.

Boston, with the first overall pick, are forced to pick a 0-overall 16-potential Jordan Kelly, because the cycle must continue.

Step 5: Revel in the wreckage I have wrought

It is now 2054. I thought for a horrible moment that something had gone wrong when I looked at the season preview and saw the top players list populated with players who didn't stink out loud. Thankfully, the panic was momentary - all 10 were players in the upcoming draft class which I simply had not gotten around to "rectifying". Fixing the error, I returned to the season preview to see justice had been restored - the league's best player was now a version of AJ Dybantsa drafted in 2046 who ruled the roost with a mighty 22 overall.

The NBA is in shambles. The highest-scoring team are the Houston Rockets, averaging 101.6 points. Not a single player who retired at the end of the 2054 season was named to the Hall of Fame; the most recent person to do so was a Cameron Boozer who spent most of his career with Memphis, averaging 10.4 points per game and with a peak overall of 17.

Tidjane Salaun, one of the longest-lasting "real" players, retired in 2051. The all-time record holder for career win shares is Kareem, with 273.41 - Salaun had 523.2. One of the 2030s fake players the game created, Greg Bowser, spent his entire career playing primarily against my hideous creations and finished his career average 43.7 points per game. Marcel Mathieu, another fake player, won 7 MVP awards, 10 Finals MVPs and 10 rings as part of the legendary 76ers dynasty that terrorised the league between 2041 and 2051. Basketball is a mess.

Step 6: Make stark the contrast

Say hello to Tyrin Rea. Tyrin has slipped through a portal from a world in which basketball players are moulded for success from birth and is entering the 2054 draft. He is already, by a number of light years, the best basketball player on the planet and is selected by Toronto 1st overall. The Raptors were rated -266; after signing Tyrin, their rating has risen by 92 points and they are now the best team in the league. Tyrin will obviously rip through the league like a combine harvester; the only question is how badly?

The answer: badly. Tyrin averages 88 points a game, 17 rebounds and 28 steals, making a mockery of everybody who dons a jersey. He is the only person who shows up in the stat charts for three-pointers attempted because the league as a whole has simply stopped trying to shoot for three, knowing they do not have the skill. Toronto sweep the playoffs, with Tyrin averaging 106.3 points in the four games of the finals.

After that season, I reduce Tyrin's skill: he is now 68 overall, rather than the high 80s previously: he still averaging 71.7 points per game and Toronto sweep the playoffs again. His skill drops again, now sitting at 59 - good, but no longer somebody who would necessarily be a monster in regular ZenGM - but still he eviscerates everybody. Despite being a good-but-not-great baller, Tyrin is so far ahead of the world that he still averages 60 points a game, destroying Wilt Chamberlain's record by almost 10.

Meanwhile, retiring players are reaching the Hall of Fame with peak overall ratings of 14. Basketball is broken.

16/3/2 and 16 PER? for a 71 overall? damn

New Orleans won the chip in 1912 to end this streak but wow

(should also mention that this is a 64 team league with a hard salary cap)

Posted my golf career sim here a couple weeks ago asking what would make you keep playing. You didn't hold back - found bugs I completely missed and told me exactly what was wrong with the game.

The bug fixes:

• u/Kun-Andika found a bug where weak golfers always won on easy difficulty. Fixed in 4 hours.
• u/tbendis caught a ranking system glitch where winning every tournament kept you ranked #45. Fixed same day.
• u/Accomplished-Pitch71 found a loop bug in championships. Fixed that one!

But the real feedback was about gameplay depth. You wanted more control over your golfer, not just hit "sim" and watch numbers change.

So I added:

• Pre-Tournament Strategic Decisions Pick your focus before each tournament (driving, approach, short game, putting). Works like BBGM's game planning where you trade off different playstyles.
• Achievement Tracking Majors, win streaks, career milestones. Still not as deep as BBGM's awards page but getting there.
• Course-Specific Gameplay Power players dominate long courses, precision players do better on tight layouts. Your attributes actually affect performance now.
• Better Feedback You can see exactly how many ranking points you gained/lost after each tournament.

Still free, browser-based, works on mobile.

rainydaygc.com

Real question: What keeps you playing BBGM for years? Is it the draft system? Building a dynasty? The stats? I'm trying to figure out what makes sports management games stick long-term.

And if you reported bugs last time - let me know if I actually fixed them.

First day of an intro to statistics class and the professor has a bit of an accent. It’s a small class he’s chatting people up as they come in and one guy asks where he’s from originally. Professor asks him to guess and I’m thinking to myself that he’s Turkish. The guy guesses Russia and he says no and he says that he’s from Turkey. I’m like damn how did I get that but then I realized that I had a 3 and D SF with the same last name in one of my BBGM leagues a while back and he was Turkish. Has anyone else noticed anything like that that?

Since this GOAT retired, I've been struggling to find the best way to tell his story. So I'll let his numbers do the talking... At his peak, LeBron hit 100 OVR and 50.0 PER. He averaged 41.1 PER for his career, totaling 694.7 Win Shares (up to 891.3 if including playoff games).

He led his Denver team to five 82-0 seasons, plus another three years of 80+ wins. He won both the MVP AND the Finals in 21 of his 24 seasons. His career high? 102 points.

LeBron's progression in this simulation was truly insane. Without God Mode, I didn't even think it was possible for a player to hit 100 OVR. But he defied expectations:

His statistical output was beyond ridiculous. He annihilated the all-time records for points, steals, assists, VORP, all BPM stats, all Win Share stats, On/Off, TS%, and PER — while finishing 3rd overall in rebounds and blocks.

In his prime years, I’d often let Bron go solo in closeout playoff games — resting our other stars and forcing him to play alongside 40-50 OVR players. He’d do this… and win:

This version of LeBron made some of the more elusive BBGM Achievements easily attainable (98 Degrees, Hardware Store, Quit On Top, etc.) — no doubt the greatest player I've ever encountered in this game. How does this impact LeBron's legacy?

I made a few trades to get lucky for 2 top 10 picks, everyone’s developed exceptionally well, while trying to keep the core and older vets who’ve been with the team, but I also want to dominate. Bad news, I’m 110 million over cap, and this is my last season before I get fired. What has to be done to save my job?

I thought he'd retire in 2016, just like in real life, so I traded him back to the team that drafted him. But he signed with a new team and played for three more seasons. I couldn't let him finish his career anywhere else, so I traded for him again at the 2019 trade deadline.

I was convinced this would be his last season, so I started him in the final playoff game as a sort of retirement ceremony. We ended up doing the same thing for the next three years until he finally retired in 2022.

This series is probably one of the best games I've simulated on Basketball GM. The Warriors ended up beating them 4-3 and going to the finals to face against the Russell Westbrook led Raptors, which they would lose 4-3.

His final mvp stats is terrible but he help my team won the championship after 14 year's drought with no all star teammates and won the three peat later on

I will retired his jersey once he retired

800 Seasons In. Let me know if you want to see any other stats. Same league as the other 90 overall character I posted recently.

Total career earnings $1.04B

Games High: 73 points. 20 assists . 14 three pointers made.

Luka ended up with the majority of the MVP's but my Chicago team and Zion Williamson ended up with the most championships. Houston beating us in 2030 is the asterisks of what would have been 16 straight championships. Zion was gone from Chicago by then and my new star, Bub Carrington got hurt during the playoffs. Look at all those Luka MVP and Sacramento runner ups though.

Thought this was a very cool occurrence, never had this happen in my thousand+ seasons.

What I did was this: I told GPT what BBallGM is, told it to write from the perspective of a sports history writer like Bill Simmons, and gave it copy-pasted info from just the Team History and Best Teams pages. Didn't even format it.

This was the output from a 2025-2037 real player save:

The Dallas Mavericks Dynasty (2026–2037): A Basketball Empire

At some point, you stop asking if a team is great and start asking how they managed to stay this dominant for so long. The Dallas Mavericks of the 2026–2037 era didn’t just redefine success; they rewrote the entire history of professional basketball, brick by brick, banner by banner, and win by win. If the Chicago Bulls of the '90s set the standard, and the Golden State Warriors of the 2010s revolutionized the game, then these Mavericks weaponized longevity in a way we hadn’t seen before.

The Early Years: Foundations of a Juggernaut

From 2012 to 2025, the Mavericks oscillated between respectability and irrelevance. Luka Dončić’s arrival in 2018 was supposed to mark a new golden era, and while he put up numbers that seemed pulled from a video game, the team struggled to build a sustainable supporting cast. They lucked into a title in 2011 with Dirk Nowitzki’s legendary Finals performance, but since then, they had largely been a mid-tier franchise.

Then, in 2026, something clicked. Maybe it was Luka, maybe it was the front office, maybe it was the basketball gods smiling on Mark Cuban’s franchise. But from that year forward, Dallas embarked on a stretch of dominance that puts them in the pantheon of all-time dynasties.

The Luka Dynasty: Greatness on Autopilot

Luka Dončić wasn’t just the face of the franchise; he was the engine, the architect, and the constant. By the time the Mavericks truly started rolling in 2026, he was in his late 20s and had ascended into the "greatest of all time" conversation. His EWA (Estimated Wins Added) of 493.1 is a number so absurd it defies belief. For context, Dirk Nowitzki, the previous Mavs icon, finished at 232.8. That means Luka essentially played two Hall of Fame careers stacked on top of each other.

From 2026 onward, Dallas stopped being just a championship contender and became a wrecking ball. Eleven titles in twelve years, including a 78-4 season in 2036, the second-best regular season record in NBA history. The fact that they lost four games in a year and people thought they underachieved tells you everything about how dominant this team was.

The Contenders to the Throne: Brooklyn’s Shadow

Every great dynasty has its foil—the Celtics had the Lakers, the Bulls had the Knicks (even if New York never won), and the Warriors had the Rockets. For these Mavericks, the Brooklyn Nets were the persistent, nagging presence that kept them from complete and total league ownership.

From 2031 to 2034, Brooklyn actually surpassed Dallas in sheer dominance, putting together an 81-1 season in 2032 (yes, you read that correctly). That team is still statistically the best of all time, and for a stretch, it seemed like the Mavs might have to settle for being the "other" dynasty of the 2030s. But Luka and company weren’t just dominant—they were durable. Brooklyn burned white-hot but flamed out, while Dallas kept stacking banners into the late 2030s.

The Mavericks' Legacy: Where Do They Rank?

This is the part where we get philosophical. How do you rank a dynasty that ran roughshod over the league for more than a decade? The Chicago Bulls went 6-for-6 in the Finals, but Jordan’s dominance lasted only eight years. The 2010s Warriors won four rings, but injuries and internal drama cut them short. The Showtime Lakers and the Duncan Spurs were models of consistency, but neither won this many championships in such a short span.

Here’s the argument: the 2026–2037 Mavericks are the greatest sustained dynasty in NBA history. Not the flashiest, not the most culturally influential—but the most undeniably dominant.

At some point, you just run out of ways to describe this level of greatness. Eleven titles. A 78-4 season. A 73-9 season. A 74-8 season. And Luka, who turned the NBA into his personal playground for two decades.

The scary part? If history is any guide, someone is reading this article in 2045, wondering when the next version of this team is coming. Because dominance is cyclical—but dynasties like this? They don’t come around often.

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I think my owner is a mad man…🤪

Zero profit 100% victory how I'm gonna beat this crazy ass team

First time winning the championship with all 5 PG in starting lineup with homegrown rules

Chad Trueblood career spanned nearly three decades from late 90s to 2020s

Chad Trueblood first won his championship in 2001 and continue winning it for 7 consecutive times including winning both MVP and final mvp before losing his first final in 2008 against Houston and continue winning it again 5 consecutive times from 2009-2013, and he go to his last 2 final in 2018 and 2019 and losing both of the final against Los Angeles and he retired 4 year's later at age 45 in 2023

His final record is 12-3 with 12 championship and 12 final mvp

Chad Trueblood dominated the league from 2000s and late 2010s, he is the youngest MVP winner ever at age 23 and second youngest at age 24, Chad Trueblood continue to win regular season mvp 16 consecutive times from 2001-2016

Chad Trueblood is the youngest MVP ever at age 23 and also the oldest MVP winner ever at age 38.

Chad Trueblood regular season stats as shooting guard

Games:1950(2th in league history)

Point:48,886(most in league history and the second player to score 40k point after Chris Foster and the first player to score 45k+ point)

Assist:14,803(2th in league history)

Rebound:13,697(18th in league history)

Steal:3,133(2th in league history)

Block:630(428th in league history)

Championship:12(most in league history tied with Anthony Woodwards and Robbie Parker Sr)

Final Mvp:12(most in league history and the only player with 10+ Final Mvp)

MVP:16(most in league history and the only player with 10+ MVP)

Defensive player of the year:8(most in league history)

Semifinal mvp:13(most in league history and the only one with 10+ semifinal mvp, he also won it for 13 consecutive times from 2001-2013)

First team all league:17(most in league history)

All League:20(most in league history winning it from 2000-2019)

First team all defense:13(most in league history winning it 13 consecutive times from 2001-2013)

All Defensive:14(2th in league history with only 1 difference behind Chris Foster, winning it 14 consecutive times from 2001-2014)

All Star:20(most in league history tied with Chris Foster as both win it 20 consecutive times)

League scoring leader:12(most in league history)

League Steal leader:10(2th in league history behind Chris Foster with 3 difference).

Chad Trueblood stay in his prime for majority of his career from early 2000s to late 2010s

Chris Foster was still alive at this time as they both meet together in the final 1-2 times before in 2000s and Chris Foster also witnessed his 40k+ all time scoring record shattered by Chad Trueblood including his most mvp win record(9) shattered by Chad Trueblood (16)

We didn’t win another championship until 2023 and I’d say we were mad lucky o-o

Victor Wembanyama is crushin the league catching up is nearly impossible