HARDWOOD BASKETBALL MANAGER - UPDATE 0.9.2
0.9.2 builds out the off-court career layer: an owner who can fire you, a real team economy, a coaching carousel, a GM
job market, a full injury system, and a created GM persona your owner personally walks through the game. The whole
interface has also been reskinned to a warm broadcast look called PRIMETIME. Available now on Steam.
Most of the new front-office systems switch on in the salary era. That means Season 4 onward in an NHA Origin
career, or day one of a Full NHA career. The early NHA Origin seasons play as before.
OWNERS & FINANCES
- Every team now answers to an owner with a spending tier, a wealth level, and a win-now or profit lean.
- A new Boardroom screen collects your owner, your job security, the season's objectives, and the club's full books in one place.
- Revenue comes from national TV money, market-scaled local income, and revenue sharing. Expenses are payroll, operating costs, and the luxury tax as an actual cash bill.
- Season objectives are tiered (Required, Preferred, Favoured), judged at season's end, and tracked through a 0-100 job-security gauge.
- Missing a Required objective drops the gauge. A sustained shortfall can get you fired, but only ever after a visible warning the season before.
THE COACHING CAROUSEL
- Your head coach, both assistants, and your scout are full staff members you hire, fire, and negotiate with. Each is rated across six tactical attributes the match engine reads.
- A new Hire Staff screen lets you browse every candidate. A "View as" selector re-rates everyone through the lens of the role you are filling.
- Hiring is a negotiation. Set a role, a salary, and a one-to-five-year term. The coach accepts, counters, or declines based on how much they want to join. A top coach can refuse a weak or small-market club at any salary.
- Staff salaries are an operating expense, separate from the player cap and tax. Your owner sets a hard ceiling on total staff pay, and firing mid-contract owes a buyout.
- You can pry a rival's coordinators or scout away for a buyout. A poached coordinator opens a vacancy you must fill before the day advances.
- The Personnel hub brings your owner, coaching, and medical staff onto one screen, with right-click menus that show the money first. You can also promote your own staff into an interim core role and resolve it later.
DEVELOPMENT STAFF
- Two new optional roles are available: up to five development Specialists (each focused on Shooting, Defending, Rebounding, Skills, or Fitness) and one Physician carrying a Level (I, II, or III).
- An assigned Specialist speeds in-domain growth and softens the decline for the players under them, scaled by how good they are.
- A new Evolution tab on the Personnel screen shows every player's development phase, star rating, trend, ceiling, assigned Specialist, and an expandable season-by-season history.
- Rival clubs assign their own Specialists each off-season, so league talent grows alongside yours.
THE INJURY SYSTEM
- After every game, each player who logged minutes rolls for an injury based on minutes played, age, fatigue, and durability.
- Severity runs from day-to-day knocks to season-enders. Major injuries leave a permanent mark, and all recoveries include a minutes ramp on return.
- A player can go down in the game you are watching, forcing a substitution rendered on the spot.
- Minor knocks are playable with a physical debuff, but push a player too hard and the injury can aggravate into a real absence. Moderate and worse injuries bench the player outright.
- Injured players cannot be traded, released, picked for the All-Star game, assigned to a Specialist, or worked in practice.
- A higher Physician Level means fewer injuries, faster recovery, and a Physician's Report on the Personnel screen. Injuries also feed a new INJURIES tab in the News feed.
THE GM CAREER
- Getting fired is not game over. You carry a league-wide reputation (Unproven up to Renowned) that gates job offers from rival clubs.
- You can take over a new club (your old one reverts to AI) or sit unemployed and wait for a better post. There is no GM salary. An offer is a choice of where to go next.
- A new World layer lets you browse a full World > Continent > Nation > Category > League hierarchy, with News moved into a scoped, breadcrumbed Hub sidebar.
- Every new career starts by building a persona: name, age, and a Former Player or Former Coach background, shown as six coaching-grade star ratings.
- Your background gives your team a small, capped on-court edge in your strong dimensions and a slight edge at the negotiating table. It applies to your team only and is tuner-safe.
- The first time you open each key screen, your owner sends a one-time, in-character note walking you through it.
PRESENTATION (PRIMETIME)
- A warm near-black canvas with a single ember accent replaces the old cool-blue theme, rolled out across the Hub and dozens of other screens.
- The Hub gets a new broadcast hero and a scoreboard stat strip showing Record, Streak, and Job Security.
- A tall condensed display face handles scoreboard-style headers. A clean body face handles everything else.
- The live scoreboard is restyled to match, with score numbers set in the new display face.
GUIDES & QUALITY OF LIFE
- Written guides for Contracts, Staff, Scouting, and the early-years NHA Origin roster rules are now in the game, opened from a "?" icon next to the relevant heading.
- Other changes include an animated match loading screen, contextual tooltips throughout, a consistent top navigation bar, and a new staff detail screen.
MODDING
- Mods can now place their own staff onto teams via roster/coaches.json (the file the Export Tool always wrote but the game never imported).
- Full NHA roster packs now load correctly, slotting mod players onto full, contracted rosters.
- You can pin an exact contract on a player directly in a Full NHA roster pack.
- A new finance/finance_config.json lets advanced modders re-tune the entire economy: cap, tax line, aprons, floor, growth rate, and revenue model.
BUG FIXES
- Fixed an issue causing the end-of-season settlement to be skipped when advancing through the off-season with Sim To Date, leaving player and staff contracts frozen (rookies stuck at "4 years remaining," coaches never ageing). The settlement now runs exactly once per season and self-heals if its calendar day is skipped.
- Fixed an issue in Full NHA causing established veterans whose contracts had expired to be re-drafted as rookies. The draft now considers only the current season's actual prospects.
- Fixed an issue causing injuries sustained in a game you watched live to wipe the rest of the league's existing injuries from the save.
- Fixed an issue causing AI teams to keep playing injured players who should have been sidelined.
- Fixed an issue causing the Finals news headline to read "NBA Finals Set" instead of the NHA league name, and a related issue hiding the calendar's playoff-round highlight.
- Fixed an issue causing the Rotations bench tooltip to always read "benched for discipline" even when a player was injured or playoff-ineligible.
- Fixed an issue allowing Submit Team with an empty starting position. Falling below a player's minutes minimum is now a non-blocking warning rather than a submission error.
- Fixed an issue causing the League screen to show a hardcoded "4 Teams" header instead of the real league size, and another displaying raw day numbers instead of dates.
KNOWN ISSUES
- Some owner objectives (lottery tanking, division finishes) are credited rather than fully resolved from final standings for now. Full resolution arrives in a later update.
- Freshly hired Specialists have no effect on the very first jump into a Full NHA season because there is no preceding off-season for the development run. They take effect from the next off-season onward.
- In a single league, rival job offers arrive once per season. Hold out and the next batch comes a season later.
- The World browser only has the NHA behind it today. The hierarchy is built to support more leagues.
- The PRIMETIME backdrop's film-grain texture is a planned future addition.
EXISTING SAVES
The new front-office systems (owners, finances, staff salaries and budgets, injuries, and the job market) activate in
the salary era, which covers NHA Origin Season 4 onward and any Full NHA career. Earlier sessions are unaffected.
Existing saves upgrade automatically: finance columns are added on load, an owner is generated for each club once a
save reaches the salary era, and pre-update scouts are migrated into the unified staff pool. The GM persona and
onboarding tour appear on new careers only. The data-integrity fixes above are forward-looking. A save that already
has frozen contracts or a wiped injury list will not auto-repair, but seasons played from this version onward will
behave correctly.