Last updated on January 2nd, 2026 at 10:59 pm
Pocket GM: Basketball Sim – Simulation Game Review
Pocket GM: Basketball Sim is a Simulation/Sports/Sports game from Jonathan Howell, first launched in 21st October 2024.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 756+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Pocket GM: Basketball Sim Stand Out
Following the popular Pocket GM: Football series, it's now time to take charge of a Basketball Franchise and sign, trade and draft players to create a the ultimate dynasty in Pocket GM.
- Master the Draft: Scout and pick the stars of the future
- Trade to Success: Win now, or stock up on draft picks
- Pick Up Gems: Build out your team through free agency
- Behind The Scenes: Construct a top management and scout network
- Watch It Play Out: Watch games play-by-play and track the stats of key players
- Customise: Create your own rosters (or import from community) to maximise immersion
REPLAYABILITY:
Use default players, random rosters or import teams created by the fantastic community. Every game is different and presents a new challenge.
CONTROL:
Become the General Manager of a Pro Basketball Team and build your dynasty. Hire your coaches, scouts and physios, all with unique traits and schemes, then sign and release players, make trades and draft future stars. Coach your players from rough diamonds to the hall of fame.
WATCH:
Watch each basketball game play out in amazing play-by-play detail, as momentum shifts from team to team. See your franchise win the Championship and stars build their own legacy.
STRATEGY:
Go all in to win now, or tank for a chance at #1 draft pick through the lottery – it's up to you! Build your Basketball Dynasty!
SHARE:
Join the community on reddit and help develop the game to be even better. You determine what features come next.
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Pocket GM: Basketball Sim is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 17th July 2025
Recent improvements include:
Updated for 2025/26 Season:
- New Salary Caps
- New Contract Demands
- Improvements to AI Draft Logic
- Improvements to Draft Display
- Bug Fixes.
Download & Availability
Pocket GM: Basketball Sim is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Pocket GM: Basketball Sim on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
These games are awesome. It would be even better if there was a baseball version as well.
Dear Pocket GM Basketball, This game is fantastic and very fun to play, we are addicted!!! However, we believe there could be some improvements. For one, we think it would be great if you can put features in the game where you can; edit jersey colors, have secondary leagues (like the g-league but not really) so we can send players there to takeover and also win championships, maybe have variety of trophies for different awards, be able to hang up jerseys, all-star competitions, be able to assign mentors to players, have players demand trade, have players purposely play bad if they are not happy with team performance, etc.!!! Thanks! Hoping you guys the best.
The game is amazing but we will live to manage game minutes to help in young players development please.
Overall a great game. Very enjoyable and fun, unlike other cash grab games. A couple suggestions: Coaches HOF seems too easy, and PF, C should be able to grab more rebounds.
Ive played every game since PGM1 Including the college games and they never miss. Even if a game isnt perfect to start they update constantly and make a better management sim than any game Ive played on any device.
Great game But we cant make players numbers, number 0.
Im really picking nits here, because this game is easily the best GM sim on iPhone that we have played. And this review is coming before updated to the July 2025 updates. However, there are a few places for improvement and one huge issue. The issue we keep running into is our team just collapsing from injuries at an absurd level. Especially if you make it to the finals, you might have so many injuries that you have to cut guys who log real minutes in the finals. That just doesnt happen irl and it grinds the momentum of this game to a halt. Smaller things around trade values and contract stuff are minor, but the injury thing is a save file killer. Worth saying again, this game is fantastic overall. Thanks dev(s).
We really love this game but we have a hard time playing last a certain point because everyone over 80 OVR wants 30+ million and every team is in the second apron making trades almost impossible. Another issue is players being to stubborn to accept smaller contracts which in conjunction with the cap issues mentioned above make them just sit in free agency to the point Ive seen 85+ overalls sit in free agency.
We know this is just the first installment of pocket GM basketball compared to pocket GM football three and theres so much more improvement needs to be done but this app is really really fun. Its really addicting just like pocket GM. Its just needing an improvement in a lot of areas like the salary cap where it doesnt go up at all and every single time you draft a player by the end of therefore your contract they want the $35.2 million extension for four years and you can only pay so many players because everyone over 80 overall wants $20 million plus so it makes it harder to build a team. Ive won nine championships, but we had to trade and keep rebuilding the team after a couple of years because the role players were getting too expensive and we had to make decisions on the star players to see if we actually had to cut them or trade them add another thing is the injuries come up in bunches like very high probability of injury for almost all of the players where theyre getting hurt and even after a couple seasons with them being hurt and averaging like five points a game theyre asking for 20+ million dollars, so the app definitely has some stuff to work on. We still love it the same way we love pocket GM. We just wanted to get there quicker and we know that the developers are making sure it Happens.
To get the maximum amount of joy out of this we encourage you to make good use of the edit tabs. Feel no shame because the game itself doesnt seem to really progress properly, or at least we hope this isnt intended.
In the next update can u put adjustable salary cap settings.
We really enjoyed rebuilding our favorite team! We gonna win the chip baby.
Overall, the content creator does a very good job. But there are a lot of random glitches and both fixes. Specifically, when you added a player, a rookie to be even more specific, the rookie becomes draft eligible again. This completely messes up the whole point of the game. When you are able, please fix the bug fixes also we dont know why three team trades are not available yet. Three team trades are the biggest thing in basketball when it comes to trading. This would open up the game even more. Overall, very good but must improve.
We love this game and want to hold a dynasty, but the next extended contract after the rookie one always seems to be 35 mil a year; Nothing in between. The next after that is 43 mil a year. Also, the salary cap never increases resulting in being trapped in the dreaded 2nd apron unless you trade in the final year of contract OR edit the player contract/salary. It would be cool if these issues were addressed. Still a great game regardless.
So glad he did a basketball version, loved the football one and this one is even better in many ways.
Seriously the most amazing game we have played on a phone hands down. We always thought phone games were below console/pc games, but this one is way better than so many $60 games. Props to the developer who continues to keep improving it.
We love pocket gm football 3 and now basketball. If you could do a baseball one and maybe eventually branch out to other sports as well, like boxing, hockey, and soccer.
So much fun. From having to keep your players healthy to planning next season, you will be hooked. Needs more to do during the season. There has to be something else to it. Right now it seems like theres not much to do.
Make a baseball version please we got the football one to.
We like this game a lot and think that its probably the best basketball GM game. One thing we wish is that the Hall of Fame was editable, so we could remove some players as it gets flooded quickly and it is less of an achievement to make HOF when there are so many HOFs. Awesome game.
This is a great game. We do have a few suggestions that we think might make it even better: 1 – Add a depth chart function so the multi-positional aspect is a bit more realistic 2 – Be able to adjust how many minutes each player plays. This is somewhat related to the depth chart one 3 – Be able to compare players stats, contracts, etc. Love playing.
Ive played about 5 seasons so far. Its not bad, well designed, but not a lot to do during the season. Still, the rise and fall and rise again of a franchise is there and its well done. One positive for sure is that if you appreciate the game of basketball, all these little 1s and 0s procedurally generated basketball players will do everything in their power to be better basketball players. They arent spouting off about practice or politics or buying yachts or getting into trouble (okay, sometimes they fight or decide not to play for you when you tank), but mostly they just love the game theyd die for. Its great.
Glorious. Make sure you download an NBA roster for an even better time :).
We love this game. Only complaint we have is we still havent figured out how to Import rosters from the community. Help.
Best gm simulator dev on the app store keep workin n ill be sure to keep supporting.
This and the football version are probably the games we spend the most time on our phone, theyre just an easy way to pass the time and highly recommend. We would also like to ask the creators if they could maybe do a hockey version of this too.
We understand that it is still in development which is why Im pointing out these inconsistencys. First of all, A player we had just drafted and interviews had a 4.0 GPA yet a low in IQ..? Along with this, most of the combine % are exactly a multiple of ten which isnt realistic.
Such a good game Ive spent tons of hours already. Our only complaint and we dont know if this is on purpose or not is if you play the player in their secondary position it always boosts the team overall significantly. We dont think its supposed to be like that.
This game is just a lazy reskin of the football gm game by the same creator. Everything is designed for a football sim game, not a basketball one. None of the things that make basketball unique are included here. Multiple team trades? Not included. Big market team vs small market? Not included. Players requesting trades? Not included. G league? Not included. Basketball is unique because the star players have so much influence on their team, but you can treat a start like a rookie. And free agency is bad, never anyone above an 80 is ever available because all CPU teams sign their stars and the star players never want to leave. If LeBron was in the game, he'd spend 20 years in Cleveland. Probably less because players retire at 36.
Would easily be 5 stars but the sim logic does not make any sense. It almost seems impossible to consistently build a roster that will win. Makes it very difficult and frustrating at times.
We love both your PGM games a butt load and Ive have played and invented countless hours into both of them but the one thing Im always craving for it some sort of option to mess with the cap space. The main issue that we run into after playing many seasons with both of the games is that the rosters and player become so talented to where we will have players sitting at like 85-87 overall just with no team for like 2-3 seasons bc the cap space for all teams is in a fixed position and the only remedy that we have found is that we have to go through all the teams top players and lower the contracts to make sure all the teams can actually add on to their rosters. If there is anything at all you could add to this game, please make it possible to either adjust the cap or make it where the cap space gradually increase throughout each season.
Coming from PGFM3 this a great expansion into a new sport. High scoring games seem to be a little too common though. Great other than that.
Literally the mobile version of 2K dynasty mode. Its unbelievably great. You can literally create & edit anything you want. Its so much fun. We can spend hours playing this game.
We love these games more than most things in life, thank you for making something so passionate and fun for us all.
We really like your games. Great time filler. The only complaint,could you fix the wingspan editing.
This franchise has created some of the best games we have ever played. Our suggestion: make a soccer version! It would be a huge undertaking, but it could grow the franchise so much! Thank you for this game.
Its what youd expect to enjoy if you play PGMFootball; Its a more Madden version of football for IOS. The current presentation for the layout is welcomed for viewing rosters, negotiating with players. It was something we very much enjoyed in PGMFootball. However simulating through weeks can be a bit disorienting when advancing through weekly games of every team in the league. If there was a filter to only see our own team match ups in a whole week it would make progressing through the season so slow. Overall though, Im wading through to a championship, and to be the best GM in history. Thanks.
Loved the football game so went and tried the beta, even the first version of the beta was great. And only after a few months of hard work, Jon was able to make a casual basketball game that is super fun and easy to get the hang of. Due to the smaller rosters and draft its way easier to sim 5-10 seasons in the same time it would take for 1-3 in the football sim game. Easy game to get sucked into! The draft lottery is an amazing feature and if you go on the Reddit and download a custom nba roster its like 2k franchise mode on the go.
The 5th year contract extension for rookies drafted is inaccurate, as it should not automatically cost $44 million dollars like it is a franchise tag in football, it should be similar to the contract they are already on.
His Sim sports games are top of the market and this is no exception. From playing on the toilet to make a dynasty in a couple of hours, this is our most played game.
Jon has done it again! Great game and easy to lose hours on hours playing across multiple saves. Give it a chance if youre new to his games you will not be disappointed. Really cant wait to see whats added in the future and how youll build upon this. Hockey next.
Big fan of these PGM games, hope to see all sports get their own version as we have lots of fun and spend most of our free time playing this game. Absolutely must play for a sports fan.
Another great creation from Jon, we always enjoyed the football series but we knew there wasnt a basketball sim one. We usually would use a game like amazing basketball but since PGM Basketball launched we immediately deleted that one because l knew it was going to be better.
We played Jons football GM game and always found it to be the best on the App Store. Several of our friends even ended up getting hooked. We were so excited to learn that he was building a basketball game that was similar. Absolutely amazing game here too, and we know it will continue to improve with updates. Already hooked on it.
PGM Football 10/10 PGM Basketball 10/10 Would be 10/10 PGM Hockey PGM NCAA Football PGM MLB.
Played the beta and always saw the potential. The finished product is well worth the price as the dev is very active and always updating and taking note of what the users have to say about the game.
Just like the NFL version, this game is great. Perfect for when you have time to kill, and great for when you want a challenge.
Great game and its a modest improvement over PGM3. We like how weve delved into a new sport and would love to see a baseball sim eventually.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.6.2
- Size: 53.13 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Jonathan Howell]()
Last updated: 17th July 2025 | Genre: Simulation, Sports | Developer: Jonathan Howell