About

Built by fans who read the CBA cover to cover.

Hardwood Machine is an independent, editorially-run NBA trade simulator. Every proposal you build in the Trade Machine is run through the same 2023 Collective Bargaining Agreement rules that a real front office has to work under — salary matching tiers, the first and second apron hard caps, Base Year Compensation, the poison-pill provision on extended rookies, the Stepien Rule, and the seven-pick rule on future first-round picks. If a deal is illegal, we say so and tell you exactly which rule broke it.

What we're trying to do

Most NBA trade tools online treat CBA compliance as a footnote — they check salary matching and call it a day. That's fine until you're building the trades that actually shape a season, where the apron hard caps, BYC math, and pick obligations decide what's even legal to propose. We wanted a tool where the answer to "could this really happen?" is trustworthy.

Alongside the builder we publish plain-English guides to the rules the tool enforces, so you can understand why a proposal was rejected or graded the way it was, not just that it was. Everything is free and there's no login.

Where the data comes from

• Rosters and biographical data from balldontlie's public API.
• Salary figures overlaid from public league sources and ESPN's cap sheet.
• Draft-pick obligations tracked manually against public reporting through 2033.
• Real-world "buzz" and grade comparisons scraped from ESPN's transaction feed and displayed with attribution and a direct link back to ESPN's story.

When we surface a third-party report, we quote a single sentence and link out. Everything else on the site — the CBA engine, the grading heuristic, the guides, the challenge briefs — is original.

Who runs it

Hardwood Machine is written and maintained by Hardwood Editorial, a small group of NBA obsessives who spend more time than is healthy arguing about apron cliffs and second-round pick swaps. We are not affiliated with the NBA, the NBPA, ESPN, or any team.

Corrections and feedback

If a contract, pick obligation, or CBA interpretation on the site looks wrong, please tell us — it's how the tool gets better. Details on the contact page.