After the commissioner creates a league, teams owners join until the commissioner decides the league is full and ready to begin fantasy game play.  The next thing the league does is decide how real NBA players are distributed to fantasy teams in the league so games can be scored based on fantasy lineups and their corresponding NBA results.

Players are most often distributed through a choice selection process known as the draft.  The one thing that is consistent for all drafts is that each team will have the opportunity to pick 1 player each of 12 rounds to fill a roster of 12 players.  Teams pick in order so that when a player is chosen, they cannot be drafted by a later pick (a player cannot be on more than one fantasy team in a league).

The order for each round is determined randomly, but even rounds mirror the preceding odd to make things more fair.  This means, if a team gets first pick in the first round, they get last in the second.  Similarly, if they draw 5th pick in the sixth round, they get fifth to last in the seventh.

This example illustrates a sample 8 team league's order:

The order is immediately determined when the commissioner starts the draft.  At the same time, e-mail notifications are sent to team owners announcing the draft, access to the draft and trade pages is enabled in your league home, and any timer set begins its countdown.

The draft is one of the most customizables features for a league during the year, and can vary widely, mostly because of the timing options.  When starting a league draft, the commissioner decides how much time each team gets to pick.  Often it's helpful to keep things moving along to give everyone an equal chance to ponder their position and still finish in time to play.  There are three options the commissioner can choose:

1. They can choose no time limit, and each team will have as much time as they want to pick.
2. They can choose to limit each pick to a certain amount of time.  When the time is up or a pick is made, the timer resets.
3. They can choose to give a total amount of draft time to each team.  While it is a team's turn to pick, their counter counts down and subtracts time from their total alloted value.  When the make a pick, the counter stops subtracting time, but the time is not reset.  The counter for the next pick they make starts from where the previous left off.  This is a helpful option to optimize time before the season starts (for example).  If there are 8 days before the season starts and 8 teams in the league, you can assign 1 full day to each team and be sure to finish the draft in time to hit game 1's deadline .

What happens when the time runs out for a pick (in option 2 or 3)?  A team is skipped.  At this point, the next team in order can pick as soon as they are ready, and their clock is then in use (getting skipped is not the end of the world!).  The timer can range anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks (it can also be changed during the draft - see below for more).

As option 3 suggests, a team only has so much time to use and when it's gone, the team is skipped and will continue to get skipped every pick unless they have contingencies in place.  When a player is selected from a contingency list, zero time is used up.  "Bots" also use zero time  when picking.

When the draft is complete, the league enters its "In Season" mode.  Games and boxscores won't be calculated until NBA games are played because they are based on real schedules, but everything else will be available and active.  The biggest differences between "Drafting" and "In Season" is you cannot drop or pickup players during the draft, but after, free agents (and waivers if applicable) become available.

Four very important commissioner features should be considered during the draft:

1. The commissioner has the power (if granted) to skip any team without notice or warning.  Timers based on each pick will reset, and timers based on team totals will have the time between the last pick and the skip time subtracted.  This was not created to make the draft unfair - it gives the commissioner the chance to keep the draft moving when just one or a few people slow things down.  It also gives commissioners the chance to implement unique drafting rules not available in a Sports.ws draft.
2. The commissioner has the power to change the draft timing values and methods at any time during the draft.  They can switch from a "per pick" to a "per team" to a "no limit" timing method and back.  Note that switching to a "per team" from a "per pick" method will reset the total team clock to the new commissioner value.
3. The commissioner has the power (if granted) to delete teams during the draft (owners cannot delete their own teams once the draft starts - in our experience this causes more problems that it prevents).  When a team is deleted, any players they have will be instantly thrown back into the available player pool, and their picks will be greyed out in the draft order (the picks will be skipped automatically).
4. The commissioner has the power (if granted) to restart the draft at any time as many times as they desire.  When a commissioner restarts a draft, the draft doesn't need to actually be restarted.  In essence, all players are removed from all teams, and the league goes back into "Join" mode.  New owners can join, existing owners can delete themselves, and the commissioner can start the draft again at any time (a new order will be randomly chosen each time).  Once a draft is over, it is final.

During the draft, owners can trade picks for picks, players for players, or any combination of each.  When a draft pick is passed any trade involving the pick is automatically removed.  If, for instance you offer picks 4 and 10 to a team for picks 7 and 8 and then pick Chris Webber at #4 - the trade offer will disappear and the team will not see a proposal of Webber and pick 10 for picks 7 and 8.