The Draft
From BBguida
At the end of every season, 48 up-and-coming youngsters are offered to each league (the players are different for each league). Each team then gets to select 3 of these players to add to their squad roster. This is an important part of building a team, since young players train much more quickly than older ones and you get these 3 players for free, rather than spending a fortune on the transfer list.
Throughout the season, you can spend up to $40,000 a week to scout out the young players. The more money you spend, the more players the scouts go to see. The results of the scouting are not shown straight away; the results are built up over the season and shown to you a few weeks before the new season starts. Also, the players are scouted randomly, and there is no way to assign a scout to a particular player, so the results that you get are also random.
Each player can be scouted a maximum of 2 times, and you get a certain amount of information about them each time they are scouted: 1) Scouting once gives you the best position of a player and his general ability rating out of 5. 2) Scouting twice gives you a player's age, their general potential rating and a summary from the game the scouts saw him playing. Note that scouting doesn't give you a player's height, and that a 5 ball rating doesn't necessarily mean that they are an absolute superstar. For example, a potential of 5 balls doesn't mean that the player will have all-time great potential, it means that they could have anything from perennial allstar to all-time great potential.
Once the scouting results are released, each team gets to put their potential draftees in order of preference. Each time it is your turn to pick a draftee, the draft engine will automatically choose the highest player in your list that hasn't already been taken, so you obviously want to put the best players at the top and move the worst to the bottom of the list! Most of the time you will have a handful of players that haven't been scouted at all, and it is up to you where to put these, depending on how much of a gamble you want to take. Once the new season starts, you will see 3 fresh-faced youngsters have been added to your squad, and then you can assess how good they really are by looking at their statistics.
In the draft, the teams that finished last in the previous season get to pick first and the teams that finished at the top get to pick last in each round, so the worst team gets pick 1, 17 and 33 and the best team 16, 32 and 48. Because of this, it is generally more useful to spend more on scouting if you don't think your team will finish particularly well, and spend less if you think you're going to push for promotion!
