FAQ

Franchise Manager is an unofficial companion app for Sleeper, which enables the addition of salary mechanics to your basketball league. With it, you can implement salary caps, player contracts with team and player options, contract extensions, free agency, trades checked against the cap, a trade finder, fair values for every player and team power rankings.

A salary cap league makes fantasy basketball decision-making much closer to the real NBA, because team owners can’t sit on their players forever. They must negotiate contracts with them, allocate their salary correctly, and make smart trades in order to keep cores together. This separates a good, smart team owner from a lucky one, making the game more about skill.

Yes. Franchise Manager is and will remain free for as long as I am able and allowed to host it, and you will never be forced to pay for anything. If you would like to optionally support me and help cover domain and server costs, there is a donation link at the bottom of the page.

Franchise Manager is entirely free, completely customizable, and as a solo dev I would be more than happy to hear your thoughts regarding functionality and features that the site may lack and quickly implement them. Please contact me at franchisemanagerinfo@gmail.com.

Franchise Manager has no official connection to Sleeper, the NBA or any players. It is a personal project I made because I felt that traditional leagues were too simple.

Yes. Franchise Manager reads your league through the public API that Sleeper offers for free, non-commercial use. It cannot change anything in your Sleeper league, and no real money is involved.

Absolutely not. FM is a read-only site, meaning it only reads the data from the league and writes none back to it, so there is no way for anything to go wrong. If you do not wish to continue using FM, simply click the Destroy League button in the Commish tab and you are done.

You can browse an example league to see how the site functions and whether it’s the right fit for your league.

Click Continue with Google to sign in, then choose Link League or Join League. Franchise Manager will never serve you ads or sell any data to third parties, and it has no access to any personal information other than your Google account name and email and your Sleeper username.

Click Link League and enter your Sleeper username and League ID, then check your Sleeper DMs for FranchiseManagerBot. It will send you your verification code, which lets you set up your league’s settings.

If your commissioner has already linked the Sleeper league to FM, simply ask them for the join code found in their Commish tab, and use the Join League button. You will then enter your Sleeper username and receive a Sleeper DM from FranchiseManagerBot to complete account verification. If your commissioner has not linked the league yet, ask them to go through the process with the Link League button.

Yes. You can switch between them under Your leagues in the account menu.

On a computer, open your league at sleeper.com and look at the address bar. The League ID is the long number after “/leagues/”.

On your phone, open the league in the Sleeper app, tap the gear icon to open the league settings, open General and scroll to the bottom, then tap Copy League ID.

Open Sleeper and check your direct messages for FranchiseManagerBot. Make sure you entered your Sleeper username exactly, and not your display name. A code is good for 15 minutes and you can only have one at a time, so wait for it to run out before asking for another.

If a second code does not arrive either, contact your commissioner, or franchisemanagerinfo@gmail.com if you are the commissioner.

Depending on the league settings chosen by the commissioner, you will face certain limits, such as having to drop players to get below it, having to make trades that shed salary, or being unable to sign free agents.

For new leagues, the default option is inheriting real-life NBA contracts. For existing salary cap leagues, contracts can be imported as a CSV to move smoothly from, for example, a manual Excel setup to an automated one. You can also start with no contracts, and team owners have free rein to allocate their cap as they please.

Player Fair Value is an algorithm that takes into account a player’s fantasy scoring, age, health, ADP and the league’s time horizon (this season, 3 seasons or 5 seasons) and assigns a dollar value to that player, which dictates their perceived worth relative to the league. This influences how much money they ask for in salary negotiations, how quickly they accept a Free Agency offer, sometimes opting to wait for a better one, and how valuable a trade asset they are. Fair Value is visible to the commissioner, who can tune it to the league’s settings.

You manage contracts in the Extensions tab. There you can offer your players a new deal to remain on your roster. Players look at their fair value and demand a certain salary, which you can negotiate.

Each season of a contract is either Guaranteed (G), Team Option (TO) or Player Option (PO), and options can only go on the final two seasons of a deal. Guaranteed seasons can only be waived in the offseason, team options can be waived at any time, and player options cannot be waived. Players therefore much prefer a player option, for example accepting $25M over 3 years with player options over $30M over 3 years with team options.

The player will play out their remaining contract and refuse to renegotiate unless traded to another team. After that they become a Restricted Free Agent, meaning their team owner will have to match the highest Free Agency offer to keep them.

By default, waiving a player removes him and the rest of his contract at no dead cap. Guaranteed contracts can only be waived in the offseason, team options at any time, and player options not at all. Dead cap is money that counts against a team’s cap with no player attached, such as salary a team keeps when it trades a player away.

The commissioner can make exceptions by hand, removing a contract or adding a dead cap charge or credit in the Commish tab.

Free Agency has a deadline set by the commissioner, usually the NBA trade deadline, which the commissioner can change on the Free Agency page. During Free Agency, team owners send contract offers to players, and players accept the highest offer, accepting it faster if it is above their Fair Value.

Offers are weighted so that players prefer money now rather than later, meaning a $50M contract over 4 years will lose out to a $45M contract over 2 years.

Trades work much like Sleeper’s. Send a trade to another team owner from the Trades tab or the Trade Finder, and wait for them to accept or counter. They will receive a DM from FranchiseManagerBot detailing the trade. Once a trade has been agreed, the commissioner approves it on the site, which moves the players and picks here, and makes the same trade in Sleeper.

It is a feature where you can input the players and picks you are willing to part with and set what you are looking for, e.g. young talent, picks or win-now options, with specific optional filters like “a point guard, under 27 years old, who scores more than 22 fantasy points per game”. It then shows the trades with other teams that fit.

Draft picks follow your Sleeper league. FM reads which team owns which future picks and shows them under Rosters, in the Picks tab. Picks can be included in trades just like players, and a pick from a team expected to be weak is worth more. The draft itself happens on Sleeper as usual.

The Leaderboard ranks teams by their power (PWR) relative to the league, and shows their projected strength in future seasons. Teams with lower PWR have more valuable picks because they are expected to finish lower, and teams with higher PWR are more likely to win the league.

FM checks your Sleeper rosters automatically every 12 hours. That check only flags the differences: it does not move players or picks. When the commissioner syncs manually in the Commish tab, the players and picks move to match Sleeper. Anything specific to FM, such as a Free Agency signing, must be done by hand in Sleeper by the commissioner.

A subcommissioner is a team owner the commissioner trusts to help run the league. They can use the Commish tools: edit contracts, rosters and rules, process trades and run free agency. They cannot destroy the league, choose or remove other subcommissioners, or remove anyone’s access. Everything they change is logged for the commissioner to see.

Open the account menu, the round button with your initials at the top right. Leave this league removes your access to the league you have open. Your Sleeper team is not touched, and the join code lets you back in. A commissioner cannot leave; they destroy the league in the Commish tab instead.

Delete account, in the same menu, removes your sign-in details and your access to every league. League history you were part of, such as trades and signings, stays without your name. It cannot be undone.

If you are a team owner, contact your commissioner. If you are a commissioner and cannot fix something, contact franchisemanagerinfo@gmail.com and I will get back to you as soon as possible.