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Spin a year, take a first-round winner, and poach a player from every team you beat. Out-point poached opponents all the way to the title.
Difficult Mode — you and every opponent poach as they advance.
Poach Playoffs guide
Poach Playoffs is the bracket-running, roster-raiding twist on the 82-0 game. Instead of drafting from a random pool, you spin a season from 1990 to 2026, take control of one of the eight first-round winners, and then climb a single-elimination playoff bracket. The signature mechanic gives the mode its name: every time you beat a team, you poach one starter from that roster and add them to your own five. Win a round, get stronger; win the Finals, take the ring.
That snowball is the whole strategic engine. Each matchup is decided on total team points, and because your lineup keeps absorbing the best pieces of the teams you eliminate, the roster you finish with looks nothing like the one you started. Poach rewards planning several rounds ahead — thinking not just about winning the next series, but about which opponent has the exact player your five is missing.
After each win you choose one starter to steal, so scout the beaten roster for the position your own five is thinnest at. A great center or a floor-spacing wing that plugs your biggest hole raises your team points more than poaching another player at a spot you have already covered.
Early-round upgrades compound. A strong first poach makes the next series easier, which unlocks a better poach after that. Prioritizing your two weakest positions in the opening rounds usually pays off far more than saving them for the Finals.
In Easy Mode only you poach — opponents keep their original rosters all bracket long. In Difficult Mode every opponent poaches as they advance too, so the team waiting in the Finals may be stacked with stolen stars. Difficult turns Poach into an arms race where falling behind on upgrades is fatal.
The strongest Poach runs treat every series as a two-part decision: can I win this matchup on team points, and what will I take if I do? Sometimes the correct poach is the obvious best player available; just as often it is a specialist who fixes a real weakness — a rebounder for a small lineup, a defender for a leaky one, or a scorer to lift a low-point five. Drafting by need instead of by name is what separates a title run from an early exit.
In Difficult Mode you also have to read the bracket. Since opponents are poaching too, the later rounds get tougher fast, so building a decisive team-points lead early gives you margin against a Finals opponent who has been raiding rosters the whole time. Which season you spin matters as well: some years are deeper than others, and a loaded field means richer poaching targets on the way to the ring.
Every other mode on the site is built around one fixed roster and one long regular season: draft your five, lock them in, and see how 82 games play out. Poach Playoffs throws that structure out entirely. There is no 82-game grind here — just a single-elimination bracket where your roster is never finished. It is the one mode where the draft never really ends; it just gets interrupted by playoff games, over and over, until either you or the bracket runs out of rounds.
That makes Poach the closest thing on the site to a true roster-management game rather than a one-shot draft. Classic, Hidden, and Team all ask you to build the best possible five before a single game is simulated. Poach asks you to build the best five you can with what you are given, then keep rebuilding it on the fly as the bracket forces new decisions — which is a fundamentally different kind of pressure, and why a strong Poach run often looks nothing like a strong Classic Mode roster by the time it reaches the Finals.