League Identity & Conduct

Three principles decide every ruling in this book:

• Realism over exploits — if it would never happen in a real NBA game, it does not belong here.
• Balance over spam — if nobody can stop it and you would run it forty times a game, that is the thing to stop running.
• Skill over animation — win with reads, personnel and preparation, not with a mechanic the game cannot answer.

What follows are guidelines, not a penal code. They exist to make good basketball the easy path, and to give a commissioner something to reason from when a situation nobody wrote down turns up. Where a guideline and a principle collide, the principle wins.

This is a MyNBA online league built to run for years. Wins and losses reset every season; the dynasty you build and the way you carried yourself do not. Play like you plan to be here in Season 8.

• Finish what you start. Do not quit a game you are losing. A game you walked out on is worth nothing to anybody, and it goes on your record — see Disconnects & Quits.
• Talk your talk, keep it human. Trash talk is part of the game. Keep it about basketball, keep it in the league's channels, and keep it the kind of thing two adults laugh about later.
• Answer the office. When the commissioner asks you about a game, respond. Silence is not a defense and it is not a strategy.

No rulebook can name every way to play a game badly, and this one does not try. Playing in bad faith is a violation on its own — abusing a mechanic nobody thought to write down, manufacturing a result you did not earn, gaming the schedule, or reading a guideline's silence as permission. "It wasn't in the rulebook" is not a defense. The three principles above are the rulebook.

How it gets handled:

1. Report it with the clip. Bring the timestamp through your league's dispute process, not the group chat. Evidence is what gets you taken seriously, and it is what protects you when someone points a finger at you.
2. The commissioner reviews the film. Both sides get heard.
3. The ruling is case by case — weighed on severity, on intent, and on what that GM has done before. A first mistake and a pattern are not the same thing, and a ruling should not pretend they are.

A commissioner can correct a result, put a note on a GM's record, apply a Legacy Points fine, or remove a GM from the league. Those are the teeth. They exist so the rest of this book can stay short.