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Your Round 1 Cheat Sheet: SuperCoach NBL Classic
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Everything you need to build your NBL27 SuperCoach team: prices, cash cows, bargain buys, Blitz form and captaincy calls.
By
NBL.com.au
By popular demand, SuperCoach NBL Classic is back, and this year NBL.com.au and basketball.com.au are bringing you the most comprehensive coverage of every round, every player, every price rise and drop, injury, POD, buy, hold, sell, double-header and captain call of the Hungry Jack's NBL27 season.
Whether you're a first-time SuperCoach or a hardened veteran chasing the $10,000 major prize, here's everything you need before the first Lockout: Saturday, September 19, 2026 at 7:30pm AEST, when Melbourne United host the Adelaide 36ers to tip off the Hungry Jack's NBL27 Season.
SuperCoach NBL Classic: The Basics
Ten players. Four guards, four forwards, two centres. A $2 million salary cap that's a hard blocker, not a warning. Build your team, pick your captain each week (they score double), and battle it out for $10,000 and weekly $500 round prizes.
Scoring rewards the full stat sheet: two-point shots score 2, threes score 3, blocks and steals both score 3, assists score 2, rebounds and free throws score 1, and turnovers cost you 2. Double-doubles are worth 5, triple-doubles 10 (replacing the double-double bonus). Fouls are neutral. Bench players contribute 50% of their score, unless the auto-emergency kicks in and promotes one to 100%.
You get two trades a round plus four Trade Boosts across the season, so who you pick early, and who you're prepared to sell, matters just as much as who you start with.
Now, here's your ultimate guide
The Complete Explainer
Before you lock in a single player, get across squad structure, the salary cap, captains and vice-captains, and the auto-emergency rule that quietly saves your round when a starter is a late withdrawal. This is the full breakdown of how SuperCoach NBL actually works, worked examples included.
Why to get SuperCoach Plus
Free until the end of Round 2, SuperCoach Plus unlocks projections, break-evens, consistency ratings, matchup data, an injury tracker and two tools that do the work for you: Optimise, which rebuilds your best starting side, and Trade Assist, which proposes the trades themselves.
Take on the experts
New for NBL27: the NBL Official League lets you go head-to-head with NBL commentators and analysts all season, same scoring, same trades, same lockouts, and every pick still counts toward the $10,000 major prize.
Your guide to double-game rounds
The captain scores double, so knowing who plays twice matters more than who's in form. Parker Jackson-Cartwright is the standout Round 1 double-header captain, before the schedule swings hard to Illawarra, who double a competition-high seven times in the first ten rounds. Full round-by-round fixture breakdown included.
Top 20 price reveals
Six-time MVP Bryce Cotton tops the price list at $473,900, almost a quarter of your entire cap on his own. Kendric Davis, Parker Jackson-Cartwright, Nathan Sobey and Jack McVeigh round out the top five, and the big question for every coach is the same: build your team around one marquee name, or spread the cap for flexibility?
Stuck in the middle: Find the value
Forty-seven players sit priced between $150,000 and $280,000, the least-owned, most overlooked band in the game, and yet the cap makes them unavoidable. You literally cannot field the four most expensive players in SuperCoach NBL; the money doesn't stretch that far. Names like Tyler Harvey, Milton Doyle and Sam Froling are the mid-tier picks worth building around.
Cash Cows
A Cash Cow is a cheap player bought to make you money, not just points, the only way to end up with a better team than you started with under a hard salary cap. Arnas Velicka and Josh Oduro exploded at the Blitz.
Bargain buys under $100K
Fifty-eight players sit under $100,000, and five days in Bendigo sorted the pretenders from the real Cheapies. Jason Spurgin, Ben Gold and Tom Wilson delivered elite returns on minimal minutes, while names like Will Johnston and Reuben Te Rangi quietly banked huge value.
Pre-Season & Blitz player-by-player scores
Every score from every game of the NBL27 pre-season, both the official warm-up fixtures and the CODE Sports NBL Blitz in Bendigo, position by position, club by club. Will Hickey, Cole Anthony, Nate Hinton and Arnas Velicka headline the best averages across the two tournaments, and it's the full data set behind every bargain, cash cow and point of difference in this guide.
>> BLITZ SCORES | PRE-SEASON SCORES
Team-by-Team analysis
Every club broken down player by player off the back of the CODE Sports NBL Blitz in Bendigo. Part 1 covers Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Illawarra and Melbourne United: Bryce Cotton headlines a stacked Adelaide core, Arnas Velicka is the best value import in the game at Brisbane, and Melbourne United's Cole Anthony, Josh Oduro and Luke Travers trio might be the league's best-kept secret. Part 2 covers New Zealand, Perth, South East Melbourne, Sydney and Tasmania: Parker Jackson-Cartwright is a captaincy cornerstone, Elijah Pepper is Perth's premium Cash Cow, and the Phoenix roster is so deep that no single pick will break your cap.
The Ultimate Season Preview
Matt Hickey is joined by Tyson Whelan and Damon Lowery to break down the best premium players, value picks, captaincy choices and sleeper selections ahead of the new season. It's the full video rundown: top premium picks, the best point guards to target, bargain picks and cheapies, pick-or-pass calls, and team names and captain selections.
The best of all-time
Seven-time MVP Andrew Gaze racked up 28,378 career SuperCoach points, 7,448 more than anyone else in NBL history, and his 1987 season would price him at $656,000 today. A fun look back at where this year's stars sit against the SuperGOAT.
What are you waiting for? Let's get started
SuperCoach NBL Classic. Build your team. Battle it out. First Lockout: Saturday, September 19, 2026, 7:30pm AEST.
