NBA Survivor — one team a week, never the same twice
Survivor is the format that fits an 82-game season, because it asks for one decision a week instead of one a night. Everybody picks a single team to win that week. If the team wins you survive; if it loses you are out, and you can never use that club again, so the easy picks disappear as the season goes on.
The NBA has no week of its own — there is no "Week 7" on a basketball calendar — so a season here is 25 Monday-to-Sunday weeks, built from the real schedule in one press. Preseason is excluded on purpose: a pool should not be decided by a game nobody’s starters played.
Choose what happens when somebody forgets to pick — a strike, the week’s biggest favourite assigned automatically, or their previous team carried over — and whether players can put an entry on auto-pilot. Pick reminders go out by email and push to anyone still alive who has not picked. Add strikes, buy-backs, mulligans or a second-chance bracket if you want the pool to last longer.
NBA Pick’Em — pick the slate you actually want
A 10-game Tuesday is too much to pick every night, so an NBA Pick’Em is built around the slate you choose rather than the whole card. Take a marquee national game each week, every game one team plays, or a handful you pick by hand — then let it run.
Scoring can stay simple (one point a win) or use confidence points, where players rank their picks and a bold call is worth more than a safe one. Add a tiebreaker on a chosen game if you want a clean winner rather than a shared pot.
Every pick is graded against the real schedule as the games end, so the standings move while people are still watching. Picks lock at each game’s own tip-off, so somebody picking a late West Coast game is not shut out by an early start on the East Coast.
NBA Squares — the grid, for one night
The 10×10 grid everybody already knows, for a single NBA game. Players take squares, the digits are drawn at random once the grid is full or at a time you set, and the axes are the last digit of each team’s score.
Basketball pays four times: the end of the 1st quarter, halftime, the end of the 3rd and the final score. That is four chances to win on one grid, which is what keeps a room watching a game that got away in the third.
Opening night, a rivalry game, Christmas Day, a watch party — a squares board takes a couple of minutes to open and needs nothing from you once the game starts. Numbers can be drawn on a lead time before tip-off, or the moment the grid sells out.
NBA Season Squares — sell it once, run it for months
Season Squares is one grid that lives across many games. A supporter buys a square once and keeps it, and the numbers are redrawn for every game, so a square that was useless in October can win in February.
That makes it the fundraiser format with the least ongoing work: one ask, one sale, and six months of reasons for people to care. Price the prizes per game, or per week, and set what happens to the money for a game that is never played.
Build the slate from any run of games — one team’s home schedule, every game against a division, a particular night of the week, or the whole season. The schedule comes from the real NBA calendar, so a postponed game moves on your board too.
