Nobody wins SuperCoach with the squad they picked in round 1. They win it with the squad they built by round 12 — and they build it with cash.
Your starting salary cap is the same as everyone else's. The gap between you and the coach who finishes 10,000 places above you is almost entirely the gap in how much money you generated in the first half of the season.
How money is actually made
A player's price tracks his three-game rolling average. Score above what your price implies, and you rise. Score below, and you fall. Play fewer than three games, and nothing happens at all (see [The Henshall Rule](02-the-henshall-rule.md)).
So cash generation comes down to one thing: owning players whose real output is higher than the price they were assigned.
That mispricing exists in three places.
1. Rookies and first-year players
The purest source. A player with no NBL history is priced near the floor. If he walks into 20+ minutes a night, he is guaranteed to be underpriced, and the correction is enormous in percentage terms.
This is why the first price jump is the biggest of a player's season, every single time. He goes from a floor price to a price that reflects three games of actual production, in one move. Own him for that move. Miss it and you've missed most of the value.
2. Role changes
A known player whose price reflects last season's role, who has just been handed a much bigger one. A guard who was third in the pecking order and is now the primary ball-handler. A big who was backing up and is now starting because the club let the starter walk. The pricing engine has no idea this happened — it only knows last season's numbers.
These are the best value in the game because they carry far less bust risk than a genuine rookie, and they're findable in the off-season if you're reading roster news properly.
3. Post-slump premiums
The reverse trade. A gun who's had three ordinary weeks and whose price has fallen well below his true level. He's not a cash cow — he's a discounted premium. Different purpose, same underlying logic: the price is wrong.
Anatomy of a cash cow
Not every cheap player generates money. The ones that do share four traits, and you should be able to tick all four before you pick anyone.
Guaranteed minutes. Not "should get minutes" — will get minutes. The clearest signal is a depth chart gap: a club that lost its starter at that position and hasn't replaced him. Hope is not a strategy; a hole in the roster is.
A team that plays early and often. Refer back to your rounds 1–5 games-played ranking. A cash cow on a club that doesn't hit three games until round 4 is three rounds of dead money.
A game that isn't purely scoring. Rookies have bad shooting nights. A rookie who rebounds, passes and defends still returns a usable score on a 2-for-11 night. A rookie who only scores returns nothing. This is covered properly in [the points-dependency test](05-bursting-bubbles.md), and it applies to cheap players just as much as expensive ones.
A coach who trusts young players. Some coaches genuinely play their bench and their development players. Some tighten the rotation to seven men the moment the games matter. Know which is which before you invest — more on this in [Rotations, Coaches and Minutes](08-rotations-and-minutes.md).
When to sell
The mistake that costs coaches most isn't picking the wrong cash cow — it's holding the right one too long.
A cash cow's job is to make money, not to score points. The moment his rate of price increase slows, he's stopped doing his job and he's occupying a roster spot that a scoring player should have.
Practical signals to sell:
- His three-game average has plateaued. Two consecutive small rises, or a flat week, means the market has caught up.
- He's approaching the price of a genuine mid-tier player. At that point you're holding a mediocre scorer at a real price. Upgrade.
- His minutes are trending down. Rotations tighten as seasons progress and as injured players return. Falling minutes precede falling scores, which precede falling price.
- The injured starter is about to come back. Sell into the news, not after it.
The rule of thumb: sell one week early rather than one week late. You'll leave a little money on the table and you'll never get caught holding a depreciating asset.
The structural point
Cash generation isn't a phase of the season that ends. It's the mechanism by which your squad improves. Every rookie you cash out funds a premium. Every premium you buy at a discount frees up money for another. The coaches at the top of the ladder in February got there by running that cycle more times than you did.
Which means the real question isn't "how much money do I have?" It's "how many roster spots do I currently have generating money?" Early season, that number should be high. By the run home, it should be near zero and your squad should be full of guns.