Some Ultimate Team Details via Gamestop

Experience the perfect combination of NBA LIVE 14 and fantasy basketball, as you build your LIVE Ultimate Team of the brightest modern NBA stars and all-time legends. Compete in Fantasy Showdown challenges to earn coins and purchase new packs of players, coaches, uniforms, contracts, and more, as you build the best line-ups possible. Take your Ultimate Team online and challenge friends in a battle of the best teams to ever take the floor.

Nice. I'll certainly be trying to earn coins with the Fantasy Showdown challenges before dropping real money on any packs.

If it's the same as Fifa, which I think it is, the general idea should be the same, as it's named the same way, you can buy packs with coins... You also earn coins just by playing regular matches either offline or online (the so called leagues - seasons mode or tournaments). These Fantasy Showdown Challenges should be the equivalent of Fifa's Team of the Week challenges, which is an offline game, where you're put against a team compiled by EA (in Fifa's case, the players that performed well over the weekend) and you get coins, if you manage to beat them (difficulty increases their number).

I love to earn my coins through trading players, but that takes a lot of work and time

As I've mentioned before, I'm not too familiar with Ultimate Team since I don't play Madden, NHL or FIFA, but that does sound like a good idea for earning coins and not having to drop real money on packs if you don't want to. I agree that they'll likely be taking a similar approach in NBA Live 14, given the snippets of info that have been made available so far.