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Inhibition of the protein-protein interaction (PPI) mediated by breast-cancer-gene 1 C-terminal (BRCT) is an attractive strategy to sensitize breast and ovarian cancers to chemotherapeutic agents that induce DNA damage. Such inhibitors could also be used for studies to understand the role of this PPI in DNA damage response. However, design of BRCT inhibitors is challenging because of the inherent flexibility associated with this domain. Several studies identified short phosphopeptides as tight BRCT binders. Here we investigated the thermodynamic properties of 18 phosphopeptides or peptide with phosphate mimic and three compounds with phosphate groups binding to BRCT to understand promiscuous molecular recognition and guide inhibitor design. We performed molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate the interactions between inhibitors and BRCT and their dynamic behavior in the free and bound states. MD simulations revealed the key role of loops in altering the shape and size of the binding site to fit various ligands. The mining minima (M2) method was used for calculating binding free energy to explore the driving forces and the fine balance between configuration entropy loss and enthalpy gain. We designed a rigidified ligand, which showed unfavorable experimental binding affinity due to weakened enthalpy. This was because it lacked the ability to rearrange itself upon binding. Investigation of another phosphate group containing compound, C1, suggested that the entropy loss can be reduced by preventing significant narrowing of the energy well and introducing multiple new compound conformations in the bound states. From our computations, we designed an analog of C1 that introduced new intermolecular interactions to strengthen attractions while maintaining small entropic penalty. This study shows that flexible compounds do not always encounter larger entropy penalty, compared with other more rigid binders, and highlights a new strategy for inhibitor design., Author Summary Promiscuous proteins are commonly observed in biological systems, such as modular domains that recognize phosphopeptides during signal transduction. The use of phosphopeptides and compounds with phosphate groups as inhibitors to protein–protein interactions have attracted increasing interest for years. By using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, we are able to perform detailed analyses of the dihedral space to explore protein fluctuation upon ligand binding to better understand promiscuous molecular recognition. Free energy calculation can further provide insights into the mechanism of binding, including both enthalpic and entropic contributions for molecular recognition, which assist in inhibitor design. Our calculation results show that pre-rigidifying a ligand is not always advantageous, suggesting the challenge in retaining optimized intermolecular interactions in pre-rigidified ligand. Instead, certain flexible ligands with multiple binding conformations can reduce entropic penalty, and therefore improves binding affinity. According to our computations, we can introduce new intermolecular interactions to flexible ligand to strengthen attractions while maintaining small entropic penalty by retaining its plasticity in the bound conformation. The study might cast light on a new general strategy for designing inhibitors targeting promiscuous modular domains and protein–protein interactions.