Ball Don't Cry

About Ball Don't Cry

Ball Don't Cry is a daily NBA guessing game played in the browser. Each puzzle is a career table of the kind you would see on a stats site: one row per season with games played and started, minutes, points, rebounds, assists, shooting percentages, steals, blocks and turnovers. The team column is replaced with a placeholder, so you have to recognise the player from the shape of the numbers alone.

Each day has a numbered puzzle with three players, and you get three guesses for each. A long career with a slow start, a peak and a decline points one way; a short career of big scoring numbers points another. Past puzzles can be played from an archive.

Compared with Poeltl, where every wrong guess tells you how close you were on team, position and height, Ball Don't Cry gives no feedback beyond the table, so it rewards players who know box scores well. It suits NBA fans who follow stats more than highlights.

How to play Ball Don't Cry

1. Open Ball Don't Cry to see the first of the day's three players.
2. Read the season-by-season stats: years, games, minutes, scoring, shooting and the rest.
3. Type a player's name to guess; you have three tries.
4. Move on to the next player, and finish all three for the day.
5. Come back the next day for a new numbered puzzle, or play past ones in the archive.

Tips

• Look at the first and last seasons: they give you the era and the career length.
• Three-point attempts per game say a lot about when a player was at his peak.
• A split season, with two rows in one year, usually means a mid-season trade.

Questions