Starting 5 (starting5.app)

About Starting 5 (starting5.app)

Starting 5 picks one NBA team season a day, from the 1960s onward, and asks for its starting lineup. The lineups are built from box scores: the player with the most combined regular season and playoff starts at each position, taken from Basketball Reference, leaving out anyone traded away that year. Where the numbers are close, the maker checks game logs and contemporary coverage, and fixes a puzzle when a player shows it was wrong.

You get five guesses per position. Naming a player on the first try is worth 200 points, and the value drops with each miss, down to 25. After a miss the card shows the player's jersey number, age and height, and further misses fill in his first name one letter at a time. The last name never appears, so the final step is yours. The maker builds each day around the one starter fans tend to forget.

There is a daily leaderboard, a Player of the Week, streaks, and yesterday's puzzle to catch up on. The Gauntlet gives five random teams in ten minutes from a pool of more than 1,100 team seasons. A free account opens the full archive. The site is a fan project, not connected with the NBA, and the same maker runs Starting 11 for the NFL.

This is a different game from Starting 5 Trivia at starting5trivia.com.

How to play Starting 5 (starting5.app)

1. Open starting5.app and play today's puzzle.
2. Read the team and season shown.
3. Type a player for each of the five positions; you get five guesses per spot.
4. After a miss, use the jersey number, age, height and the letters of his first name to narrow it down.
5. Finish all five spots, see your score out of 1000, and check the leaderboard.

Tips

• Name the stars first to bank 200-point answers, then spend your thinking on the role players.
• Think about who started most games that season, not who was most famous on the roster.
• Height and age after a miss quickly separate a veteran big man from a young guard.

Questions