What is Starting 5?

Starting 5 is a daily NBA lineup puzzle, free to play. Every night at midnight ET a team from basketball history goes up, and you name its five starters. You get five guesses per spot. Name a guy first try and he's worth 200 points, and the value drops with every miss after that, down to 25. A perfect day is 1000.

The stars are easy. Anyone can put LeBron on the 2016 Cavs. It's the fourth and fifth names that get you, the guy who started 62 games for a team you swear you remember. Miss once and the card gives up his jersey number, age and height. Keep missing and his first name fills in a letter at a time. The last name never does. You finish that part yourself.

Every puzzle hides one starter that fans always forget. That's the one I build the day around.

Where the lineups come from

I build each lineup from the box scores: most combined regular season and playoff starts at every position, pulled from Basketball Reference, minus anyone who got traded away that year. When the numbers are close enough to argue about, I go read the game logs and how the season was actually covered at the time.

I still get some wrong. Someone emails me with a case, I go back through it, and if they're right the puzzle gets fixed. Nothing else on this site matters if the five names are wrong.

What else is here

The Gauntlet is the long version: five random teams, ten minutes on the clock for all of them. The pool is past 1,100 team seasons going back to the 60s, and you can play it all-time or lock it to a single decade. There's a fresh leaderboard every day and a Player of the Week. Streaks if you keep showing up. And the whole archive of old puzzles opens with a free account, so finding this late doesn't mean starting at today.

Who's behind it

Me. I make basketball videos on YouTube for a living, and I built this because I wanted to play it. It's a fan project with no affiliation with the NBA or any team. If a lineup looks wrong, or the game needs something it doesn't have yet, email playstarting5@gmail.com. I read all of it.