About Starting 5

I've loved basketball since I was a kid. These days I make basketball videos on YouTube full time, and Starting 5 is the thing I always wanted to exist: a daily ritual that tests how well you really know the league and digs up the nostalgia everyone forgot. The stars are easy. The other two starters on that team you loved in 2009 are the whole game.

New team every day. Pick the 5 starters, build a streak, climb the leaderboard.

The rules I build by

Every lineup comes from the record: combined regular season and playoff starts by position, stats from Basketball Reference, minus anyone the team traded away mid-season. Where the numbers leave room for argument, I check game logs and how that season was actually covered at the time.

People still catch things I missed, and honestly that's the best part of running this. Someone writes in with a case, I go back to the box scores, and if they're right the puzzle gets fixed. A trivia game only works if the answers hold up.

How it grew

The daily puzzle came first and everything else grew around it. The Gauntlet is for when one team a day isn't enough: five random teams against a ten-minute clock, pulled from more than 1,100 team seasons back to the 1960s, all-time or locked to one decade. Leaderboards and a Player of the Week for people who want to see where they rank. Streak badges for people who just want the ritual. And the archive is free with an account, because nobody who finds this in year two should have to start at today.

I'm happy building this, and I want it to be perfect for basketball fans. If something's wrong, or you know what it needs next, email me: playstarting5@gmail.com.

Built by a fan, for fans. — Matt