82-0: A User Guide
The Sports Page special report - possibly the last
82-0. Many of you have already heard of the online craze sweeping the nation, or are deep into the process of losing all connection to your family, work, and all physical reality while constructing rosters of players present and long past. I heard of it on the radio while driving, Googled it, and was hooked within 5 minutes. If you haven’t heard of it, the short advice is: stay away, especially if you are an NBA junkie with knowledge of teams going back to at least the 80’s. That is exactly my wheelhouse, and you may never hear from me again, like those poor people in Backrooms. This is my last will and testament.
82 - 0 (pronounced “eighty two and oh”) is a game where you try to build a team that the simulator determines will go 82-0 (a perfect record) in a theoretical NBA regular season. Theoretical because these 5-man teams will never come together in real life, being selected from a menu of players from the past and present. You click “Spin”, and the user interface generates a team and a decade (“era”), along with a menu of players that played for that team in that decade, displayed on the left side of the screen. A display on the right side shows the five traditional positions (point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center1) that you need to fill out to create your team. You click on a player, and click on the position they fill (each player is listed with one or more positions they can play, based on historical usage), and you do it again - a total of five times. Once a round, if you don’t like the team and/or era you were given, you can spin again to change the team once and the era once. The game is deceptively simple and graphically non-involved, but apparently has a bit of technology behind it - a random number generator, a large database, and some kind of simulator that may or may not be simple arithmetic comparison of stats. At the end, when you submit the last of your five players, your team record gets spit out of the simulator, with a category - lottery (below 45 wins), playoff (45-53-ish), contender (54-64), or dynasty (more than 65 wins). Also, your team and all their stats from their time with the team during that era are displayed. Above 70 wins or so, they award “historic” status. I have attained this status three times - a 72, 74, and 75 wins. I am not sure if anyone has gotten to the mythical 82-0 season, but given the many many many attempts across the nation by degenerates like me, I wouldn’t be surprised.
There is “Classic” mode in which all player stats are visible, and “HoopIQ” mode, where only the name and position are given, along with team and decade. I have only played HoopIQ mode, a conscious decision, and am all the more proud of my high scores as a consequence. I suspect anyone who has approached 82-0 have used the easy mode or cheated with online database or record book help. To get to 75-7, I needed a bit of luck. I rolled Cleveland Cavaliers of the 2000’s (picked LeBron - duh, at PG), Minnesota Timberwolves of the 2020’s (Ant-man Edwards - SG), the 2020’s Celtics (Jayson Tatum - SF), Milwaukee Bucks in the ‘20s (Giannis - PF), and Sacramento Kinds in the aughts (Chris Webber - C). Not very difficult. I am actually more proud of my 74 win season, where I spun 1960’s OKC (Lenny Wilkens, PG for the Seattle Supersonics - more on this below), 2000’s LA Lakers (Kobe - SG), 1960’s NY Knicks (Dave DeBusschere - SF), 1980’s Utah (Karl Malone - PF), and 90’s Houston (Hakeem - C).2
As you can see, the team names are the present-day names and locations, making some of the identifications difficult. OKC prior to 2005 was SEA, and the New Orleans Pelicans used to be the Charlotte Hornets, but there is also another team today called the Charlotte Hornets. Brooklyn was New Jersey, Utah was New Orleans, Memphis was Vancouver, Sacramento was Kansas City and Rochester before that, and so on. If you roll a team in the 1960’s (the earliest era available), unless it’s the Celtics, Lakers, or one of the teams that had Wilt Chamberlain, you’d best use your “spin again” option to change the era. These rosters are noticeably short, due to the lack of player movement in the early NBA. Also featuring short rosters: expansion teams, especially the ones that were created in the latter half of the decade you spun. These rosters also tend to suck, because they were created through expansion drafts from other teams’ rejects. I would re-spin these if possible.
Positional flexibility matters. I advise that, if possible, the first two players (or so) picked should be able to play more than one position, so you are not locked into picking a bad player at a remaining position later. You don’t want to be stuck with DeAndre Jordan from the 2010’s Clippers because you started with Dominique Wilkens at SF (the only position he can play for some reason). LeBron is like a Queen on the chessboard for this reason, because he plays all five. Luka and Magic play 4 positions each. I disagree with some of the restrictions - for example, I think Dominique could play SG and PF if he had to. This might be a function of what the game reports said at the time, which favors recent players whose usage is more diverse. Draymond is another 4- or 5-position player, but so is Scottie.
The trickiest part of determining the best player of a given team and era to choose is knowing exactly when in that decade this player was on that team. The stats are averaged for that player’s entire tenure on that team during the decade.3 2010’s Orlando Magic Vince Carter sounds really good, until you realize he was washed when he got there. There is (approximately) 300 wins’ worth of difference between 1990s Chicago Bulls Michael Jordan and 2000s Washington Wizards Michael Jordan. A player could have been really good when they arrived at a team via trade or free agency at the end of a decade, but by the next decade, injury or decline could have set in, or the players’ entire decade with the team could have been bad (Did you know that Allen Iverson was on the Detroit Pistons in the 2010’s?). Remembering exactly when things happened requires an obsessive level of detailed memory.
There are drawbacks to the game’s setup. You are only selecting a starting five, so there can be no simulation with these rosters that will be fully realistic. I wish there were more roster spots in play so I could create a whole bench. I would really like there to be a version that doubles down on the obscure, randomly fun player aspect - you don’t know how many times I wanted to click on John Bagley, Kiki Vandeweghe, or Bimbo Coles. Just scrolling down the list of these team rosters brought back memories like I can’t even describe.4 I am not certain what the formula is for determining wins and losses (all we know is that it incorporates points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks), but as we well know, stat-accumulating players often do not translate to winning (Exhibit 1-A: Russ Westbrook). On a related note, I am not sure that having Armen Gilliam score 20 points a game was good for his teams. It is also not clear to me whether the decade-averaged stats are per game or per minute - if it is the former, some “super-sub” types like Lou Williams or Eddie Johnson who score in bunches over short periods of time could be devalued. Besides blocks and steals, defense is not a factor, which penalizes guys like Draymond Green and Scottie Pippen.
Ultimately, this is a nostalgic walk down memory lane for me, a chance to engage in my dream job (NBA GM), with the players I watched as a young man or read about through the recollections of the old-school sportswriters I used to read, on print newspapers. And it feels perversely rewarding to find a competitive endeavor in which all the time I spent perusing game reports, box scores, and player movement events is finally “useful”. God bless the internet.
Part of the beauty is seeing the prominent use of these position designations, which have fallen out of style in today’s game, with a trend towards “position-less basketball” around the league. If you read my previous posts, you will know that the traditional center position is back in vogue with the recent success of Victor Wembanyama and Nikola Jokic, as well as everyone currently employed for the purposes of stopping these guys. This game was surely created by someone of my generation.
Don’t sleep on Wilkens, Dave Bing (60’s and 70’s DET and WAS), and Dave DeBusschere. Knowing how good these guys were got me a lot of successful teams.
It took me some experimenting to figure this out, but it makes sense to do it this way and is computationally possible.
One radio person said they tried to go 0-82 with a bunch of bad players, which I might try once I succeed at 82-0. Which might be never.