NBA Message boards in the 80's

[jkvonny]

Maybe open the paper to scour box scores.

Just saying this makes me feel really old.

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

Here in Brazil you had to wait 2 days to get the boxes, due to the time zones and the time the presses had to start to work to print next day's newspapers... and they were very simple boxscores, just the points scored by both teams, and some selected star's very basic stats...

For example, you open the newspaper and there it is: "Chicago won against the Lakers, 100 x 92, Jordan scored 32, had 6 rebounds and 4 assists, Pippen contributed with 19 points, 8 rebounds, Magic had 20 points for the Lakers, meanwhile in the other 3 games of the night the scores were so and so", that's it.

You were left imagining what happened.

On Saturdays afternoon we had the NBA Action TV show, a simple, 15 minute show which ended with the "top 10 plays of the week" routine (yep, that existed as far as I've been following the NBA, since 1991).

Sometimes we've had a "special" article on the newspaper, for instance in the weekend of the All-Star weekend they put a half page of the players, some individual article (for example, "here's Chris Webber, probable ROY, let's take a look at what he has done").

Games were broadcasted usually 1 time per week, on a very bad time, like starting at 1 am, 3 am or so. Live games were very rare, usually just the All-Star game, and the Finals. Later on (due to Jordan's and Dream Team's popularity I guess) the weekly game was broadcasted live.

Also, there were NBA magazines, many of them. I used to buy everything I saw, it was very cheap. There was even the Slam Magazine here, somehow it was imported and I bought dozens of them, even manage to subscribe it for a few years. Still got my collection somewhere in the house.

And the videogames, of course. All of us kids collected our knowledge of the NBA by these various sources.

All of this was around 1991/1996, when the internet was in its very infancy. I remember back then, when a neighbour got the internet, I went to his house and took a notebook, then went into NBA.com and wrote down all the rosters, got back home and memorized all those names, lol.

Cheers!

Haha!
Yep. You know.

Sounds about right. Very late 80s and 90s.

[GSWFan1994]

Haha!
Yep. You know.

Sounds about right. Very late 80s and 90s.

And I'll tell you what... looking back, it was an AMAZING feeling.

You never knew what to expect.

I vividly remember my surprise when, in the 1994 All-Star weekend, I got the sunday newspapers and saw the East starters:

Shaq
Derrick Coleman
Pippen
Kenny Anderson
BJ Armstrong

I was like,

"Who are Coleman and Anderson?"

And, most importantly... "how the heck is BJ Armstrong an All-Star?"

I remember seeing a bunch of Bulls games, and never thought Armstrong was THAT good...

[JonFromVA]

A lot of old content has been lost. Google has preserved the usenet, but can't say the same for old BBS systems or dial up services like CompuServe. Prodigy and AOL came around and made online communication accessible to the masses. All lost.

These services eventually added internet access to their offerings and programs which were developed on minicomputers and mainframes running Unix started getting ported over to the micro computers.

In otherwords, you didn't go to a web page to post on usenet, you ran a newsreader program.

[r0drig0lac]

amazing

[Capn'O]

Maybe open the paper to scour box scores.

Just saying this makes me feel really old.

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

[JonFromVA]

Keep in mind ESPN started broadcasting in 1979. Sports coverage in newspapers was far more extensive. We had weekly and monthly magazines that people used to subscribe too. And if you really wanted to say your piece and didn't care to write a letter to the editor, you could dial in to sports-talk radio.

[JonFromVA]

Maybe open the paper to scour box scores.

Just saying this makes me feel really old.

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

I used to stare at the Baseball Encyclopedia for hours - that dates back to 1969. Looks like something similar came along for Basketball in 1978.

Gotta have access to basic stats in order to move on to the advanced stuff.

82games.com started collecting tracking data from games and they started up around 2002. Looks like basketball-reference.com dates back to 2000.

Synergy Sports roots date back to work Garrick Barr did with the Phoenix Suns in 1992. He founded Synergy 12 years later in 2004, so it takes some time for this sort of data to move from proprietary to service and then eventually to publicly accessible.

[GSWFan1994]

I remember in one of the first NBA articles I've read, someone asked Jordan how he was able to score 32 a game...

"It's easy: 8, 8, 8, and then 8 in the final quarter"

[dhsilv2]

Maybe open the paper to scour box scores.

Just saying this makes me feel really old.

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

One of the reasons those of us who grew up on basketball cards are prone to stats. That's really how we first knew players outside of the mega stars who got most of the national games. The better you were with reading a stat sheet the better you understood a trade.

[scrabbarista]

Haha!
Yep. You know.

Sounds about right. Very late 80s and 90s.

And I'll tell you what... looking back, it was an AMAZING feeling.

You never knew what to expect.

I vividly remember my surprise when, in the 1994 All-Star weekend, I got the sunday newspapers and saw the East starters:

Shaq
Derrick Coleman
Pippen
Kenny Anderson
BJ Armstrong

I was like,

"Who are Coleman and Anderson?"

And, most importantly... "how the heck is BJ Armstrong an All-Star?"

I remember seeing a bunch of Bulls games, and never thought Armstrong was THAT good...

I had this thought while reading your comment.

I don't believe the rumour that MJ was forced to retire by Stern because of his gambling, but if you imagine some kind of backroom power struggle between Stern and Jordan, then you can imagine Stern pulling strings to prove to Jordan that the league made him and not vice versa. Hence, delusionally: "See, we can make BJ Armstrong a star, just like we made you a star."

As I said, I don't believe any of this, but it's an interesting idea.

I mean, the dude was clearly not an All-Star... starter...

[scrabbarista]

I remember in one of the first NBA articles I've read, someone asked Jordan how he was able to score 32 a game...

"It's easy: 8, 8, 8, and then 8 in the final quarter"

I remember this quote as well. It's a really good one.

(Jordan was usually pass-first in the all the first quarters I watched in the 90's, though. Probably some tongue in cheek from MJ.)

[scrabbarista]

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

One of the reasons those of us who grew up on basketball cards are prone to stats. That's really how we first knew players outside of the mega stars who got most of the national games. The better you were with reading a stat sheet the better you understood a trade.

I agree more with Capn'O: I think being prone to stats is a natural tendency, and basketball cards filled that inborn desire. Kind of tangential to what you're saying, though...

Not trying to start a philosophical argument...

[dhsilv2]

Haha!
Yep. You know.

Sounds about right. Very late 80s and 90s.

And I'll tell you what... looking back, it was an AMAZING feeling.

You never knew what to expect.

I vividly remember my surprise when, in the 1994 All-Star weekend, I got the sunday newspapers and saw the East starters:

Shaq
Derrick Coleman
Pippen
Kenny Anderson
BJ Armstrong

I was like,

"Who are Coleman and Anderson?"

And, most importantly... "how the heck is BJ Armstrong an All-Star?"

I remember seeing a bunch of Bulls games, and never thought Armstrong was THAT good...

I had this thought while reading your comment.

I don't believe the rumour that MJ was forced to retire by Stern because of his gambling, but if you imagine some kind of backroom power struggle between Stern and Jordan, then you can imagine Stern pulling strings to prove to Jordan that the league made him and not vice versa. Hence, delusionally: "See, we can make BJ Armstrong a star, just like we made you a star."

As I said, I don't believe any of this, but it's an interesting idea.

I mean, the dude was clearly not an All-Star... starter...

My greatest miss was when Washington got Mitch Richmond and Rod Stricktland together. I mean we got the guy leading the league in assists with this super star who just doesn't have a good team. That was going to be the best back court EVER! Well or at least it was going to be a second round team.

And they had Howard, who was a big name who scores good bit!

Turns out...some of the posters here are right. You need to watch players, and what everyone who always defends Mitch Richmond when I say he wasn't a legit hall guy always forget to mention. NOBODY outside of his local fans saw him play on the kings! They had like one national TV game a year! Turns out he sucked even with better teammates.

[Capn'O]

Yeah, Jon. I had the baseball encyclopedia too and wowed my peers with my knowledge!

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

One of the reasons those of us who grew up on basketball cards are prone to stats. That's really how we first knew players outside of the mega stars who got most of the national games. The better you were with reading a stat sheet the better you understood a trade.

Totally. That said, I recently revisited the trade that sent Charles Smith to NYK in '92. They were just coming off an exhilarating series against the Bulls where it really looked like we had a shot at beating them and running to the title. While we were losing Xavier McDaniel, Knicks fans were by and large thrilled to be bringing in a 20 point scorer next to Ewing. But it didn't work out. Smith never really found a role with the Knicks and while they did make the finals in '94 it was almost in spite of Smith. Then, of course, the '93 Bulls series where he couldn't hit a contested layup to push Game 7.

So I watched some tape of Smith on the Clippers and it hit me. Why the hell did anyone think this would work? First of all, he was clearly a power forward and the Knicks kept Oakley for this trade. He didn't have the handles to be a small forward nor the speed to keep up with better small forwards on defense. But second, most of his points came on the break or otherwise assisted. He wasn't a halfcourt creator, so trading Jackson and slowing the game down was obviously going to hinder his impact with the team. X-Man, a true small forward, was a FAR better fit even if he was starting to age.

And it hit me again - we have FAR more access to tape of Charles Smith on the Clippers now than we would have had at the time. Nobody was watching a late night Clippers game to check up on Charles Smith. You'd only know about him because of his basketball card. Fans were really riding blind in comparison in how we watched the game. It was easier to sell narratives because that's all we had.

[NZB2323]

Maybe open the paper to scour box scores.

Just saying this makes me feel really old.

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

That’s how fantasy football started. Guys would cut out stats from newspapers and mail them to each other.

[dhsilv2]

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

One of the reasons those of us who grew up on basketball cards are prone to stats. That's really how we first knew players outside of the mega stars who got most of the national games. The better you were with reading a stat sheet the better you understood a trade.

I agree more with Capn'O: I think being prone to stats is a natural tendency, and basketball cards filled that inborn desire. Kind of tangential to what you're saying, though...

Not trying to start a philosophical argument...

Not sure we're speaking different thing. It was just for SOOOOOOOOOO long, we just didn't know who so many guys were on bad teams. We got 1 national game a year for some teams. So our ONLY knowledge when a trade or something happened were those stats. It was just all we had to go on.

[Sealab2024]

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

One of the reasons those of us who grew up on basketball cards are prone to stats. That's really how we first knew players outside of the mega stars who got most of the national games. The better you were with reading a stat sheet the better you understood a trade.

For 12 year old me there was nothing better than a page in the sports section full of NBA box scores. If you knew how to read them you could almost tell how the game went just by reading the basic numbers. There were a bunch of guys that I only got to see play maybe once a year but who I followed religiously in the box scores.

[dhsilv2]

Yeah, Jon. I had the baseball encyclopedia too and wowed my peers with my knowledge!

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

One of the reasons those of us who grew up on basketball cards are prone to stats. That's really how we first knew players outside of the mega stars who got most of the national games. The better you were with reading a stat sheet the better you understood a trade.

Totally. That said, I recently revisited the trade that sent Charles Smith to NYK in '92. They were just coming off an exhilarating series against the Bulls where it really looked like we had a shot at beating them and running to the title. While we were losing Xavier McDaniel, Knicks fans were by and large thrilled to be bringing in a 20 point scorer next to Ewing. But it didn't work out. Smith never really found a role with the Knicks and while they did make the finals in '94 it was almost in spite of Smith. Then, of course, the '93 Bulls series where he couldn't hit a contested layup to push Game 7.

So I watched some tape of Smith on the Clippers and it hit me. Why the hell did anyone think this would work? First of all, he was clearly a power forward and the Knicks kept Oakley for this trade. He didn't have the handles to be a small forward nor the speed to keep up with better small forwards on defense. But second, most of his points came on the break or otherwise assisted. He wasn't a halfcourt creator, so trading Jackson and slowing the game down was obviously going to hinder his impact with the team. X-Man, a true small forward, was a FAR better fit even if he was starting to age.

And it hit me again - we have FAR more access to tape of Charles Smith on the Clippers now than we would have had at the time. Nobody was watching a late night Clippers game to check up on Charles Smith. You'd only know about him because of his basketball card. Fans were really riding blinds in comparison in how we watched the game. It was easier to sell narratives because that's all we had.

I just made reference to the 98 or 99 trade with Richmond, but I think this doubles back on the bias we all see now for the allstar games of the past.

We used to care about the allstar game because it was our only chance to really see a lot of players. Maybe YOU stayed up the ONE time a year a trash team was on national TV on the west coast. But lets be real, nobody made sure to see everyone of those games. So an allstar like Richmond was a guy nobody had seen play since his warriors days on SAC....other than the allstar game. And fans would form their view of his game based on those games.

It's really wild to think but even in the late 90's we still didn't have access like today. Now days I can see 10-15 minute recaps that are actually good of nearly every game the next day. You were lucky if you got 5 plays on sport center or espn news. And I can watch any game I want through streams...legal or not every single night of the week.

[scrabbarista]

One of the reasons those of us who grew up on basketball cards are prone to stats. That's really how we first knew players outside of the mega stars who got most of the national games. The better you were with reading a stat sheet the better you understood a trade.

I agree more with Capn'O: I think being prone to stats is a natural tendency, and basketball cards filled that inborn desire. Kind of tangential to what you're saying, though...

Not trying to start a philosophical argument...

Not sure we're speaking different thing. It was just for SOOOOOOOOOO long, we just didn't know who so many guys were on bad teams. We got 1 national game a year for some teams. So our ONLY knowledge when a trade or something happened were those stats. It was just all we had to go on.

I was speaking to the cause and effect relationship in your first sentence. Based on your responses, it seems clear I was right that this was tangential to what you were saying. To be clear, I agree with the rest of what you've written. In that sense, you're right that you and Capn'O are not speaking different things.

[Clyde Frazier]

Maybe open the paper to scour box scores.

Just saying this makes me feel really old.

The idea of having to wait until you got the newspaper in the morning to know the stats for games out of your region seems.........so strange to me.

Sounds kind of cool though.

It made mornings exciting.

To that effect, the papers were also your main source of stats documentation until that year's sports cards came out the following season and the papers would only show your league leaders. Which is why sports cards boomed during that time. People had some access to national games but not complete so cards supplemented that for people who wanted a bigger taste. Of course, with those you were only getting basic stats but the stats were actually a big part of it.

It was a pretty big deal when all of a sudden you could go to nba.com and look up anyone.

So these guys on old message boards... they just didn't have a whole lot of data to go by. I remember a lot of these proto advanced stats getting talked about in the early 2000s on the usenet boards. Some of the bigger nerds on the boards were developing efficiency measures in real time. Maybe tsherkin can weigh in there because the Raptors board was particularly prolific in that way iirc.

A few more "**** I'm old" memories:

- Poring over my dad's old NBA guides and registers from the 80s looking up stats of players I'd heard of but never saw live. Hard copy bball reference right there!

- The luxury of getting knicks and nets games on cable, doubling the number of games we could watch vs most other people. And then later on randomly getting WGN bulls games in NY!

- Eagerly awaiting the street & smith NBA preview magazine to come out to commemorate the start of a new season

- Calling a service called "sports phone" to get live score updates

- Later on syncing my handspring visor (palm pilot) every morning before school to get stories from sporting news, SI, etc.