I don't know how many people realize this, but recently I added box scores for the 1969-70 NBA season to the site. For example, here is the box score for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's debut. (Yes, I know Jabbar was known as Lew Alcindor back then, but it's easier if he has a common name throughout the site.)

The box scores were entered by a team of volunteers from the APBRmetrics message board. The box scores were obtained from old issues of The Sporting News, and unfortunately they only contained four player statistics: FG, FT, FTA, and PTS. I know there are newspapers (such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times) that ran more complete box scores for their local teams, so someday I'm sure I'll go back and fill in some of the blanks that we have.

This project is still very much in its infant stages, and at some point in the future I will be sending out a call for volunteers. However, before that can happen I am going to develop a web form that can be used to input box score data. Before the form is accepted, a check will be made to make sure that things like player points for each team add up to the team's point total. That is going to take some time for me to code, though, so don't look for it in the immediate future.

If you would like to play around with the 1969-70 box scores, I have posted them for download on the site. The files are free; all I ask is that you carefully read and follow the instructions given in the "Notices" section of the previous link.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.