The NBA facts archive
	---------------------

The four subdirectories contain separate files for each year.  As a
rule, the year number is the one in which the season ended; so, for
example, the 1989-1990 season is listed under 90.  This makes good
sense, especially for the draft and playoffs.

Each file in the "drafts" directory contains all of the first round
and as many "interesting" names as I bothered to enter from later
rounds.  The very recent drafts, which had only two rounds, are here
in their entirety.  The format is self evident: number of pick, name,
college, team.  An asterisk (*) denotes a team that obtained the
player in a draft-day trade (because I figure that that's the team
that considered that player worthy of that pick).

The "playoffs" directory contains a tree-like description of the
playoffs in that year, with series scores (e.g., 4-2) but no game
scores.  See playoffs/README for details.  (Game scores will be
entered in the "scores" directory.)

The "records" directory contains the final standings of each season.
The divisions are listed from east to west (i.e., Atlantic, Central,
Midwest, Pacific) and tie-breakers are supposed to have been applied.

The "scores" directory covers fewer years, but has a lot of data.  It
contains the 1990 playoffs, the complete 1990-91 and 1990-92 seasons
(including playoffs) and the skeleton of the 1992-93 season.  The
format should be obvious.  In particular, every line that starts with
a percent symbol (%) is essentially a comment.  Some of these comments
are actually supposed to serve as directives for programs that might
manipulate the information: for example, the playoff scores are
separated from the regular season by the comment line "%PLAYOFF".

The "lists" directory is designed to have any other miscellaneous
data.  It has some intresting files: "championships" lists every
champion and runner-up; "franchises" details the history of all
the current NBA teams; "history" tells the year-by-year story in
terms of teams, alignment, playoff structure, etc; and "all-records.Z"
is a compressed file that sums up in one convenient list all the
data of the "records" and "playoffs" directories.

The "stats" directory contains full stats for the 92 and 93 seasons,
as posted to the net by other people.  I'm afraid even the formats
are not the same.

Most of the old data was copied (without permission, of course) from
the big fat blue book (The NBA Encyclopedia).  The newer stuff was
entered as it happened.  If you have additions, corrections or
suggestions, send e-mail to nbastats-admin@athena.mit.edu, home
of the NBASTATS administrators.

As for me, I am no longer at Stanford, so I will probably not have
time or access to work on these archives any more.  Good luck, and
happy hoops!

				Gidi Avrahami
				gidi@cs.stanford.edu

				(March 13, 1992)
				August 11, 1993