Starting in 1976

1976-77 is the first season in the file. A run from here can last the full twenty years, which carries you through 1995-96. It is also the season where the draft list in the file is least like a single clean board.

The league you walk into

The file has 22 clubs in 1976. It grows slowly after that: 23 in 1980, 25 in 1988, 27 in 1989, 29 in 1995, and 30 from 2004 through the end of the data in 2025. The roster limit in 1976 is twelve. It stays twelve until 2005, then becomes fifteen. You will feel the twelve-man cap if you try to hoard a class. A pick you cannot house is a pick you do not get to use, and cutting a man only frees the spot. It does not mint another selection.

Four clubs had no previous season in this league to carry players over from: Indiana, Denver, San Antonio, and the club the file labels NYN in 1976. A club in that spot keeps the men who played, up to the limit, the same way an expansion club does. Everyone else is built from whoever was on the list last year and is still on it. That inherited group is deliberately small. The rest of a real roster arrived in the off-season, so they belong in the pool.

The real title that year, the one your grade is measured against if you take that club, is Portland's. Every simulated season is still 82 games. 1976's real records in the file are 82 games already, so this particular year does not need the lockout scaling that 1998-99, 2011-12 and the shortened seasons around 2020 do. The scoring baseline stored for 1976 is 106.6 points a game. Later seasons swing from 91 in 1998 up to 115.3 in 2025, which is why a rating is scaled inside its own year before it is compared with any other.

Why the draft list looks wrong

The file tags 43 men as drafted in 1976, with a pick number. Four of those numbers are shared by two men each: 1, 3, 7 and 10. John Lucas II (Houston, rookie rating 56, peak 64 in 1983) and Artis Gilmore (Chicago, rookie 71, peak 74 in 1977) are both stored as pick 1. Several rows carry an old club name in the college field, Kentucky Colonels and Spirits of St. Louis among them, rather than a university. This page will not invent a clean order those rows do not have. If you open 1976 in the game, trust the board you are shown over a memory of a single first overall pick.

The names that matter for a long run are easier to read off the peaks than off the top of that list.

• Alex English, pick 23, Milwaukee. His 1976 rating is 40. His peak is 81, in 1982. A twenty-year run from 1976 includes that peak. A one-season run does not, and a 40 is what you would be drafting for the year in front of you.
• Robert Parish, pick 8, Golden State. Rookie rating 65. Peak 80 in 1980. He is already useful, and he gets better inside a short run, not only inside a long one.
• Adrian Dantley, pick 6, Buffalo. That is the city the file uses in 1976. Rookie rating 64, peak 77 in 1983.

Gilmore's 71 is one of the better rookie numbers on the list, and his peak, 74, is the next year. He is a present-tense player in this file, not a twenty-year project. Lucas, the other man stored at pick 1, never rates higher than 64. Taking the first row because it says 1 is the mistake this whole game is built to let you refuse.

How to think about a 1976 start

A one-season grade here is the list you inherited plus one messy draft. The grade rules say that plainly: over one year, the draft has not had time to become a career. Five seasons gets you to 1980-81, which is far enough for Parish's peak and not far enough for English's best year. Twenty seasons, The Full Epic, is on the menu here, and it is on the menu for every start year through 2006-07. From 1976 it runs through 1995-96. It is not a privilege of the early years.

Contracts default on. In this era the cap and the trade window are still the rules you chose at setup, not a different sport. Rivals still cannot see a later season. English at 40 is what they can see. You can see the 81, if you have looked. Whether your run includes 1982 is the part you decided when you picked the length.

The other early boards get cleaner. 1984 is the one people mean when they talk about a redraft. All of the guides use the same file, including this one's duplicate pick numbers, which are left in because deleting them would be a different dataset from the game.