Roll Call shows you one real NBA playoff game each day - the season, the date, both teams and the final score - with both rosters hidden. Your job is to name everyone who played in it. Search for a player and select him; if he appeared in that game he lands in his team's column, along with the minutes, points and rebounds he actually recorded that night. The two columns are the point of the layout: you can see at a glance that you have cleared one bench and are still four short on the other. There is no clock and there are no lives, and a wrong guess costs you nothing at all, so this is a memory test rather than a punishment. Name half the men who played and the day is a win. When you are finished, give up to reveal everyone you missed. A small bonus exists for naming a player the box score lists with no minutes recorded, where there is one.
Roll Call is airball.gg's NBA memory game, built on real box scores. Every puzzle comes straight out of our game-log database - 77,274 games and over 1.8 million player lines - and the roster you are asked to name is exactly the set of players who recorded minutes in that game. Nothing is curated or typed by hand, which is why the column matches the box score exactly. Games are drawn from the playoffs only, and only from 1974 onwards: before that, minutes were not consistently recorded, and without minutes there is no way to tell a man who played from a man who only suited up. The final score shown is summed from the box score itself. Only games with a namable roster are used, so you will not be handed a nine-man 1970s box or a thirty-man blowout.
Does the search tell me the answer?
No. The search runs against the entire player database, not against today's roster, so autocompleting a name reveals nothing about whether he played. That is deliberate - a typeahead fed the answer list would hand the game away on the first keystroke.
Why playoff games only?
A random regular-season Tuesday is unanswerable for almost everyone, while a playoff game is something a fan might actually have watched. It keeps the puzzle hard but fair.
Why does it start in 1974?
Minutes played were not consistently recorded before then - entirely absent before 1952 and missing for around 39% of records between 1952 and 1973. Without minutes, the game cannot tell who played from who sat, so it would be asking a question the data cannot answer.
What is the bench bonus?
Some box scores list a man with no minutes recorded. Naming one is worth a bonus, but it never counts toward the win bar - remembering the twelfth man off a 1997 bench should be a flourish, not a requirement. Note that zero minutes is not quite the same as never leaving the bench: the source rounds down, so a man who played under a minute lands here too, occasionally with a basket to his name. In practice these records are sparse, so many games have none.
Where does the final score come from?
It is summed from the box score - each side's points added up, which is what a final score is. Verified against known results.
Player stats, rosters, and career data reflect the most recently completed NBA season until the new season is underway.
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airball.gg is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by the NBA, the NBPA, or any of their teams. Player names and statistics are historical public record, used for informational and entertainment purposes only. Simulated games, results, and stat lines are fictional.