| Methodology: I used a number of sources to
identify a player's numbers and his statistics. For statistics, I used the following resources. Sometimes the information conflicted. When they did this is how I rank the data 1. Game films. 2. Home team's programs-My assumption is the home team is pretty reliable on it's own roster. Hopefully that's not a false assumption. 3. Media guide-I used these mainly for players who were on the roster, but didn't make it into a game. They are not that reliable for general numbers. Media guides were put out before the season. As players got cut, players would switch their numbers. 4. Road programs-Road programs in the early years of the league were prone to misspellings and number errors. 5. http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/ This is an incredible website. 6. Photographs-This is a chicken and egg problem. You need to know the number to identify the player. You also need to know the jersey style to accurately identify the year. Over time you recognize both and can be reasonably accurate. Sometimes a player wore 2 different numbers in a year. In that case, I separate the numbers with a comma, e.g. "10,20." It was not uncommon for a player to really have 2 numbers in a year. However, my sense is most of the times it is a bookkeeping error and not a real number change. One of the two numbers is right. |