1947-2025 BAA/NBA Relational Database

[jfran1524]

TL;DR - I made a database for use with stat tracking in MyNBA Eras. The link is below. Feel free to make a copy and track your own deep dives into NBA history.

Hello there. Hopefully this is being put in the right spot and doesn't violate any rules. If so, I do apologize!

I recently built my own MyNBA Eras-focused blog (https://www.erastribune.com for those interested; still very much a work in progress), and I wanted to share something else I built for use with the website.

Using data available on Basketball-Reference, I built a relational database containing basic, regular season player stats for every BAA and NBA season between 1947 and 2025. The database can be accessed at: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rMMYTvTICRjQgJt7zgnN8t49r33hu-0xA-hWup7gTzg/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to download a copy for your own use.

Important note: this spreadsheet does contain customs Apps Scripts that were used to help populate the databases. There's nothing malicious about them, but if you are wary of that sort of thing, please do not give them permission/access.

Included are several sheets labeled in green (Teams, Seasons, Players, PlayerSeasonTotals, etc.). These are the actual databases housing the historical data. There are also three sheets labeled in light blue. These are the query/report sheets used to manipulate the data. There's one for NBA career totals, one for team career totals, and one for player career totals.

These query sheets allow the user to see career leaders in stat categories throughout each season of NBA history. You can select how many results you want to see (e.g. Top 5, Top 25, Top 100, Top 1,000, etc.). So, if you wanted to see the top 100 NBA leaderboard as of the end of the 1972 NBA season, you could go to the Qry NBA Career sheet, select S1972 from the dropdown, and type 100 in the "No of Leaders" box.

Likewise, if you wanted to see the Top 25 leaders (select stats only for this query) for the Portland Trail Blazers through the 1987 season, you could go to the Qry Team Career sheet, select S1987 from the Season drop down, select T032 from the Team drop down (this is their TeamID from the Teams sheet), and type 25 in the "No of Leaders" box.

Furthermore, if you wanted to see Oscar Robertson's career numbers through the 1968 season, you could go to the Qry Player Career sheet, enter his PlayerID (see the Players sheet for his PlayerID; all PlayerIDs are the same as those used by Basketball-Reference; they were included with the data export to save time), and enter S1968 in the "Cutoff Season" box.

Why is this useful, you might ask. Great question. I see a few uses:

1) I think it is cool to be able to see, at a glance, the top X leaders for the league or for each team at specific points in time.

2) When you play far enough into a MyNBA Eras save file, much of the historic data disappears. When people are bumped from the NBA/team record books in the game, that info is pretty much inaccessible. To my knowledge, after a player retires, there is no easy way to see their season or career stats (beyond the career summary if they make the HoF, and that is only temporary). This database acts as a repository for that data and for each season.

3) There have been some fantastic 1960s and 1970s rosters in 2KShare lately. When loading one of those rosters into MyNBA Eras, the all-time NBA/team records are pretty much useless. If you're playing in 1968 in the Magic vs. Bird Era or Modern Era, Wilt's career stats will already be reflected in the record books. Likely, the version of him in your 1968 league will have his stats count as a separate entry. Also, if you add a retired player back to your league, you can now keep track of their cumulative stats rather than two separate entries in the 2K record books.

With some limitations in terms of the scope of this database, this database and the query sheets help alleviate issues #2 and #3 above. It requires some work from the user, but these databases can be modified how you see fit. If you're playing in the 1968 season, you can delete all the TeamSeasonStats and PlayerSeasonTotals data from S1968 to S2025 and populate it with your own data for the seasons you play through. The same goes for any season/Era you happen to be playing in. Want to start in the Jordan Era, delete all S1992 to S2025 data.

If you add expansion teams to the league, you would need to add them to the Teams database. If you add custom players or use fictional players generated by 2K, you will need to add them to the Players sheet. Season stats from your playthroughs can be added to TeamSeasonStats and PlayerSeasonTotals. To save time and manual data entry, I intend to take screenshots of the end-of-season stat pages in the game and use my LLM of choice to convert them from an image to a spreadsheet/CSV. 

I know this seems like a lot of work, and it is, but if you plan to really dive deep into a re-sim and play through multiple seasons, this database may be a useful tool in tracking the history of your league.

This project was very time-consuming, and I don't intend to make any changes for the time being (I just don't have the time and my focus will move elsewhere), so this spreadsheet is what it is. I hope some of your find it useful.

Thanks!

[Andrew]

Incredible stuff!