1980-81 NBA season

Elo moves after every game by how surprising the result was and by how big the margin was, damped so a blowout by a heavy favourite counts for less than the same blowout by an underdog. One pool per season, so the ratings are comparable across the whole league but not across eras.

Week 0 is the preseason seed, carried over from the previous season and adjusted by hand for the roster as it stands. It is an input to the season, not a result of it.

Three records, because they are three different things. Regular season is the 82-game year and is what the seeding comes from. Playoffs is the postseason run, blank for a team that did not make it, which is not the same as 0-0. Total is the two added together. The Elo column keeps moving through the postseason, so a team can climb after its regular season has finished. The NBA Cup final counts toward neither the regular season nor the playoffs officially; from its date it is carried in the Playoffs column here, so the two finalists read one game more than the official postseason record.

GB div is games behind the division leader on the date shown (the conference leader before divisions). GB playoff is games behind the last place that keeps a season going in the conference: from 2021 that is 10th, the last play-in place, and a team in the play-in shows how far it sits off 6th. It follows the seed column, so it starts when the seeds do.

Rounds run left to right in the order they were played. The field, the number of rounds and the series length have all changed repeatedly, so the shape here is whatever that season actually had rather than a modern bracket imposed on it. From 2020 the play-in sits below the bracket: those games decided who entered, so a team beaten there did not have a playoff run.

Every other section on this page is a club. These are the people: the individual awards, the All-NBA teams and the All-Star selections, all as the workbook records them. A player’s All-Star entry carries which appearance it was for them, so a seventh selection reads differently from a first.

Game Score is a composite rating of how good a game was to watch, built from how close it finished, how much the result went against the odds, how far the ratings moved, what was at stake and how highly rated both sides were. It is roughly zero-centred, so an average game sits near zero and anything past two is rare. It is the same metric the all-time and by-decade boards use, so a game keeps the same score wherever it appears.