Draft legends. Let the record prove it.

It deals you eras and asks you to fill a starting five, then plays the whole 82-game season and the playoffs to find out whether your five could actually carry it. Every card is a real season a player had, not a career average.

From the current league back through the shot-clock decades to the league's early years. Cards carry that season's real scoring, rebounding and playmaking lines along with the honours attached to it.

It is judged against the pace and the league it happened in. Teams once put up a hundred shots a night, so raw totals from those years look enormous and modern efficiency looks quiet. Rating each season against its own era is the only way both are readable on one board.

Yes, more than in most drafts here, because you are only filling five seats. Five scorers who all need the ball is the most common way a spectacular-looking roster loses in April.

A single shared five, live for the calendar day. Same spins for everybody worldwide, so the leaderboard afterwards is measuring your decisions and nothing else.

It has its own board with its own record book, kept entirely separate. Folding two leagues into one pool would make both sets of numbers meaningless, so we do not.

All 56 franchises on the board, including relocated and defunct clubs, each split into its real eras. The 1980s and the 2010s of the same city are separate spins with separate rosters, because the players available are the ones who actually played there.

That is the point of it. Five seats can hold a 1960s centre beside a 2010s guard, because each is drafted from the era the reel landed on. The result then plays out as a single team rather than as a nostalgia list.

Fewer seats means every pick matters more than it does in the twelve-seat sports. Positional balance still counts, but with a short roster the strongest available player is usually the right pick, and passing on a great one to fill a slot is how boards get lost.

No. The archive opens in the 1940s and the board deals whichever era it lands on, so knowing the 1980s or the 1960s is worth exactly as much as knowing last season. A fan of one decade drafts well whenever that decade comes up.

All-NBA, All-NBA Team, NBA All-Defensive Team and the rest the league keeps. Pace has moved so far that per-game lines from different decades barely compare — an honour still does.

The NBA record opens in 1947 — later than baseball, football or hockey — and 463 figures hold Hall-of-Fame membership. A shorter history puts the great eras closer together than anywhere else here.