What It Means To Puzzle

Or my new obsession, HoopGrids

It started simply enough, as all new obsessions do.

One simple tweet.

Then a click.

My Twitter friend Bryan Harvey posted something with a grid.

It was a puzzle featuring my favorite sport, the NBA.

HoopGrids? Say what?

I quickly clicked over and realized it’s like your own personal trivia for basketball players.

Or Wordle for the NBA.¹

I quickly sent it to my basketball text thread.

They were immediately into it for the slow season of the NBA, that is the late summer.

This has been a lifesaver for the text thread. Otherwise, it would be bleak. Very.

I’ll go deeper into HoopGrid specifics in a minute, but a quick word on puzzles & games:

• HoopGrids is a simple game, like a crossword puzzle

• My grandma and my great-grandmother used to work on crossword puzzles all the time, like stacks and stacks of crossword books (pre-Internet) and they would underline key passages, and know a lot of three-letter answers (similar to Scrabble in that regard) and the crossword puzzle would come every day in the newspaper and they would do it. I once asked if they ever checked their answers, but they never did. They knew if they got it right or not. Then my great-grandmother passed away, and my grandma kept doing it, but I don’t think she still does it or gets the newspaper anymore, but she’s still in the same house, I went there a few months ago

• The trivia aspect of both I think is important. It makes us feel like all of the random knowledge accumulation wasn’t a waste

• The facts and figures add worth

• There’s a certain personality for it, for sure, somewhat erudite, somewhat arrogant

• But puzzles: My wife plays a Candy Crush game almost every night (it’s not CC, it’s something else)

• There’s an accomplishment, there’s an achievement, there’s genuine satisfaction in the pieces fitting together when nothing else in life quite works that way.

• It’s not messy, it’s straightforward.

• There is a right answer.

• The same with crossword puzzles. The same with HoopGrids.

Here’s How HoopGrids Works (IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE NBA SKIP TO THE NEXT SECTION)

I’m sure there is some other popular game this is stealing from, I just don’t know what.

But like a grid, you have to fill in an answer that fits both the X and Y axis.

The categories are set on each side.

Quick Rules:

• The answers are always players.

• You get an individual player score for how “rare” the player is, compared to other players

• You get an overall rarity score (the lower the better)

• You can get a score in comparison to other players (percentage higher than others)

Here’s a blank one:

Smart people do this from memory, without trying to look anything up.

What really happens is that it takes one part memory, one part of my personal affinity for certain players, and one part of looking for players and their stats via Basketball Reference.

Here’s how I did on this one:

My sweet spot is probably 00s to early 10s basketball. I can remember a lot of those players. The history goes pretty far back from what I can tell, the creators captured all NBA players in their database.

You can see that .12% and .66% of respondents picked Randy White and Tony Delk respectively.

That drives down the Rarity Score and helps you do better than the masses.

Arcane random basketball knowledge is rewarded.

I’m particularly proud of Nick Van Exel and Josh Howard in this one. One time I got Nick Young and JaVale McGee in the same one, so I was proud of that too. Cedric Ceballos too.

I am fond of the swing guys who had a lot of personality and were always sorta unhinged. (Google FreeDarko for the complete guide on these players).

If you like basketball, give it a try. New ones drop every night.

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More Things

1. What Happened to Wirecutter? The Internet Happened. At The Atlantic.

2. My former co-worker Jean wrote a viral piece about Ask vs. Guess Culture. Really interesting dichotomy for approaching the world. At Substack.

3. Man Called Fran by John Jeremiah Sullivan. At Harper’s. Great piece for homeowners, great piece for people who used to live in Wilmington, NC (like me!), great piece for people who like “slice of life"-type stories, great piece for people who like interesting writing.

4. I watched 20 Feet From Stardom the other night. It’s been on my list forever, and can’t believe it’s 10 years old? A good look at the lives of backup singers, their evolution, and when they should’ve made it big (if at all). On Max (for the moment).

5. A ton of great albums out in the past few days. Here are some from bands I like:

   1. “No Joy” by Spanish Love Songs

   2. “Find a Way Home” by MxPx

   3. “Sumday: Excess Baggage” by Grandaddy

   4. “The Window” by Ratboys

6. Currently Reading: The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. Never heard of this until the recent re-release, but it’s about the lives of secretaries and typists at a publishing house in 50s NYC. Written and published in 1958. Mad Men vibes but from the female POV.

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Last Thing

“I wanna make a jigsaw puzzle that's 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says 'go outside.'“ — Demetri Martin

Keep going,

-Josh Spilker

1. I KNOW THAT’S NOW HOW WORDLE WORKS