NLSC Your source for basketball video games.
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m paying tribute to Doug’s Stats, an essential modding resource in the early days of our community.
I’ll admit that sometimes I yearn for the World Wide Web of yesteryear, when fansites were king and before social media became everything. Selfishly, it’s because we didn’t have to compete with platforms backed by billionaires, but beyond that, I miss seeing other websites that have the same passion that we do. At this point, we’ve outlasted a number of our contemporaries, from fellow NBA Live fansites to our former host, GameSpy. Some of those sites have been preserved by archive.org, but many others are sadly gone forever.
Occasionally, someone will drop by the Forum or one of our social media pages to reminisce and express joy that we’re still around. Obviously it’s always nice to receive flattering compliments and read people’s positive memories of the NLSC, but I also relate to it because I too am heartened to discover a site I once used to visit is still around decades later. One of those sites is Doug’s Stats, which as I mentioned, was once an essential roster modding resource in our community. Doug’s work definitely deserves recognition – even to this day – so let’s take a look back…way back…
As the name no doubt implies, Doug’s Stats is a website that’s all about statistics, more specifically NBA and MLB stats. This includes year-by-year listings of player and team statistics, going right back to 1988-89 for the NBA and 1994 for MLB. These listings are in text file format, with individual team pages and raw data for the entire league. Before the launch of Basketball Reference, Doug’s Stats was one of the best ways to access that data digitally, and certainly far more convenient than flipping through a printed almanac! Furthermore, our founders were able to make use of those stats listings, thanks to the way that Doug expertly formatted all of the statistical data.
Several of their roster editing utilities, including the NBA Live 95 editor for Windows and the NBA Live Toolkits for NBA Live 98, 99, and 2000, allowed us to import stats from Doug’s text files. Having manually entered new previous season statistics in my rosters for NBA Live 96 – resulting in at least one embarrassing error – I can attest to how much of a timesaver it was to be able to import Doug’s stats in just a couple of clicks! Updating the player statistics helped to generate better simulated performance and award winners in season play, so it was definitely worthwhile. Admittedly, I did stop doing it for games that didn’t have an editor with stat importing functionality!
To that end, while Basketball Reference may be more user-friendly as far as looking up information while working on roster mods, if you’re working on a game that has an editor that can import data from Doug’s text files, they’re still useful today. In fact, as Doug is still updating the site with statistics from the 2025 season, if you wanted to create a current roster update for NBA Live 95 PC, there’s a handy resource at your disposal! You’d still need to create all of the necessary players first, which would take some time as you carefully overwrite text strings with the editor. Once they’re all in place however, they can be assigned 2024 (or 2025) stats in just a couple of seconds.
Unfortunately, none of the NBA 2K editors have included the ability to import stats from Doug’s text files as easily as the old NBA Live roster tools. However, given that RED MC and REDitor II allow us to edit NBA 2K roster files like a spreadsheet, I’m guessing that it may be possible to whip up a solution wherein we can copy and paste the data fairly quickly. In any event, while our community doesn’t make as much use of Doug’s Stats as we did at the height of modding the early NBA Live titles, it’s nice to know that it’s still going all these years later! The data can still be useful for roster modding, and seeing those Looney Tunes images on his site really takes me back!
It’s impossible to say without sounding like I’m stuck in the past and ignoring all of the resources that are now readily available to us, but like so many people my age, there are times when I really do miss the “old internet”. We lost something special with the transition from fansites and other passion projects like Doug’s Stats to social media platforms and the current landscape of the World Wide Web. Not everything was perfect, of course. Old message boards and forums could be toxic just like social media, and not all fansites were created equal. There was genuine love there, though. No algorithms, no clout chasing…just enthusiasm for various hobbies and interests.
Sadly, not only has the culture around content creation changed – so much so that it spawned the terms “content creation” and “content creators” in the first place – but as I noted, so many of the websites that embodied the spirit of Web 1.0 disappeared along with it. In hindsight, we could’ve and should’ve done a better job of preserving mods and other resources from the early days of our community, many of which had been uploaded to sites hosted on free services such as Angelfire and Yahoo! GeoCities. For whatever reason, we expected them to be around indefinitely, even after inactive sites were deleted, and Yahoo! GeoCities completely shut down for good in October 2009.
Mind you, it’s not just independently-run fansites on free hosting services that have disappeared over the years. Many sites that were once extremely popular (or in some cases, infamous) have been shut down as they’ve lost funding or been bought out by a bigger company, the creators have lost interest, or some other circumstances have led to them falling into ruin. It’s not just the major players, either. I’m sure we’ve all gone through our bookmarks at some point and been reminded of that moderately popular or cool site we used to visit, decided to drop by for old times’ sake, and been saddened to see that everything is gone. I’m glad (and proud) that we’re a more positive story!
Once again though, when you do recall a site that you once frequented or see it while cleaning out your bookmarks, it’s a joy to discover that it’s still around, especially when it’s actively being updated. That’s what happened with me and Doug’s Stats. Some of his text files were packaged with the aforementioned NBA Live 95 editor to demonstrate the stats importing function, which I was reminded of while browsing my NBA Live 95 folder where the editor and various roster mods are also installed. That prompted me to look up the site to see if it was still going, and lo and behold, there it was! I was certainly pleasantly surprised to see 2025 season stats available as well.
As I said, our community hasn’t been making regular use of those resources for some time – at least as far as I’m aware – but it’s great to know that they’re there if we need them. To that end, I’m not sure if it’s just a passion project for Doug these days, or if there are other entities out there who are making use of those formatted text files to quickly import data. Either way though, as a retro gamer and modder, I’m definitely not judging, nor suggesting that Doug stops doing what he’s doing as long as he’s still motivated to do it! I’ve seen a lot of people lose their passion for online endeavours much quicker, so I truly am delighted to see that he’s still going, much as we are.
To put things into perspective, in May 2024, Pew Research revealed that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by 2023. That doesn’t necessarily mean entire sites disappearing, as it also includes single pages and social media posts that have been deleted or removed from an otherwise functional site or platform. As with older sites, they’re not always preserved by archive.org, either. It’s fascinating, as it goes against the common (and sensible) warning that anything you share online is out there forever, as so many pages and posts aren’t even lasting a decade. With that being said, it’s still advisable to be careful about what you share with the internet!
Nevertheless, it’s proof that online content – from articles to videos to social media posts – can be fleeting. It’s less surprising when we’re talking about websites that were created in the late 90s and early 2000s, i.e. around the dotcom boom/bubble when free web hosting services such as Yahoo! GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod were striving to build online communities. These initiatives are still being championed by social media platforms as well as services such as Wix, though obviously content still can (and does) disappear in an instant. As per Pew Research’s findings, the platform that hosts the content may survive, but pages and posts disappear for a variety of reasons.
I speak from experience when I say how much dedication and sustained enthusiasm it takes to keep an online endeavour going for multiple decades, particularly when it’s basically a passion project. I’m sure that at this point, Doug can say the same! Yes, Basketball Reference may be the primary resource for roster modding nowadays – though some of its research functionality is now a paid service – but it’s awesome that Doug’s Stats is still around, providing raw statistical data in a format that allows it to be imported with the right software. To that point, I’ve toyed with the idea of a current season update for NBA Live 95, so it’s good to know Doug’s stats remain available.
Even if I don’t make use of them in any projects ever again though, I’m very grateful for Doug’s contribution of those stats files in the early days of NBA Live modding. Much like the tools that originally came from communities dedicated to tinkering with other EA Sports titles, it’s an example of how collaborating with people beyond the basketball gaming community has benefitted our modding scene (and hopefully, been beneficial for them as well). Collaborations still occur of course, but the goodwill and selflessness of the Web 1.0 days isn’t always there. As for Doug’s Stats, thanks for all your hard work over the decades! May we both stick around for many years to come!
