Starting Five — Naming the Team From Flags, Numbers and Positions
Starting Five draws a team's recognisable lineup on a court diagram — but every player is reduced to a country flag, a jersey number and a position label. Your job is to name the team. Wrong guesses unlock hints in order: conference, division, one player's initials, then the team's arena. The mode is pure deduction, and the good news is that an NBA starting five leaks far more identity than it seems. This guide shows you how to read it.
The how-to-play guide covers the basics; here we get tactical.
Foreign flags are the skeleton key
Most NBA starters carry the US flag, so every non-US flag is a flare in the night. The international superstars of the modern league are concentrated on a relatively small number of rosters, which means a single rare flag can end the puzzle by itself. One Slovenian flag on a guard, one Serbian or Greek flag on a big, one French flag on a seven-footer, one Cameroonian flag — each of these points to a very short list of teams, sometimes exactly one.
When you see a foreign flag, start there. Ask which famous international player of that nationality plays that position, then which team he anchors. Two non-US flags in the same lineup is often a complete solve before you have looked at a single number — the modern league simply does not have many rosters with two specific international stars in specific roles.
Numbers do the heavy lifting
When the flags are all stars-and-stripes, jersey numbers take over, and famous numbers are practically trademarks. You can name half the league's franchises from one star's digits plus his position — the connection between an iconic number and the player who made it iconic is one of the most reliable facts in the game. (Our piece on iconic jersey numbers is essentially a cheat sheet for this mode.)
Work the combination, not the number alone: #30 on a point guard means something completely different from #30 on a forward. The position label disambiguates numbers that several players share.
Two cautions. First, role players' numbers are far less famous than stars' numbers — so anchor your deduction on the one or two digits you are genuinely sure about, and let the rest be confirmation. Second, watch for digits that read similarly at a glance: a #1 and a #11, or a #5 and a #15, can blur on a small diagram, so give the lineup a careful second look before committing.
Positions sketch the era and the system
The positional shape of the five tells you what kind of team you are looking at. A lineup listing two traditional bigs — a true power forward and a true center — plays a different style from one with four switchable wings around a single big. If the five reads PG-SG-SF-PF-C with classic sizes, think conventional roster construction and the teams built that way. A heavy-wing, positionless five narrows you to the handful of teams that have leaned hardest into modern switch-everything basketball. Use shape to break ties between two otherwise plausible rosters.
Spend hints like currency
Each hint costs a wrong guess, so spend only when it changes your answer:
- Conference halves the league — cheap, and well worth buying when you are stuck 60/40 between two teams in different conferences.
- Division gets you to five teams or fewer, often two or three.
- Initials of one player is the secret weapon: combined with that player's flag, number and position, it is nearly a full identification of the person, and therefore the team.
- Arena is the mercy hint. If you have put in your reps on Arena Spotter, the arena reveal is instant checkmate.
There is no lose state, so a strategic wrong guess to buy the conference is a perfectly honourable opening move when nothing clicks immediately.
One French flag, one famous number: a full solve
The diagram shows a five with one French flag on the center, the rest American, and a recognisable number on the point guard. Start with the flag: a French center on an NBA starting five is a very short list. Cross-reference the point guard's famous number and position, and the two facts together usually land on one franchise. If you are still split between two teams, buy the division hint — five teams becomes one — and confirm with the point guard's initials if needed. That is a two-guess solve on a puzzle that looked like pure mystery.
When the whole five is American
The hardest Starting Five puzzles strip away your best clue: every flag is the US flag. Now you are working purely from numbers, positions and shape, and the discipline shifts. Find the one number you are most certain about — usually a superstar's signature digit — and anchor everything to it. From that one player, the position labels tell you whether the surrounding cast fits a team you can name. Resist the urge to weigh all five numbers equally; role players' digits are noise, and chasing them is how solvers talk themselves into the wrong franchise.
When even the numbers are ambiguous, fall back on positional shape and buy the conference hint early. An all-American five that plays two traditional bigs belongs to a different short list of teams than one running four wings, and conference plus shape together often gets you to two or three candidates — at which point one player's initials closes it.
The hint order is a budget
Because the hints always arrive conference → division → initials → arena, you can plan your spending in advance. If you are completely lost, the most efficient path is usually to buy conference and division immediately (two guesses that together cut the league from thirty teams to about five), then deduce from the five rather than guessing blindly and wasting attempts on long shots. Spending two cheap hints to reach a five-team shortlist beats four random guesses every time.
The meta-tip
The lineups are hand-curated to be recognisable — the five you would expect to see on a team poster, not an injury-report shuffle of deep bench players. So if your deduction lands on a plausible-but-boring roster, reconsider. The intended answer is whichever candidate team's starting five would look iconic on a court diagram. When two readings compete, pick the more famous, more "poster-worthy" lineup; that is almost always the one the puzzle was built from.
Try it on today's Starting Five, and work through the other strategy guides to sharpen the cross-mode skills it leans on.