How to play
Five Out
A lineup that really shared the floor. Name the fifth.
The floor
A round is 5 lineups from 5 different teams, drawn from the 2024–25 and 2025–26 regular seasons. Each is a real five that genuinely played together, laid out across a half court with the team, the season and four of the names. The fifth spot is empty. Type who was in it.
Nothing here is a hypothetical. The play-by-play records all ten players on the floor for every event, so every unit on the board can be checked to the second: how long it played, in how many games, and what the score did while it was out there. That last number is shown once you have answered.
The minutes
Every board prints how many minutes the five logged together, and that number is the difficulty. Nine hundred minutes is a starting unit that stayed healthy; you should know it. A hundred is a closing five or a starting unit that lost somebody in December, and only that team’s fans will. A round is ordered from the most-played to the least, so it gets harder as it goes.
The floor for a unit to be asked about is 80 minutes together. Below it the fifth stops being knowable and starts being a coin toss among the bench, and nothing about a coin toss is worth a puzzle. Of the 1,092 fives that logged at least half an hour together across 2024–25 and 2025–26, 271 clear the bar.
Two guesses
You get 2 at each lineup. Name the fifth on the first and it is worth 2points: you knew it cold. Miss, and the board shows you the missing player’s position and their season line for that team — points, rebounds, assists, starts. Name them from that and it is worth 1.
The second guess is a different skill and the scoring says so. Working out that the missing piece is a centre averaging eleven and nine on a team whose other centre is already on the floor is real reasoning. It is just not the thing the game is named after.
How you win
10 points across the round. 6 is a win.
- The minutes are in the hundreds
- Name the starter who is missing. Do not overthink it.A five that played that much together is a starting unit, and the missing name is the starter you cannot see.
- The four you can see are all starters and the minutes are low
- Think injury replacement, not sixth man.Starting units survive one absence: the same four plus whoever filled in for three weeks. That fill-in is the fifth.
- Two of the four are bench players
- This is a closing or second unit. The fifth is usually the star who stays on with the bench.
- You have missed and the clue is a low-minute line with many starts
- Look for a player who was traded or hurt midseason.Twenty starts in thirty games is a starter who was not there all year, which narrows a roster to one or two names.
The hidden fifth is always somebody with at least 20 starts or 600 points for that team that season. The four shown can be anybody in the unit - an obscure teammate is a clue, not a trap.
Scoring
2 for a cold answer, 1 on the clue, 0 for a miss, out of 10. The shared leaderboard shows it as a percentage.
One round a day, the same five lineups for everybody. Unlimited pulls another five whenever you want more.
Golfle is an independent game platform and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the NBA, any member team, or the NBPA. Team and player names are used for identification and factual game context.