Your first basketball game, you look at the scoreboard and feel overwhelmed by all the information?
Don’t worry – we all felt the same way. In this article, we explain exactly what you can read on the scoreboard and where you can find which information.
On the scoreboard in German leagues, you always see the home team on the left and the away team on the right. In our example below, Germany is playing at home against the Czech Republic.
In case of doubt, you can also recognize which page is for which team by the logos (for international matches, the flags are shown here, otherwise the respective club logo, as you can see in the picture above).
The large white numbers to the left and right of the logos are the total points, i.e. the score display. Here, the German women’s national team is currently leading 37 to 35.
If you look through the board from top to bottom, you will see the members of the teams on both sides.
You can read the following information here:
First the jersey number of the respective player, then the player’s name (here: surname and first letter of the first name).
The green dots next to it indicate the player’s personal fouls.
The yellow number to the far right of each name shows how many points the player has scored in the game so far.
Let’s take another look at the country flags. To the right of the German flag you can see a small red three. These are the team fouls for the respective quarter. In our example, the Germans have collected three team fouls, while the Czechs already have five.
Why is this important? As soon as a team exceeds the “foul limit”, the generic team automatically receives a free throw for every further foul, regardless of whether the foul occurred during the throw or not. This rule ensures that the defense does not foul “wildly” to stop the flow of the game. The foul limit applies from the fifth foul per quarter. This means that the Czech team has already exceeded it.
Below the display for the team fouls, you can see two small squares or bars in our image. These are the timeouts that the team has taken so far. During normal playing time, each team has five timeouts at its disposal. Two during the first half and three more during the second half. If there is overtime, each team receives an additional timeout.
At the bottom, in the middle of the board, you will see something very important: the music box. Here you can see the remaining time of the current quarter.
You may be wondering why the dividing dots between the minutes and seconds are red: this little detail tells you immediately whether the game is currently running or the clock has been stopped. The dots flash in time with the shot clock. As soon as the game is interrupted (e.g. by a whistle), the display stops flashing. And of course the time no longer changes.
Last but not least, you can also see here which quarter the game is currently in.
Depending on which league you are in or how modern the scoreboard in the hall is, the views may vary slightly. Sometimes the personal fouls are on the left, sometimes the team points are in a different color.
But don’t worry: once you have understood the basic principle, you will find the most important information in each version within seconds.
