Player's Starting and Ending Year?

It sounds like you are referring to one of the tables in the downloadable data. However, I'm not sure which table you are referring to.

If you are using that data, and have it loaded in a database, I would issue an SQL like this:

select pi.PlayerID as PlayerID, concat_ws(' ',FirstName,LastName) as Name, TeamID, DraftYear, min(YearPlayed) as Start, max(YearPlayed) as End from PlayerInfo pi left join Players p using(PlayerID) left join Draft d using(PlayerID) group by PlayerID, Name, TeamID order by PlayerID, Start, End;

The result will look something like this:

+----------+---------------------+--------+-----------+-------+------+
| PlayerID | Name                | TeamID | DraftYear | Start | End  |
+----------+---------------------+--------+-----------+-------+------+
|        1 | Darrin Jackson      | SEI    |      1995 |  1996 | 1996 | 
|        2 | Makoto Sasaki       | SEI    |      1984 |  1996 | 1998 | 
|        2 | Makoto Sasaki       | HAN    |      1984 |  1999 | 2000 | 
|        3 | Ken Suzuki          | SEI    |      1988 |  1996 | 2002 | 
|        3 | Ken Suzuki          | YAK    |      1988 |  2003 | 2007 | 
|        4 | Tsutomu Itoh        | SEI    |      1982 |  1996 | 2007 | 
|        5 | Kazuhiro Kiyohara   | SEI    |      1986 |  1996 | 1996 | 
|        5 | Kazuhiro Kiyohara   | YOM    |      1986 |  1997 | 2005 | 
|        5 | Kazuhiro Kiyohara   | ORX    |      1986 |  2006 | 2008 | 
|      ... | ...                 | ...    |       ... |   ... |  ... | 
|     1000 | Bill Selby          | YOK    |      1997 |  1997 | 1997 | 
|     1001 | Takahiro Ohno       | YOK    |      1997 |  1997 | 2001 | 
|     1002 | Yoshihito Ishii     | YOK    |      1997 |  1997 | 2002 | 
|     1002 | Yoshihito Ishii     | SEI    |      1997 |  2003 | 2008 | 
|     1003 | Yoshio Yoshida      | HAN    |      1953 |  1997 | 1998 | 
|     1004 | Tadahiro Hoshiyama  | HAN    |      1997 |  1997 | 2000 | 
|      ... | ...                 | ...    |       ... |   ... |  ... | 
|     2000 | Kei Hosoya          | LOT    |      2006 |  2006 | 2008 | 
|     2001 | Daniel Carrasco     | SFT    |      2006 |  2006 | 2006 | 
|     2002 | Yoshiaki Fujioka    | SFT    |      2006 |  2006 | 2008 | 
|     2003 | Keisuke Kattoh      | SFT    |      2006 |  2006 | 2008 | 
|     2004 | Akihiro Yanase      | SFT    |      2006 |  2006 | 2008 | 
|      ... | ...                 | ...    |       ... |   ... |  ... | 
+----------+---------------------+--------+-----------+-------+------+

As you can see at the beginning, there is a problem with this. The first year in the PlayerInfo table (which is a table of information that changes year to year, stint to stint), does not equal the year for which the player was drafted. That's because I started the database in 1995, then overwrote a lot of data in 1996 before realizing I needed yearly data preserved in a separate table (the birth of the PlayerInfo table separate from Players).

If you would like some consulting done with regards to the data, or are looking for more detailed information on a specific player or set of players, feel free to contact me off of the forum. E-mail is my handle @ this domain.