Thanks for an excellent attempt. I explored it further with replacing 'career years' instead of games, so I modified the code little bit.

        
my $player_count = 0;

open(IN, "players");
while(<IN>){
  ($player,$years) =split /\t/;
  my($start,$end) = split /\-/,$years;
  $player_count++;
  foreach my $year ($start..$end){
    push @{$games[$year]},$player_count;
  }
}
[download]

Also modified code for eliminating empty rows. It works great.