With the NFL Draft kicking off Thursday night, now might be a good time to point out all the draft resources we have available at Pro Football Reference. You can check out:

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While the NBA Playoffs, MLB season, and Stanley Cup Playoffs may be in full swing, football never sleeps. This weekend, the country's most popular sport will take center stage as the NFL Draft descends on Philadelphia.

Last year's draft showed how a smart team can use the draft to turn their fortunes around at warp speed, as the Dallas Cowboys, who went 4-12 in 2015, took Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott with two of their first five picks and then watched as that duo led the team to a 13-3 record and the #1 seed in the NFC. While it may be too much to ask for a team to replicate the feat of finding two franchise-changing, All-Pro skill players in the same draft, Dallas' experience shows that it's not impossible.

Are any teams out there poised to pull off the same feat as Dallas and go from their division's cellar to its throne by shrewd drafting? Is there another Dak Prescott out there, waiting for the right team? Let's dig into those questions and more, with our preview of the 2017 NFL Draft. Read the rest of this entry

We're pleased to announce the newest video in our series showing how to get the most out of our websites. Today's video is all about the stat tables themselves. We've programmed several ways for the site to reorganize and add up stats on the tables for you, just by clicking a button or two. However, many users don't realize these hacks exist. Hopefully, this video will save you some time and also illustrate how to answer questions like "What was Bryce Harper's OPS over his last 10 games" Read the rest of this entry

After an unusually eventful final week of the season that saw Moe Harkless going to great lengths to get paid, featured thrilling closing arguments from all four NBA MVP candidates in what may be the closest race in history, and ended with Dion Waiters and the Miami Heat falling painfully short in their late push for a playoff spot, the field is set for the 2017 NBA Playoffs.

The question that has loomed over the NBA all season is whether any team had the quality to challenge the Golden State Warriors or Cleveland Cavaliers, or if this year would be one long preamble to a third showdown between those teams. While we won't know the answer with certainty until June, there's plenty of reasons to expect that the playoffs won't be a cake-walk for the either the defending champs or their rivals in the East Bay. In fact, in Cleveland's case, by both raw win-loss record and more advanced stats like Simple Rating System or Net Rating, they haven't even been the best team in the East this year.

Still, the playoffs are a different animal from the regular season, and before those teams can think about replaying the 2016 NBA Finals, they have to win their first round matchups, no sure thing given that both the Warriors and Cavaliers are facing a little uncertainty at the moment. For the former, they're tasked with re-integrating Kevin Durant into their offense after finding a major groove in his absence. For the latter, the problems are more severe: in the second half of the season, only the Minnesota Timberwolves and Los Angeles Lakers have been worse on defense than the defending champs.

For Warriors and Cavs fans, as well as those cheering on the Boston Celtics and San Antonio Spurs, a loss in the first round would be a devastating outcome for a season that seemed so promising. Fortunately, this kind of thing rarely happens. Since 2002-03, the year that the NBA changed to its current playoff format with a Best of Seven series in the first round, only four top-two-seeds out of fifty-six have lost in round one.

Today, we're going to take a look at what went wrong for those teams, and what went right for the underdogs who managed to pull off the unthinkable. Read the rest of this entry

With playoffs season upon us, we wanted to point out our 2017 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs section. While it's mostly a shell right now, it will be a good bookmark for info as the playoffs get going. You can find a schedule & results for every game, stats for every skater, goalie & team, as well as leaderboards.

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We're just a couple of weeks away from the most glorious period of the annual sports calendar, the NBA Playoffs. However, there's still one huge piece of unfinished business to settle before we get there: the race for NBA MVP. This year's race is going down to the wire as LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden all remain in contention with just a few games remaining on the NBA schedule.

In the big picture, very little has changed since the last time we checked in on the race: Russell Westbrook is still averaging a triple-double, James Harden is still combining efficiency, volume, and playmaking to an unprecedented extent, LeBron James is still looking like Magic Johnson 2.0, and Kawhi Leonard remains the best two-way player in the league while dominating the ball and shouldering the offensive load in a way that no Spurs player has since Gregg Popovich took over as head coach. Read the rest of this entry