Somehow I let this slip by without notice, but last Thursday Basketball-Reference.com celebrated its 8th birthday. I launched BBR as a standalone site on May 10, 2004, but of course it is now part of the Sports-Reference.com family. I still do almost all of the work on the site, so I take great pride in how much it has grown over the years. That growth, of course, would not be possible without our dedicated users, so in addition to the birthday wishes I would also like to extend a warm thank you to everyone who has played a part in making this site what it is today.

Here's a link to a piece I wrote for the print edition of Sunday's New York Times:

The Numbers Are Adding Up for the Thunder

A quick feature note: just like we recently added player Twitter links to Baseball-Reference, we also have added about 500 players' Twitter links to their Basketball-Reference pages. (For example.)

As always, please let us know if we're missing anybody.

Thanks to various diversions (vacation, etc.), it's been about a month since my last column for the New York Times. I'm back at it, though, so here's a link to my piece on Steve Nash that appears in today's paper:

Keeping Score: Nash’s Efficiency Keeps Suns in the Hunt

This morning I updated a couple of things on Basketball-Reference.com.

First, you can now select rows to sum on the player game logs. For example, go to Michael Jordan's 1986-87 Game Log. Suppose you want to see Jordan's statistics for his first five games that season. To do this, click on the row for his first game of the season (the row should now be highlighted in blue), then click on the row for his fifth game of the season. A pop-up will appear with Jordan's per game averages for those games.

Second, I added an option to the Player Game Finder that will allow you to search by the player's game number rather than just the team game number. For example, here are the highest scoring debuts of the last 10 seasons.

Just a quick note to let you know that I have added play-by-play summaries, shot charts, and plus/minus reports to the Box Scores section for all of the games in our database that have play-by-play data.

I hope you enjoy these new additions, and please let us know if you find anything amiss.

The annual McDonald's High School All-American Game is this week, so here's a reminder that you can find historical rosters for the McDonald's teams going back to the 1st game in 1977, under the Awards section of the site. Congrats to all the selections, and good luck to them in the next stage of their hoops careers.

In this week's column for the New York Times, I take a look at the Knicks under interim coach Mike Woodson:

Knicks Slow Down and Take Off

While a five-game sample is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions, some changes that have occurred under Woodson bear watching.

By popular demand, we have added a Player Plus/Minus Finder to the Basketball-Reference Play Index+. This new tool allows you to search through thousands of game logs to find the player whose team had the best offensive rating, best defensive rating, and best net rating while the player was on the floor (plus much, much more). For example, here are the raw +/- leaders (minimum 10,000 minutes) since 2001:

This past weekend in the New York Times, I took a look at how recent NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player award winners have not fared so well in the NBA:

Tournament's Stars Dim After March