The NBA has been back in our lives for over two weeks and this year is already more lit than even the most optimistic observers could have guessed. Fears of a joyless march to Golden State Warriors vs Cleveland Cavaliers III have proven greatly exaggerated. Instead, this season is already shaping up to be the most fun in recent memory. Let's check in on a few storylines. Read the rest of this entry

UPDATE: As of March 14, 2017, we figured out how to once again allow for automatic export to Excel

As you may have noticed, on our re-designed sites we recently disabled the feature allowing you to export our tables directly to Excel. This was because updated browsers were no longer supporting the function and it was becoming problematic to keep up. However, this doesn't mean that you can't still easily export our tables into spreadsheets. There's just an extra step or two, now.

First, look for the "Share & more" tab atop the table you'd like to export. If you don't see this tab, it means the particular table you're looking at isn't exportable. Otherwise, hover over it and options will drop down (see image). Select "Get table as CSV (for Excel)", which will convert the table to comma-separated values.

Once the table has been converted to CSV, copy and paste the entirety of the table (or whatever section of it you want) into Excel, as text. You will now have an unintelligible, single-column mess in your spreadsheet, but that's fine. The commas are there for a reason and Excel will help us easily convert those commas into nice, readable columns of data. This next step is sometimes variable depending on the version of Excel you're working with, but what you want to find is the "text to columns" function. In my Excel for Mac 2011, this can be found under the "Data" tab. If you can't find it on your version, a google search for "Excel text to columns" with your Excel version number should yield useful results.

Once you have located the "text to columns" function, you will choose a file type that best describes your data. You will want to choose "delimited" since the fields are separated by commas. Next, you will choose the delimiter. Check the box next to "comma." Once you make that selection, you can finish up with the text to columns wizard and you should then have a nicely formatted spreadsheet.

We realize this is not quite as quick or simple as the old export function, but unfortunately we can no longer support that function. Once you get the hang of this method, you'll see it's also quite simple.

Every day during the season, we publish a sortable table showing the box score stats for every player who played the previous day. This table goes all the way back to November 1, 1946, the first day of the BAA (which merged with the NBL three years later to form the NBA). This table can easily be navigated to from our homepage by clicking "See all of yesterday's players" underneath the "Yesterday's Top Performers" table.

We've recently added a feature to this table, which allows users to isolate the rookies, by clicking "Show All Rookies" atop the table. This option will allow you to easily view and compare all of the rookies who played the previous day. This could come in handy for figuring out who will come in second in the Rookie of the Year race to Joel Embiid.

With tonight's World Series Game 7, we thought we'd post quick links to Play Index searches showing every championship round Game 7 in MLB, NBA and NHL history. The lists are searches for home teams in Game 7s, sorted by date. If you click the date, you can see the box score for the game (when available). Enjoy!

World Series Game 7s (please note that this list is Winner Take All games, rather than Game 7s due to some World Series being longer than 7 games or having 7th games that weren't decisive in the early years)

NBA Finals Game 7s

Stanley Cup Final Game 7s

What are we doing here? It's been four months since the Cleveland Cavaliers pulled off a miraculous comeback, winning three straight games against the team with the best regular season record in NBA history and ending the city's 52-year, 147-season title drought. And eight months from now, we'll be doing it again.

No Eastern Conference team has constructed a squad that's anything other than a heavy underdog to stop LeBron James from making his seventh straight NBA Finals. Out West, the picture is even bleaker for fans who don't live in the Bay Area, where Kevin Durant now resides as a member of the 73-win Golden State Warriors. What is this regular season, then, besides a long march to LeBron-Steph III?

While it's true that the probability overwhelmingly favors a Warriors-Cavaliers rematch, a chart in this excellent Howard Beck piece on the Warriors points out that, just two years ago, the Dubs didn't even place among the top six most likely champions, according to their Vegas odds.

More to the point, there's 28 other teams and, even though they have a dramatically worse shot at the title than Cleveland and Golden State, there's still plenty of reasons to be intrigued by them. So here's a look at five players who may not win a title, but could emerge to have fascinating seasons in their own right. Read the rest of this entry

At Sports Reference, we pride ourselves on having user-friendly search and navigation. We've heard a lot of frustration from Stats.NBA.com users unable to find what they're looking for in recent weeks. To that end, we've added links to Stats.NBA.com pages on our player pages. So you can now easily navigate to pages with features we're unable to provide, such as SportVU tracking stats for LeBron James, directly from Basketball Reference. These links now appear between our player Per Game stats tables and the player newsfeeds.

We hope this new addition makes for easier browsing of a wide range of basketball statistics.

We have added 2016-17 NBA player projections, using our Simple Projection System, adapted from Tom Tango's Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System.

Please bear in mind that these projections are being published because (1) they were easy and (2) they were fun. That said, we do believe these results will hold up quite well when compared at the end of the season to other (and much more sophisticated) projection systems.

Since we're not controlling substitution patterns, all projections are for per-36 minutes statistics. Please use these responsibly and enjoy!

We're continuing to add features to our newly redesigned sites, and we have a very exciting one to share with you today, especially for those of you who have your own website.

Previously, we've had tools that give you the option to embed tables like standings and leaderboards on your website. That option is still around, but we've improved on it. If you hover over "Share & More", the second option you'll see is "Embed This Table." Read the rest of this entry

The writing was on the wall for the San Antonio Spurs. At the end of the third quarter of Game 6 of the Western Conference Semifinals, they trailed the Oklahoma City Thunder by 26 points. They had lost three of their last four games vs OKC and found themselves overwhelmed by the size and physicality of Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and, most surprisingly, Enes Kanter.

On the San Antonio bench, Tim Duncan pulled Gregg Popovich aside for a quick conversation. After the conversation, Duncan played the entire fourth quarter. Even as the game entered clear garbage time and Andre Miller and Kyle Anderson replaced Tony Parker and Kawhi Leonard, Duncan stayed on the floor. Read the rest of this entry

If you follow me on twitter, you know that this work has been a long time coming. Starting last summer, Adam Wodon, Adam Darowski, and I started throwing around ideas for a more mobile-friendly version of our sites. Our mobile experience is probably charitably described as limited and functional and with now over 2/3rd's of our visits coming from handheld devices, we clearly needed to up our game there.

This led to complete review of what we have on our sites and how we present that data on desktop and how we can make that usable on a small screen. It's not easy and after months of design, user testing and work, we have an approach that we believe will serve both desktop and mobile users better than they are now. This is the first in a series of posts we'll publish about our redesign.
Read the rest of this entry