When we revamped our search engine last year we didn't provide much instruction. After all, it's pretty simple to use. It's fast, features auto-complete, and has nicely categorized search results.

Since then, we've added some new features that should make finding what you want even easier. The following is a quick guide to the most useful tips and tricks.

First thing is first, the search bar is at the top right of the site, and also on the left-hand side of the homepage, shown here, respectively:

Player Search

We match against the player's common name or a known nickname: 'lebron' will return LeBron James; searching 'sir charles' will return Charles Barkley.

Partial strings work, too. For example, 'kentav' will return Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, if you want to save yourself some typing and the player's name is unique.

Team Names

Searching for team indexes and seasons is just as easy. 'spurs' will return all Spurs teams since they adopted that name for the 1974 ABA season.

Clicking on the right column - 'Team Seasons' - will give you a list of individual Spurs seasons, which bring you conveniently to a season summary page.

Team Seasons

In fact, there's an even easier way to get to a team's season page. Just add a year before or after the team name.

For example, '1996 bulls' or 'bulls 1996' will bring you directly to that champion Bulls season.

League Seasons

What if you want to get to a particular NBA season page to view historical standings, stats, and leaders?

Same trick as for teams, except use the league name: 'nba 1998' or '1998 nba'. This will land you on the 1998 NBA season summary. This pattern works for the ABA and BAA seasons, as well.

Playoffs

Likewise, to access historical playoff pages do the same thing, except substitute the word 'playoffs'.

'playoffs 1990' or '1990 playoffs' will send you to the 1990 Playoffs summary page, with links to series stats, leaders, etc.

Finals

Finals summaries work the same way.

'finals 1984' or '1984 finals' will give you all the Bird & Magic stats from that year's Finals.

et cetera

We get a lot of searches that don't fit a particular pattern - for example, mis-spellings like 'dwayne wade', or searches like 'hall of fame'.

Often, these will give you what you're looking for and the best way to find out is trial and error. In fact, 'dwayne wade' will go to Wade's page and 'hall of fame' will land you on our Hall of Fame summary page.

Likewise, 'mj' will bring you to Jordan's page, 'sixers' to the 76ers franchise summary, and 'salaries' will direct you to our database of player salaries.

If a common search is missing or there's a term or search pattern you'd like us to add here, please ask!

Just a note that we've added 3-Point Attempt Rate (3PAr) and Free Throw Attempt Rate (FTr) to our Player Season Finder.

In addition, we've expanded the group of shooting stats that we show by default, now including both eFG% and TS%.

This should help you keep tabs on Kyle Korver's historic sharpshooting...

If you've poked around our Draft section recently, you might have a noticed a new link for 'Draft Rights'. We've compiled a list of all held draft rights for players that are currently playing abroad.

The easiest way to view this is to mouse over the 'draft' item in the navigation bar and look for the link:

The selections are sorted by the retaining team, then by the year of selection. We have current year stats for all players that participate in one of the Liga ACB (Spain), LNB Pro A (France), Lega Serie A (Italy), or Greek Basket League, as well as the Euroleague or Eurocup. In these cases, the Current Team column will link to those team's pages and you can view the player's season stats there.

Finally, if that's not enough, on our team pages we've included the current year stats for all players whose draft rights are retained by that team. In some cases, the player will play in a league for which we don't have stats or might not currently be under contract with a team, but most players whose rights are currently held are active and playing in Europe...

Users of our Play Index have likely grown accustomed to searching through the Team Game Finder to find things like highest-scoring games or best shooting performances. However, over the years basketball fans (and our users) have grown more statistically savvy and often crave a deeper perspective beyond the raw numbers. For that reason, we have included an advanced box score within our games boxes for some time. Now, we have taken the next step by allowing users to search through these advanced statistics via the Team Game Finder.

To use these tools, you can simply go to the link above and set the parameters you would like for your search. Please note that these advanced stat searches are limited to the era for which we have complete box scores (since 1985-86). Here are some examples:

• Instead of searching for most points in a game, you can now search for most points per 100 possessions in a game. Yes, we find it incredible that the most efficient offensive performance of the last 30 years was authored by the 1997-98 Clippers.
• Instead of searching for the largest point differentials, you can now search for the largest net rating differentials.
• Perhaps you would have felt better about sitting through this beauty pageant if you knew you were witnessing shot-blocking history.
• You can even use the cumulative season games feature to discover that the 1991-92 Nets, led by Chris Dudley, Derrick Coleman & Sam Bowie, had the best offensive rebounding percentage by any team since 1985.
• And that the 2011-12 Thunder had the best block percentage of that era.

Please note that cumulative searches utilizing possession-based metrics will differ slightly from some season totals found on team pages and in the team season finder because our box scores have player turnovers, but not team turnovers, which causes slight variations.

Just a note that we've expanded the searchable options in our Player Season Finder this week.

In particular, we've added BPM and VORP to the list of searchable stats, both of which are available going back to the 1973-74 season.  If you don't know what those stats are, you may have missed this recent announcement. Also feel free to weigh in at the discussion on the APBRmetrics forum.

Also, we've added search options by a player's birth state, college, and debut seasons, either in the NBA or ABA. There's also a new option to search by award winners so you can see all seasons by MVP winners, All-NBA selections, Defensive Players of the Year, etc.

If you're new to the site, the Player Season Finder is our most popular database search tool. You can get to it by clicking on 'play-index' in the top navigation menu, then the large 'Player Season Finder' link. It allows you to search for and compare player stats for a season or a player's career (or a span of years). You can also find the number of seasons that match your criteria. As an example, you can find the highest USG% seasons of all time, most career VORP for a player from Duke, or the most points scored in a single postseason.

The new fields are highlighted in red below:

We're excited to introduce our newest statistical feature, Box Plus/Minus (BPM), developed and shared by Daniel Myers, well known as an administrator of the APBRmetrics forum and the developer of Advanced Statistical Plus/Minus (ASPM), which has performed very well empirically and to which BPM now serves as successor.

BPM is an advanced stat intended to measure a player's total contribution, calculated using box-score data that's available going back to the 1973-74 season. It follows on work done toward the Statistical Plus/Minus (SPM) concept, and ASPM, and uses long-term data sets developed by Jeremias Engelmann, the creator of ESPN's Real Plus/Minus statistic. Please visit Daniel's write-up to read more about the development of BPM, the background of the concept, and everyone that's contributed to the research.

BPM is presented intuitively, representing points per 100 possessions for which the player was on the court. For example, a player with a +4.3 BPM is said to have contributed 4.3 more points than an average player over 100 possessions, based on measurable statistical output from game box scores. The calculation makes heavy use of context dependent box score stats like USG%, TS%, STL% and others (as well as the statistical interactions between these components). We publish these as Advanced Box Score Stats and you can read about these component calculations in our glossary. Note that there is a separate calculation for the offensive component of a player's BPM, which yields both OBPM (Offensive Box Plus/Minus) and DBPM (Defensive Box Plus/Minus).

Further, BPM is scaled so that -2.0 represents a theoretical "replacement level" - thus, this concept is easily extended to permit calculations of one player's value over that theoretical threshold - that formula is [BPM - (-2.0)] * (% of minutes played), which is VORP, and interpreted as per 100 team possessions.

We'll be presenting BPM, it's offensive and defensive components, as well as VORP in the 'Advanced' table of our player pages, and likewise in our team pages:

For 2014, the leaderboards for BPM, OBPM, and DBPM, respectively, look like the following (> 1,000 MP):

And as the season gets underway, you'll be able to find BPM and its components, as well as VORP, on our actual leaderboard as well as other site features like the Play Index tools and season registers.

We maintained a Hall of Fame prediction model that, overall, works pretty well. This looks like a good list, yes?

However, keep scrolling and you'll see that a few players are slipping through the cracks. Miller is already in and good money is on both Mutombo's and Nash's eventual inductions.

So we've tweaked our model a little bit. It's no less simple than what we've been doing, but it casts a wider net around those factors that voters and the media prioritize for player inductions. Its criteria include All-Star games, leaderboard appearances, peak dominance, championships, and the player's height (yes, height!). Many of these variables are considered as well by our old model.

A necessary disclaimer is that Hall voters, to varying extents over the years, have used criteria that are difficult to account for in a simple predictive model such as college stardom, FIBA success, foreign careers, and so on. In a nutshell, we're considering plaudits earned while playing in the NBA so adjust as you wish those careers of players like Manu Ginobili and Pau Gasol who have racked up FIBA medals in addition to their pro career.

Anyway, here's the list of the top 25 retired and active players...

RETIRED:                                                             ACTIVE:

Except for Mutombo (6.4% to 86.8%) nothing changes too dramatically. Ben Wallace gets back in the race, and Nash becomes a virtual lock. Chauncey Billups and Shawn Marion move up significantly while Carmelo falls 10+ points.

To gauge your thinking about how many players "should" get in, here are the number of players in every NBA season between 1979-80 and 1999-00, inclusive, that were eventually enshrined:

We used the logistic regression method (same as before) and found that this works fairly well:

my $logit = -0.20303
              + -0.14203 * height_inches
              +  0.80573  * championships
              +  0.01594  * leaderboard_points
              +  0.41568  * peak_ws
              +  1.02443  * all_star_games

I'll get the documentation page up shortly which will explain a few of the nuances, for example how we determine "leaderboard points" and a few other particulars.

Just  a note that we added per possession statistics to the player pages on our college site. In particular, we express these as per 100 team possessions, which we estimate using component stats* and which we can calculate for every D-I school beginning with the 2010-11 season.

We recently added these to Basketball Reference so that users could easily compare output from different teams or eras, however the disparities in pace of play are even greater in college. Miami (Fl.) had the slowest pace in 2013-14 at 59.1 team possessions per game. On the other hand, Northwestern State and Virginia Military Institute led the NCAA at 78.9 and 77.5, respectively.

For now you can find these tables on the player pages:

And we'll be adding per possession statistics to the school pages, season registers and play-index tools soon enough.

*team_poss = 0.5 x ((fga + 0.475 x fta - orb + tov) + (opp_fga + 0.475 x opp_fta - opp_orb + opp_tov))

Since we've launched the various Play Index tools on our sites, we've struggled with the best way to monetize what we feel is the deepest and most powerful set of sports data tools anywhere. We know they are useful, our users, the teams, broadcast networks, and newspaper reporters tell us so.

On baseball, we charge an annual fee of $36, but our best guess is that the traffic and audience of the other sites would not be sufficient to make a subscription model worth our while. We have been running traditional banner ads on those pages, but they pay so little and the play index content is niche content (valuable, but niche content) so the traffic will never rise that high on the play index pages. So we have decided to remove all banner advertising and instead run Google consumer surveys on the non-baseball play index pages.

Here's how it works. The first time you run a report each day your results will be obscured and you will be asked to answer a 1-5 question survey. After you answer the survey, your requested report will be shown to you and you won't see another survey for that site on that browser for 24 hours (multi-question surveys are good for 48 hours). These surveys pay us around 5 cents per survey which, while it doesn't sound like much, is about 15 times what we would get from banner ads on those pages. Here is an FAQ if you are wondering how Google uses this information.

Also, if you find these gateway surveys a step too far, consider subscribing to our Ad-Free Access. Starting at $20/year you can surf every Sports Reference page ad and survey free.

If you are wondering what our play index tools are, give them a try. We think you'll enjoy them.
Play Index at Basketball-Reference.com
Play Index at Pro-Football-Reference.com
Play Index at Hockey-Reference.com
Play Index at Sports-Reference.com/cbb
Play Index at Sports-Reference.com/cfb

Earlier this week we introduced new advanced search options into our shooting splits tool.

In case you didn't know before, we have detailed shooting data for every player since 2000-01, and detailed splits are available by going to a player's page and hovering your mouse cursor over 'Shooting':

Now, you can click on the [+] next to 'show advanced options' and you'll see two new advanced tools.

On the left, type in a player's name and click the search result to add it. In most cases, it will automatically populate as 'As teammate' or 'As opponent'. This will show shooting splits for whoever's page you are on, with the selected player both on and off the court.

In fact, you can even add several players and select custom combinations of 'On' and 'Off'.

Check out how LeBron fared versus Kawhi Leonard in 2013-14 by adding Leonard's name, then clicking on 'Go to Page'.

You can check out the numbers for just the Finals by clicking on the 'Playoffs' link in the results (likewise, you can add any split to your query the same way).

Why did Ruben Patterson call himself "Kobe Stopper". It might be these 2001-2002 numbers when Kobe went 18-63 with Patterson on the court, then 46-96 with him off:

ALSO! The tool on the right lets you compare the player whose page you are on versus any other player, or any other season. It works the same way, that is, begin typing the name in the form and then click a season from the select box that appears.

Then click 'Go to Page' and you'll get a side-by-side comparison of that player's shooting splits versus his own or another player's, in whichever season you selected: