Our devops department finished our move from AWS's Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN) to Cloudflare's CDN this week. This will be undecipherable technical jargon to most of you, so I'll explain what it means.

When you request a page or file from the site, the request first goes to a CDN that is located geographically close to you and if a neighbor of yours (within several hundred miles) has requested the page earlier in the day, you'll get a cached copy of that page much faster than you would otherwise. If your neighbors are lame and don't use our site or just haven't visited that page, then the request will be passed on to our servers and we'll send you the page.

This has many advantages in that it takes a load off our servers and also makes things faster in general for our users the more the sites are used.

Cloudflare also includes bot filtering with this offering. It actively searches for badly behaved bots and proactively blocks them from our site. We are now utilizing this feature because we get scraped. A LOT. And if your bot is badly behaved then we don't want you impacting the performance of the site for our other users. We've gotten a number of emails around this this week as people who have been scraping us have found themselves blocked.

As of today, this filtering will remain in place for our:

• Soccer/Football
• Basketball
• Hockey
• College sites

We are turning off the active bot filtering on our baseball and pro football sites at this time. We will re-enable bot filtering the week after the end of their respective seasons.

What is a well-behaved bot? Please see our Data Use page and our Bot Traffic page for guidance. Note that if you are blocked by our servers, the blocks reset after 24 hours, so with some more polite settings on your bot you may be able to try again the next day.

We can not provide an API (per our data licensing agreements), and you should not view as a data provider (on par with SportRadar or Genius Sports). This is a role that we do not and can not support with company resources.

If you're a WNBA fan, you'll definitely want to learn more about the newest update to Stathead. We've added WNBA stats to the Team Season Finder, giving you the ability to use this amazing tool to search team stats from a single season, multiple seasons, or the entire history of the WNBA.
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Our latest update to Stathead is live and it brings some brand new stats to our basketball side. Like Football and Hockey before it, Stathead Basketball's Team Game Finder just got a set of cool improvements that will let you answer more questions than ever before while making sure the tool itself runs smoother than ever. Read the rest of this entry

That's right, we've got another one! After updating the Player Game Finders on Stathead Hockey and Stathead Football, it's Basketball's turn to receive some improvements. Let's take a look at the cool new stuff we've just added to one of the most popular tools on Stathead.

There are two major additions to the Player Game Finder. First, it's received three new filters. These filters allow you to search for teams or seasons with the most player games matching your search criteria, or team games with the most players matching the criteria. What does that mean? Well, now you can do searches like:
-What team had the most double-doubles in a season?
-What season had the most double-doubles?
-What team had the most players with a double-double in a game?

The second change is that we've merged WNBA stats into the Game Finder. While previously, the WNBA Player Game Finder was a separate tool, merging the stats into a single Game Finder will make it easier to find, while also adding these new search options, and new filters like Hall of Fame status. So in addition to answering which NBA team had the most double-doubles in a season, you can now see which WNBA team had the most double-doubles in a season.

We're excited to announce another update to Stathead, this time on the Basketball side. As we've done with Baseball, Football, and Hockey, we've made a number of improvements to the Basketball Season Finder, bringing in new features and an overall smoother performance to one of the most popular Stathead tools.

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Since the start of the year, Sports Reference has promoted three team members into director roles.

Jaclyn Mahoney, Director of Operations and Strategic Planning, leads our work on internal operations including our policies, procedures and our strategic planning. She started with SR as a data developer in early 2018.

Adam Darowski, Product Director, will lead Sports Reference's product development and product team. Adam was previously our Head of User Experience joining SR in late 2020.

Mike Lynch, Data Director, will lead Sports Reference's data work. He will lead both our internal data team and also independent contractors and our data vendors. Mike was previously our Stathead product manager. He joined SR in 2014.

Rajeev Lekhwar, SEO Specialist, joined Sports Reference this week. Having worked for almost 2.5 years in the SEO Industry with brands like VWO, he moved to Sports Reference with a goal of keeping the upward trend moving. He is an avid cricket fan. You can find him on Twitter at @panditrajeev22.

Over the past three months the Sports Reference team has grown significantly. We have made seven new hires in a variety of roles.

​​Nicolas Westin, DevOps Engineer, joined Sports Reference towards the end of 2021. He previously worked at Redhorse Corporation as a front-end engineer. He graduated from Northeastern University in Boston. He is a big Wizards fan, and a casual Cubs fan.

Aidan Jackson-Evans, Customer Success, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. Originally from the UK, Aidan now lives in New England. He enjoys baseball history and trivia, and has written biographies for the SABR BioProject. He is a fan of the San Francisco Giants and the England national football team. Follow him on Twitter at @ajacksonevans.

Adela Armstrong-Spielberg, Engineering Support Coordinator, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. She was born and raised in the DC area, and now lives in Los Angeles after attending UCLA. She's growing into a Dodgers and Rams fan, but she would like to reassure her friends and family back east that she will always root for the Nats and Ravens first.

Ryan Walsh, Social Media Coordinator, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. Hailing from the great state of New Jersey, Ryan previously managed social media for Temple University and the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, among others. He remains an ardent defender of the 76ers Process, and is also a fan of NASCAR and the WNBA. You can find him on Twitter at @RyanLWalsh.

Sara Halloran, Test Engineer, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. She attended Northwestern University and previously worked as a data scientist for the Milwaukee Brewers, during which time she became a casual Bucks and Brewers fan. Now Philadelphia-based, she is originally from New Jersey and also supports the Mets and NY/NJ Gotham FC, as well as Tottenham Hotspur and the United States women’s national soccer team.

Connor Zielinski, Social Media Coordinator, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. Growing up never more than 10 miles away from a Wawa, Connor grew up on the baseball fields with Taney Little League and Philly sports fandom. Connor previously worked for the Tampa Bay Lightning and Red Bull while down in Tampa for school. Catch up with him on Twitter: CTZee_.

Sam Nipatnantaporn, Digital Marketing Manager, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. She previously worked as a marketing manager at the Boston Red Sox and Worcester Red Sox. Originally from Nantucket Island, she now resides in Cambridge, MA and is a fan of all things Boston sports and mascots. Follow her on Instagram at @wsamnipat.

Join us in welcoming Nicolas, Aidan, Adela, Ryan, Sara, Connor, and Sam!

While Basketball Reference has been creating unique player pages for everyone selected in the NBA draft for the past couple of years, many people who never played in the NBA but were selected in the draft could only find their names in our draft tables. We have decided to rectify this by creating player pages for every draftee in NBA history, dating back to the inaugural 1947 BAA Draft. Due to historical drafts being much longer than the current two-round format, this has led to almost 4000 new player pages. These player pages include biographical information, links to relevant college/international pages and family connections where available.

Some notable people that are getting pages as a result of this addition:

- Len Bias, 2nd overall pick in the 1986 draft who tragically passed away days later
- Lusia Harris, 137th overall pick in the 1977 draft and the first woman ever selected
- Terry Stotts, 38th overall pick in the 1980 draft who went on to coach the Portland Trail Blazers
- Carl Lewis, 208th overall pick in the 1984 draft who had set Olympic track and field records
- Phil Elderkin, 205th overall pick in the 1973 draft who was a reporter selected as a joke by the Cavaliers' Bill Fitch
- Dave Winfield, 79th overall pick in the 1973 draft who went on to have a Hall of Fame career in Major League Baseball.
- Jay Bilas, 108th overall pick in the 1986 draft who went on to be a successful college basketball broadcaster

We give big thanks to data developer Charlotte Eisenberg for her time organizing and collecting data for this project.

Please let us know via our feedback form if you have any questions or comments.

We've created a page to describe our hiring process.

We post our jobs through our page on breezy. Visit https://sports-reference-llc.breezy.hr/ to apply.

• Test Engineer
• Engineering Support Coordinator
• SEO Specialist
• Digital Marketing Manager
• Customer Success Coordinator, Reference
• Social Media Coordinator

We will be starting the phone interview process October 25th through November 12th.