We are happy to announce that we have added shooting handedness for all players in WNBA history to player pages on Basketball Reference.
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An eagle-eyed user recently noticed that the True Shooting Percentage calculation we were using in our college basketball box scores seemed to differ slightly from the method we spell out in our glossary. It turns out we were mistakenly using the FT constant we use for the pro game (.44) in our college box scores, rather than the .475 that we spell out in our glossary and that we use to calculate season and career-level data for players.
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From time to time Baseball-Reference receives updates to the historical record from trusted sources. These are transmitted to us via the Chadwick Baseball Bureau, which obtains updates from the legendary sports researcher Pete Palmer.

Generally these sorts of updates are most numerous when our friends at Retrosheet release new seasons worth of data. However, earlier this month we loaded a smaller update that deserves a mention and some further reflection on our part on how to best proceed.
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Basketball Reference has added NBA Coach of the Year voting back to 1995-96 thanks to work of Noureddine Hourani, a researcher who passed this information along to us.

This new information can be found on coach pages such as Phil Jackson and Monty Williams. Additionally, if you visit our page with the full history of the NBA Coach of the Year Award, you will see a 'v' link in the rows for years where we have voting. Those links will lead to a page with voting summaries for all of the awards for which we have data for that season. For instance, here's the 1995-96 NBA Award voting summary.

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Thanks to the research of Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has added player statistics (passing, rushing, receiving, defensive interceptions, kicking, punting and kick/punt returns) to every box score in AAFC history. This means we now have, for instance, complete passing logs for Hall of Famer Otto Graham, rushing logs for Hall of Famer Marion Motley, receiving logs for Hall of Famer Mac Speedie, kick/punt return logs for Chet Mutryn,  kicking logs for Hall of Famer Lou Groza, and the whole nine yards from Spec Sanders, who passed, ran, received, returned, punted AND intercepted during his outstanding AAFC career.

These statistics can be found in our AAFC box scores, as well as on player game log pages like the ones mentioned above.

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In April of 2021, we announced a series of changes to player name presentations on Baseball Reference and Pro Football Reference in which we changed the main name presentation for many historical players who had been tagged with offensive nicknames decades ago. When we completed that task, we hinted that we'd perform similar work with less offensive nicknames, as well. Read the rest of this entry

Just wanted to provide a quick heads up on a subtle change to Basketball-Reference. We have changed the name presentation for several dozen for ABA players to more accurately reflect what they were known as during their playing days, rather than their more formal names. Their formal full names will still appear on their pages (and turn up in search), but the main name we use for presenting the following players has been updated. These names were formerly merely listed as nicknames: Read the rest of this entry

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.

Thanks to the research of John Turney, we have made a big addition in our coverage of historical awards given to the NFL's top players. With this addition, more context can be given to which players were considered the best in various categories. Here follows a list of the latest additions we have made:

• Associated Press (AP) NFL Comeback Player of the Year vote breakdowns (1963-1966, 1998-present)
• United Press International (UPI) NFL Most Valuable Player vote breakdowns (1951-1969)
• UPI AFL Player of the Year vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• UPI NFL Rookie of the Year winners (1954-1969 NFL, 1970-1996 NFC/AFC) and vote breakdowns (1954-1969)
• UPI AFL Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• AP AFL Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1961-1966)
• AP AFL Offensive Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1967-1969)
• AP AFL Defensive Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1967-1969)
• AP AFL Coach of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1961-1969)
• UPI AFL Coach of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• AP Assistant Coach of the Year (2014-present)
• NFLPA Alan Page Community Award (formerly known as the Whizzer White Man of the Year) (1966-present)
• AAFC Most Valuable Player (1946-1948)
• Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA) Offensive Player of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Defensive Player of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Most Improved Player (2000-present)
• PFWA Rookie of the Year (1966, 1975-1991, 2013-present)
• PFWA Offensive Rookie of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Defensive Rookie of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Coach of the Year (1966-present)
• PFWA Assistant Coach of the Year (1993-present)
• PFWA Executive of the Year (1993-present)
• Sporting News (SN) Player of the Year (1954-2008)
• SN Offensive Player of the Year (2008-present)
• SN Defensive Player of the Year (2008-present)
• SN Rookie of the Year (1955-present)
• SN Coach of the Year (1947-present)
• UPI NFL Coach of the Year (1953-1969 NFL, 1970-1996 NFC/AFC)
• UPI Offensive Player of the Year (1983-1996 NFC/AFC)
• UPI Defensive Player of the Year (1975-1996 NFC/AFC)
• Pro Football Weekly's Player of the Week (1976-2012)

Again, a big thanks to John Turney for collecting and providing this data. Turney's name may be familiar as we have also credited him in our addition of AP award voting breakdown data as well as pre-1982 sacks. If you have any suggestions or feedback, feel free to contact us directly via our feedback form.

With the season concluded, we're pleased to report that we've added 2021 Approximate Value (AV) numbers to the site for all NFL players. Note that these numbers are just provisional right now; the final numbers will be released after the All-Pro teams are announced.

Update: All-Pro teams have since been announced so 2021 Approximate Value has since been finalized.

Josh Allen leads 2021 players with 19 AV, and Justin Herbert, Patrick Mahomes, Cooper Kupp and Micah Parsons close behind at 18. You can see all of the top players in this Stathead.com Player Season Finder search.

Not sure what AV is? To learn more about PFR's attempt to put a single number on each player-season since 1960 (for the purposes of comparing players across position and era), check out this link. Feel free to send us feedback via our site's form.