You may have noticed that we added player photos in the past couple of days:

In addition to these, we have added pronunciations for many player names. You can see all of them on the Pronunciation Guide page. Hopefully this helps you with some of the harder to pronounce names.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

It's been a long cold winter here in Philadelphia. In honor of Sunday and Monday, the greatest days of the year, here are some Opening Day features we have here at B-R:

• 100 Years of Franchise Opening-Day Starters (1914-2013)
• Batting and pitching game finders can be set to search "In team's first x games":
  • Example 1: Most HR in team's 1st game of the season (1919-2010)
  • Example 2: Highest Game Score in team's 1st game of the season (1919-2010)
• Use streak finders to look for the longest streaks to open the season:
  • Example 1: Most consecutive games with a hit to start the season (2000-09)
  • Example 2: Most consecutive wins by a pitcher to start the season (1980-89)
• Game Previews
• Our Mobile Site is perfect for looking up stats at the game, in a restaurant, or on your couch. We even have every box score since 1914 available in an easy to use mobile format.

Give them a try, and enjoy baseball's return.

We've added a number of new features to the site for those of you that are interested in player awards:

1. Voting Results for Awards (going back to the 1923-24 season)
2. NHL Stars of the Week and Month
3. Links to awards from the player stat lines.

Voting Results for Awards

To see the voting results for an individual year, you can either go to the main awards index, or you can go to an individual award page and click on the Season that you want the voting results for.

NHL Stars of the Week and Month

On the main awards index, you can find links to the NHL Three Stars Awards going back to the 2009-10 season. These awards took the place of the previous NHL Offensive and Defensive Player of the Week/Month awards:

Awards on Player Stat Lines

Finally, we've added links on the yearly stat lines to all of the player awards to make them easier to find. For example, this is what Wayne Gretzky's stat line looks like:

As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions on these new features.

Just a quick note that we've added the Recruiting Services Consensus Index (RSCI) high school rankings to BBR, going back to the HS class of 1998. These will now show up on yearly RSCI pages, as well as player pages (under the bio section -> "recruiting rank") when applicable.

If you're not familiar with the RSCI service, they cull together various national recruiting lists and combine them together into a consensus ranking (like DraftExpress, we've also tweaked the basic RSCI by including prep-school players for their final year of the recruiting process, which is also why some players may be listed multiple years). The rankings you see at BBR are the final standings for each year; for more info on how the process works, as well as additional data like in-season rankings (fall, pre-summer, etc.), be sure to go to RSCIhoops.com.

If you're also a Baseball-Reference user, you might recognize this new feature we recently added to Basketball-Reference:

If not, it's a sparkline that shows the team's scoring margin for every game of the season, with green representing wins, red representing losses, and the height of the bar representing the margin of the game. We think it's a great way to visualize the peaks and valleys of a team's season, and we hope it adds your BBR experience.

Today, we added a new feature to Basketball-Reference: historical team Pace Factors and Offensive/Defensive Rating estimates.

As of yesterday, we only had Pace and ORtg/DRtg for NBA teams going back to 1973-74, the first season in which the league tracked team/opponent turnovers and offensive rebounds (which are, of course, necessary to the possessions formula). However, it is possible to estimate possessions for years prior to '74 -- an idea I developed casually at the old BBR Blog in 2010, and one which was expanded on in more detail by ElGee35 at his (now-defunct) blog in 2012.

Read the rest of this entry

For the 2013-14 College Basketball season, we've added a few new features:

• Seasonal Coaching Lists - These pages list every coach who was active during the season in question along with their record that season, plus their career record (both overall and at the school they coached) through the season in question. This means, for instance, that you'll see Bob Knight as the 4th-winningest active coach through, say, 1994, but he'll be #1 through 2002. This list can be accessed from the "Seasons" dropdown on any page, as well as the individual season pages themselves.
• 2-Point Shooting Stats - Just like we did for Basketball-Reference, we added 2-point shooting numbers (2P/2PA/2P%) to the player stat tables. These are also now on team pages and are searchable in the Play Index Season Finder for years since 1998.

Just a quick note that our NBA Playoff Series pages now have advanced stats tables, so you can learn that, for instance, Chris Andersen and Chauncey Billups both had Offensive Ratings north of 150 in this 2009 playoff series.

We also added Four Factors tables to the series summary pages, wherein you'll find nuggets like Phoenix's ridiculous 122.7 team Offensive Rating against the Warriors in this 1994 series. Enjoy!

In case you missed it, here is one of our newest PFR Play Index tools: the Drive Finder. Similar to the Play Finder tool, this will let you find drives for all types of game situations, featuring all drives from 2000-2012. We include a breakdown of average time, yards, plays, points, and even starting position so you can get an idea of the situation behind each drive. Did you know the 2012 Browns average drive started at their own 30.6 yard line with them trailing by 2.8 points? Well now you do! You can also find:

• all of the Patriots' game-winning playoff drives
• all drives since 2000 which took 20 or more plays
• all 90+ yard comeback drives in 2012

In addition, we have added drive breakdowns to all of the boxscore pages since 2000 which include summaries of offensive performance for each drive (look for the "Drives" section midway through the page above the full play-by-play). Now Patriots fans can relive both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

Wondering how far your favorite team has to travel this season? This summer we created some team travel maps highlighting the distances each team has to go to away games each year (back to 1970). Compare the Browns' 6,578 miles traveled (round-trip) with the 28,268 miles Seattle travels in 2013.