Sports Reference Blog

With March Madness right around the corner, we're very excited to announce the latest addition to the Play Index: The NCAA Tournament Player Game Finder! This tool allows users to make custom searches through every individual box score line in NCAA Tournament history, all the way back to the inaugural tournament in 1939. This tool is powered by the most robust, complete collection of NCAA Tournament box scores available online and allows for all sorts of searches for single-game leaders, single-tournament leaders and career tournament leaders.

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Thanks to the efforts of our friends at Retrosheet, we have added box scores back to the 1908 season to Baseball Reference (previously, our coverage went back to 1913). Additionally, we have added play-by-play coverage for games games as far back as 1925. Previously, our oldest play-by-plays were from 1930. In addition to the boxes and PBPs themselves, this update allows for a variety of new information searchable in the play index, as well as new rows of information in team/player/league statistics tables.

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Two years ago, LeBron James passed Michael Jordan to become the NBA's all-time leader in Value Over Replacement Player (which is calculated back to 1973-74). Now, LeBron has passed Jordan on the NBA's All-Time Win Shares list. Both players still trail Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain and Karl Malone, however.

For more nuanced perspective on how these five players stack up, please visit this detailed comparison from our Player Comparison Finder tool.

To enhance our coverage of NFL Players of the Week, we have also added an NFL Player of the Week leaderboard. As you can see, Tom Brady is the all-time leader in this honor, which dates back to 1984.

We've made a small addition to the Basketball Reference Team Streak Finder. You can now restrict your searches to active streaks. So you can now search for things like longest active win streak or longest active streaks with a 3-pointer made.

I'm pleased to welcome Jaclyn Mahoney and Jay Hutchinson to Sports Reference in the roles of Data Developer. They'll be working behind the scenes to make sure our data is accurate and updated in a timely manner. Their main focus, for now, will be helping us push FBref.com out the door this spring.

I've written a bit about them on our About Page.

If you're like me, you were a bit annoyed when the NCAA made the decision to re-name several of the early rounds of the 2011 NCAA Tournament. All of a sudden, the First Round had become the Second Round and the Second Round had become the Third Round. The First Round, meanwhile, had become what we'd previously derided as play-in games (or what been officially known as the Opening Round). Talking about the tournament with friends somehow became a frustrating exercise, as the common nomenclature had been ruined. It was impossible to clearly communicate with people what round you were actually referring to. Notes like "Team X has won Y straight First Round games" now didn't make much sense. This also made it very difficult to run searches as intended in our NCAA Tournament Game Finder tool.

Fortunately, the NCAA corrected its mistake by returning to the original round names in 2016, but the damage was done. From 2011-2015, the Round of 64 and Round of 32 had different names than they'd had for all other years.

However, we've now upgraded our round search in the NCAA Tournament Game Finder to make it possible to run the searches that NCAA Tournament buffs actually want to run.

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You may have noticed that we added projections for 2018 to player and team pages last month. We have now added a register with all 2018 projections. See the batting projections here and the pitching projections here. These projections are very simple and are done in an automated way using Tom Tango's Marcels forecasting system, which you can read about here.

At Hockey Reference, we calculate adjusted stats in order to more accurately compare players from different eras and different goal scoring environments. With Alex Ovechkin approaching his 600th career goal, there has been some chatter about Ovi being the greatest goal scorer in NHL history.

So we thought this made for a good time to introduce the adjusted scoring statistics into the Player Season Finder tool in order to test this hypothesis. As it turns out, Ovechkin is easily the NHL leader in "adjusted goals" through 13 seasons of play. If you click on the link, you'll see he has 691 adjusted goals (through 1/15/18), while Wayne Gretzky had 607 adjusted goals through 13 seasons.

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With last week's announcement of the 2017 All-Pro teams, we're pleased to report that we've added 2017 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 Pro Bowl rosters are finalized. However, there's already some interesting preliminary information to dig through.

As of right now, Tom Brady and Todd Gurley are co-AV leaders at 19. For Brady, this represents the best season in NFL history by a player in his 40s. Gurley, meanwhile, is the youngest RB to hit that mark since Steven Jackson in 2006.

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. For this year's full AV leaderboard, go here.