Sports Reference Blog

We have recently made an addition to the Awards section on Basketball Reference. We now have NBA Coaches of the Month all the way back to the creation of the award in 1982-83. These winners can be found not only on the page for the award, but also on season pages and coaching pages. It should also be noted that from 1982-83 through 2001-02, there was one winner per month for the entire league. Starting in 2002-03, however, there was a separate winner from the Western Conference and the Eastern Conference every month. The all-time leader in Coach of the Month Awards (through the 2015-16 NBA season) is Gregg Popovich, with 16. He's followed by George Karl, with 12, and Pat Riley/Phil Jackson with 11 apiece. The leader among currently active head coaches is Doc Rivers, with 9 (and November 2016 could well end up being his 10th).

The NBA has been back in our lives for over two weeks and this year is already more lit than even the most optimistic observers could have guessed. Fears of a joyless march to Golden State Warriors vs Cleveland Cavaliers III have proven greatly exaggerated. Instead, this season is already shaping up to be the most fun in recent memory. Let's check in on a few storylines. Read the rest of this entry

UPDATE: As of March 14, 2017, we figured out how to once again allow for automatic export to Excel

As you may have noticed, on our re-designed sites we recently disabled the feature allowing you to export our tables directly to Excel. This was because updated browsers were no longer supporting the function and it was becoming problematic to keep up. However, this doesn't mean that you can't still easily export our tables into spreadsheets. There's just an extra step or two, now.

First, look for the "Share & more" tab atop the table you'd like to export. If you don't see this tab, it means the particular table you're looking at isn't exportable. Otherwise, hover over it and options will drop down (see image). Select "Get table as CSV (for Excel)", which will convert the table to comma-separated values.

Once the table has been converted to CSV, copy and paste the entirety of the table (or whatever section of it you want) into Excel, as text. You will now have an unintelligible, single-column mess in your spreadsheet, but that's fine. The commas are there for a reason and Excel will help us easily convert those commas into nice, readable columns of data. This next step is sometimes variable depending on the version of Excel you're working with, but what you want to find is the "text to columns" function. In my Excel for Mac 2011, this can be found under the "Data" tab. If you can't find it on your version, a google search for "Excel text to columns" with your Excel version number should yield useful results.

Once you have located the "text to columns" function, you will choose a file type that best describes your data. You will want to choose "delimited" since the fields are separated by commas. Next, you will choose the delimiter. Check the box next to "comma." Once you make that selection, you can finish up with the text to columns wizard and you should then have a nicely formatted spreadsheet.

We realize this is not quite as quick or simple as the old export function, but unfortunately we can no longer support that function. Once you get the hang of this method, you'll see it's also quite simple.

Every day during the season, we publish a sortable table showing the box score stats for every player who played the previous day. This table goes all the way back to November 1, 1946, the first day of the BAA (which merged with the NBL three years later to form the NBA). This table can easily be navigated to from our homepage by clicking "See all of yesterday's players" underneath the "Yesterday's Top Performers" table.

We've recently added a feature to this table, which allows users to isolate the rookies, by clicking "Show All Rookies" atop the table. This option will allow you to easily view and compare all of the rookies who played the previous day. This could come in handy for figuring out who will come in second in the Rookie of the Year race to Joel Embiid.

We're a little past the halfway point in the college football season, and things are heating up. The real contenders have separated themselves from the pack and the playoff committee is already making baffling choices in its voting. Read the rest of this entry

With tonight's World Series Game 7, we thought we'd post quick links to Play Index searches showing every championship round Game 7 in MLB, NBA and NHL history. The lists are searches for home teams in Game 7s, sorted by date. If you click the date, you can see the box score for the game (when available). Enjoy!

World Series Game 7s (please note that this list is Winner Take All games, rather than Game 7s due to some World Series being longer than 7 games or having 7th games that weren't decisive in the early years)

NBA Finals Game 7s

Stanley Cup Final Game 7s

Our historical performance data for professional leagues (affiliated minor leagues, independent minor leagues, fall/winter leagues, and other international leagues) is provided by and licensed from 24-7 Baseball and Chadwick Baseball Bureau. It incorporates the work of many stalwart baseball researchers, including Cliff Blau, Art Cantu, Frank Hamilton, Reed Howard, Kevin Johnson, Bob McConnell, Jack Morris, and Ray Nemec, as well as members of the Minor Leagues Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research. Perhaps most importantly, it builds upon the seminal work of Ed Washuta, who magnanimously provided the framework to make the whole thing possible.

As licensors of this data, Sports Reference LLC is not in a position to update and make corrections to the dataset ourselves. All proposed corrections are passed along to the Chadwick Baseball Bureau. Their focus is on making corrections for post-1960 data first and then pre-1960 data as time permits. This is largely due to the sheer scope of the project, but also for economic reasons. The economic value to us for information such as the 1929 California State League is minimal and likewise the market for licensing such data is effectively zero. We wish to have the most accurate datasets we can, but must operate within the economic constraints of what the market will bear.

We realize that this may mean that certain issues and errors may linger on the site for months or even years and apologize for all such errors.

You can use the Chadwick Bureau website to send corrections or changes to the data.

You may have noticed that we recently expanded much of our player game logs coverage back to 1950. Previously, this data only went back to 1960 on our site. Below is a complete breakdown of the added material:

• Passing statistics (pass attempts, completions, yards, pass touchdowns and interceptions) are complete for all players from 1950-59
• Rushing/Receiving statistics (rush attempts, rush yards, rush TD, receptions, receiving yards, receiving TD) are 95% complete from 1953-59. 25 games over these seven seasons are missing some data (though all HOFers and All-Pros are complete). From 1950-52, this data is 100% complete for HOFers/All-Pros and for the Packers, 49ers, Lions, Rams and Browns. The Bears, Giants, Eagles, Steelers, Redskins and Cardinals are 90% complete. The Colts, Yanks and Texans are 75% complete.

That fine print is not particularly exciting to read, so below I'll highlight just some of the cool data this now adds to our site:

• We now have Adrian Burk's 7-TD game in 1954 in play index searches
• No big surprise that Jim Brown had the high game for rushing yardage in the 1950s
• In fact, Brown's 237-yd game remains the most by a player 21 or younger since 1950
• We now have game logs for Jim Brown's entire career. Click here to ogle.
• Crazy Legs Hirsch had 22 games with 100+ receiving yards in the 1950s

In addition to the play index searches, you can also view the fleshed out box scores of the games of from the 1950s.

We hope you enjoy this addition. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Two teams, united by 176 seasons of heartbreak and disappointment, sit four games away from a title. Read the rest of this entry

What are we doing here? It's been four months since the Cleveland Cavaliers pulled off a miraculous comeback, winning three straight games against the team with the best regular season record in NBA history and ending the city's 52-year, 147-season title drought. And eight months from now, we'll be doing it again.

No Eastern Conference team has constructed a squad that's anything other than a heavy underdog to stop LeBron James from making his seventh straight NBA Finals. Out West, the picture is even bleaker for fans who don't live in the Bay Area, where Kevin Durant now resides as a member of the 73-win Golden State Warriors. What is this regular season, then, besides a long march to LeBron-Steph III?

While it's true that the probability overwhelmingly favors a Warriors-Cavaliers rematch, a chart in this excellent Howard Beck piece on the Warriors points out that, just two years ago, the Dubs didn't even place among the top six most likely champions, according to their Vegas odds.

More to the point, there's 28 other teams and, even though they have a dramatically worse shot at the title than Cleveland and Golden State, there's still plenty of reasons to be intrigued by them. So here's a look at five players who may not win a title, but could emerge to have fascinating seasons in their own right. Read the rest of this entry