Sports Reference Blog

College Basketball Stats are now in Stathead! Check out our first discovery tool

Posted by Jonah Gardner on March 18, 2024

Huge news for college hoops fans! You can now search D1 college basketball stats, both men's and women's, in Stathead Basketball.

Our first college discovery tool is live. It's the Team Game Finder, which gives you the ability to search through team stats from a single game or across multiple games. This will be an especially useful tool to use this week, as you can use the Team Game Finder to build out your bracket. Read the rest of this entry

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, Stathead | No Comments »

NCAA Tournament Round Name Changes Over Time

Posted by Mike Lynch on March 13, 2024

Our new Stathead Basketball tools for searching our college basketball database feature ways to search for NCAA Tournament games. Due to major changes in the format and round nomenclature over the years, it is tricky to search for exactly what you're looking for using strictly round names. And so we have added some search groupings that will hopefully make all of this a bit more clear. Read the rest of this entry

Posted in CBB at Sports Reference, Stathead | 3 Comments »

Sports Reference Expands Women’s College Basketball Data

Posted by Mike Lynch on February 15, 2024

We are excited to announce that Sports Reference's College Basketball site has added 14 new seasons worth of player and team statistics for Division I women's basketball. This takes our coverage all the way back to 1987-88, when a balanced Louisiana Tech squad featuring the likes of Teresa Weatherspoon, Venus Lacy and Erica Westbrooks won the National Championship, while Weatherspoon, Sue Wicks and Michelle Edwards shared the various national player of the year honors. Some of the most notable players in basketball history have had their statistics added to the site with this update. They include, among others: Lisa Leslie, Dawn Staley, Sheryl Swoopes, Rebecca Lobo, Chamique Holdsclaw and Tamika Catchings. Read the rest of this entry

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Check Out an Amazing New Feature in Stathead

Posted by Jonah Gardner on February 13, 2024

We've added a very cool new features to Stathead that we're excited to share with you. On all Game, Streak, and Span Finders for all five Stathead sports, there's a new way to search timeframes. Read the rest of this entry

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, FBref, Hockey-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Stathead | Comments Off on Check Out an Amazing New Feature in Stathead

Awards Information Added to Main Player Tables on Basketball Reference

Posted by Mike Lynch on February 7, 2024

The main player stat tables on Basketball Reference (the first set of stats on a player's page) now feature information on awards the player won, and some award voting information for each season. The information included uses the following shorthand:

AS: All Star

NBA1, NBA2, NBA3 (or WNBA1, etc): All-NBA/WNBA First, Second or Third team

DEF1, DEF2: NBA/WNBA All-Defense First or Second team

MVP-1: MVP voting rank (1 means the player was the MVP, 2 means they were runner-up, 3 means third place, etc)

DPOY-1: Defensive Player of the Year voting rank

ROY-1: Rookie of the Year voting rank

MIP-1: Most Improved Player voting rank

CPOY-1: Clutch Player of the Year voting rank

6MOY-1 Sixth Man of the Year voting rank

LeBron James's and Breanna Stewart's pages are great places to see a sampling of this information.

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Full Sack Yards Lost Data Added to Pro Football Reference

Posted by Mike Lynch on February 1, 2024

Pro Football Reference is pleased to announce that it has added full game-by-game (and also year-by-year) Sack Yards Lost data for all passers (NFL, AFL and AAFC) back to 1947, which was the first season Sack Yards Lost were tracked separately and not merely removed from rushing yardage (which is why many passers before 1947 had negative rushing yards). Read the rest of this entry

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Unofficial MVPs from 1929 & 1930 Added to Baseball Reference

Posted by Mike Lynch on January 29, 2024

Most Valuable Player Awards in the National and American Leagues date back to 1911, when the Chalmers Award was voted on by a writer from each league city to reward the player in each league who "should prove himself as the most important and useful player to his club and to the league at large in point of deportment and value of services rendered." The reward for winning was an automobile. The award was created in 1910, but was for winning the batting title and ended in controversy. So from 1911-14 the award went to an MVP from each league. Interest in the award waned, and so from 1915-21 no MVPs were awarded. Read the rest of this entry

Posted in Announcement, Awards, Baseball-Reference.com, History | Comments Off on Unofficial MVPs from 1929 & 1930 Added to Baseball Reference

Historical East vs West Records Added to Basketball Reference

Posted by Mike Lynch on January 4, 2024

Here at Basketball Reference we take our frivolities very seriously. So seriously that we have made a new addition to our Frivolities section: season-by-season breakdowns of how the Eastern and Western Conferences have fared against each other.

You can see, for instance, that the West has the upper hand thus far in 2023-24 after the East won the series for each of the last two seasons. Before those two seasons, the West won the series in 12 straight seasons and 21 of the previous 22. You can also see how dominant the East was from mid-50s through the 60s, and also for all of the 1980s.

One technical point to bear in mind with this data is that before the 1970-71 season, the NBA was split into Eastern and Western 'divisions' instead of 'conferences.'

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Why a Major League Player Disappeared from Our Count

Posted by Mike Lynch on December 19, 2023

You may have noticed that, as of the end of the 2023 MLB season, the counter on the front page of Baseball-Reference indicated that there had been 23,115 players in major league history and that that number now says 23,114.

This change is due to the hard work and dedication of the SABR Biographical Research Committee, which continually makes new discoveries about players in the early days of the game, in particular. In this case, a mistaken identity involving a player who caught one inning for the 1900 St. Louis Cardinals has been resolved. Previously, it was thought that this catching appearance was made by Henry Edward Stein. However, it has been discovered via the Sporting News archives (which all SABR members get complementary access to as a membership perk) that the appearance was actually made by Tom Stanton. Stanton also appeared in one game for the 1904 Chicago Cubs, and thus already had a player record. This is why we now show 23,114 all-time major league players instead of 23,115.

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Quarterly Scoring Added For Most Pre-Shot Clock NBA/BAA Games

Posted by Mike Lynch on December 14, 2023

If you peruse the NBA Guide (the name of the NBA's official record book produced before every season) you'll notice that most team scoring records for quarters are restricted to 'since 1954-55', which is when the NBA first introduced the shot clock. Before that, games tended to be lower scoring, particularly in late and close situations as teams held out for possession of the ball at the end of the game. It is also often hard to find record of how much was scored in a given quarter before the shot clock as the league was generally less popular and recaps, let alone box scores, were less thorough. However, at Basketball-Reference we view it as important to attempt to preserve as many recordable facts about these games as possible. We are frequently making minor improvements to our box scores in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Thanks to some help from NBA research ace Todd Spehr, we have recently added quarter-by-quarter scoring to the vast majority of the BAA and NBA games from 1946-47 through 1953-54 that were previously missing these details. Before this recent work, we were missing these details on 709 games. We were able to add complete data for 569 of them and partial data for 62 of them. This leaves fewer than 100 games completely lacking scoring breakdowns. For instance, what the NBA considers the first game in the history of the league (though it was actually a BAA game) between the Knicks and Huskies on November 1, 1946 now has a complete scoring breakdown, with the Knicks winning despite coming up with just six points in the third quarter. Chicago Stags home games in this era might be particularly fun to look at because, as a marketing tactic, they decided to play 15-minute quarters in several home games such as this, this and this. Minutes played were not yet an official statistic, so it's unclear if any Stags were averaging over 50 MPG for some home games. We hope you enjoy these new additions.

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