Sports Reference Blog

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Even though the temperature has been in the 80s here in Philadelphia this week, the calendar insists it's nearly October, which means it's nearly time for glorious postseason baseball! Following last year's World Series will be a tall order, but there are plenty of intriguing matchups lined up and no clear frontrunner to win it all.

To help you get ready, Baseball-Reference has plenty of postseason data. However, we've found that some users aren't quite sure where to find it or don't know quite how deep our postseason dataset goes. So, here's a quick primer on how to get all the information you need on MLB Postseason History. Read the rest of this entry

Last week we announced that we have added every Hat Trick in NHL history. This week, we're happy to announce that we have also added every penalty shot in NHL history to Hockey Reference.

Similar to the Hat Tricks, penalty shots are available as a table on player pages, team pages and season pages. Additionally, we have created franchise registers for penalty shots.

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

We're happy to announce that you can now find every Hat Trick in NHL history on Hockey Reference. We have integrated these additions across many sections of the site.

Read the rest of this entry

We have added a new section to the Awards page at Pro Football Reference. We're happy to announce we have added the NFL Network's yearly list of the Top 100 NFL Players, as voted by their fellow players every offseason. These rankings go back to 2011, and feature the statistics each of the players went on to post that season. These rankings can also be found in the Awards section of player pages. We hope you enjoy this addition and please let us know if you have any questions.

At Basketball-Reference, we have every box score in NBA history, including the playoffs. However, for many years, we don't have all statistical categories filled in in these box scores. We have recently taken a major step towards remedying this issue with our playoff box scores. We now have nearly complete box scores and series cumulative boxes for every NBA Finals series in NBA history.

Read the rest of this entry

As you may know, our College Basketball site has every box score in NCAA Tournament history. However, many of these box scores were missing certain categories. For instance, blocks, steals and assists were not officially-tracked college basketball statistics until the mid-1980s. And in the tournament's earliest years, only scoring and shooting were officially recorded. Still, we were missing large swaths of available data on these games. However, thanks to the research of Sean Burrill, we have made huge improvements and now have nearly full coverage of all statistical categories for all NCAA Tournament games since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985.

Read the rest of this entry

We have added a few new search options to the Basketball Reference Player Season Finder

These additions can be found in the "Search Award/Honor" dropdown on the search form. Previously, you could run searches for major award winners and All-NBA or All-Rookie players. We've now added the ability to search for All-Defensive Players. Additionally, rather than searching for just First or Second team players separately, you can can now search for both First and Second team in the same search. Here are a few examples of new searches you can run:

---Worst Defensive BPM by a First-Team All Defense Player

---Fewest Win Shares by an All-Rookie player (1st or 2nd team)

---Youngest players to make an All-NBA team

We hope you enjoy these additions. Please let us know if you have any questions

Heavy Play Index users, especially those who try to share their findings, may have noticed that the URLs for Play Index queries tend to be very long and unwieldy. Here, for example, is the URL for a simple query of most HRs in a season:

As many an infomercial host has suggested, there simply has to be a better way. Fortunately, there is! Every Play Index tool has a button in the top right that says "Make Tiny URL" Read the rest of this entry

On Friday, we moved all of the sites over to secure http (or https, more simply). Here's the Wikipedia explainer. Basically, this just means that the data between your computer and our browser is now encrypted, rather than plain text. You should now see "secure" and/or a lock in the address bar when you are on the site. We have never stored credit card information and still don't. All payments were always encrypted and handled by third parties, Paypal and Stripe.

We have not seen any issues surface in this switch, but if you do find something, we'd greatly appreciate you letting us know.