Sports Reference Blog

In a huge addition, we at Hockey-Reference are glad to announce that we now have all NHL regular season box scores available back to the beginning of the NHL, the 1917-18 season. With this, we can now fill out the gamelogs section of many great players' careers. For example, you could now find Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito's excellent 1970-71 seasons when Orr finished with a career high 139 points and Esposito set the then-record of 76 goals in one season. Bernie Parent's 1973-74 season of 12 shutouts can now be examined easily. Gordie Howe's extensive NHL career, beginning with his rookie season in 1946-47, has game logs now.

All of these game logs are also searchable on Stathead now, which is also a great new asset to have. Looking for most goals by a player in a game will now lead you to Joe Malone's record day in 1920, when he scored seven for Quebec in what ended up being a 10-6 victory over the Toronto St. Patricks. While the top of the list of most saves in a shutout doesn't change, Jacques Plante's 52-save shutout in 1955 now properly appears in the top 5 thanks to this addition. We should put a reminder that there are some categories, such as saves and shots against, that were not recorded in the earlier days of the league.

So now there's a lot more history to dig through, and we hope you enjoy our presentation of the "new" box scores! Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

One important piece to interpreting a sport's history is looking at who the media of the time selected as the top players to award, but you can also get some important context by looking at the other players who were in serious consideration for those awards. With that in mind, we're happy to announce the addition of voting breakdown data for the Associated Press' Most Valuable Player, Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year, Offensive and Defensive Rookie of the Year and Coach of the Year awards. You can find this information in the Football Award Voting Summaries section of our Awards index. Just taking a random example of 1982, you can see Mark Moseley's narrow win over Dan Fouts in the MVP race, as well as Marcus Allen's unanimous OROY win and the runners-up to Lawrence Taylor in the DPOY race.

Having this data also allows us to calculate career Award Shares. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is the sum of the percentage of maximum votes they received over the course of their career. For example, a unanimous MVP like Lamar Jackson in 2019 gets 1.0 Award Share for that award, while 2016 Matt Ryan got 25 out of the possible 50 votes, so that's 0.5 Award Shares for that win. We have links to the career MVP, OPOY and DPOY award shares leaderboards on our Leaders index. Award shares and rank for each season they received votes will also be available in the Awards and Honors table on player pages, so you can more quickly see that in addition to Aaron Donald's 3 DPOY awards so far, he's also received at least a vote in every DPOY ballot since his sophomore season.

Some coverage notes:

• MVP voting breakdowns available since 1957. 100% complete back to 1986. 1961 and 1975 MVP vote totals still missing. AP did not give out awards in 1960.
• OPOY voting breakdowns available since 1972. 100% complete back to 1986. 1975 and 1985 OPOY vote totals still missing.
• DPOY voting breakdowns available since 1971. 100% complete back to 1988. 1985 DPOY vote totals still missing.

We want to give a big thanks to John Turney who compiled this historical voting data. Turney was also a contributor on the pre-1982 sacks data we announced recently.

If you have any questions, suggestions or even a lead on some of the still-waiting-to-be-discovered vote totals, feel free to contact us via our feedback form.

The NFL has only officially counted player sacks since 1982, which means sack records and leaderboards present an incomplete history of pass rushing. In many cases we accept these holes in the official record and move on. After all, we don't know how many rushing yards Jim Thorpe had, passing yards Paddy Driscoll had or even how many blocked shots Wilt Chamberlain had. Heck, we don't even "officially" know how many tackles anyone had in 2020 (or any other season). However, thanks to Official Gamebooks, 'unofficial' tackle totals get published in many places (including here). In the case of sacks, thanks to decades of research by John Turney and Nick Webster, we have a very thorough accounting of the statistic all the way back to 1960. Given that accounting for these 'unofficial' statistics allows us to paint a richer picture of the history of the game, we think it is a no-brainer to present them on Pro Football Reference, allowing fans to gain a deeper appreciation of some of football's biggest stars in the 1960s and 1970s. This isn't terribly different from presenting RBI totals for baseball players from before 1920 (the first season the statistic was "official"). These additions allow us to print year-by-year and career sacks totals for not just legends such as Deacon Jones (173.5), Jack Youngblood (151.5), Alan Page (148.5), Carl Eller (133.5) and Joe Greene (77.5), but also for less recognized stars like Coy Bacon (130.5), Cedrick Hardman (122.5) and Jack Gregory (106.0) whose greatness and impact can now be more readily quantified.
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We are thrilled to announce that we have added thousands of data points to our collection of historical NBA box scores (which includes at least a partial box score for every game in NBA history). The new data is courtesy web developer and statistician Justin Kubatko, who once upon a time built Basketball Reference.

For an overview of how complete our box score data now is, please visit our Data Coverage Summaries for the regular season and postseason.
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We've always had Home Run Derby and Futures Game information on the Bullpen, Baseball-Reference's user-managed wiki, but we have now added participation data for those events to the main Baseball-Reference site.

Home Run Derby champions, as evidenced by 3-time winner Ken Griffey Jr., now have that marked among their accomplishment "bling" at the top of their player page. In addition, if you scroll down to the Appearances on Leaderboards, Awards and Honors table, Home Run Derby participation is included as its own section now, with wins bolded. Because this is just participation data, you still have to go to the Bullpen if you want to see the actual scores of the Derbies.

Similarly, if a player participated in a Futures Game, using Joey Gallo as an example, that appears now in a new section of the Appearances on Leaderboards, Awards and Honors table. This data also appears on their minor league page in a column of the Prospect Rankings table. Each Futures Game is linked to the relevant Bullpen page if you want to see the full roster that year as well as the score and relevant events.

We thank intern Jeremy Frank for his work in collecting and preparing this data for this project. If you want to share any feedback or suggestions, please send us your thoughts via our feedback form.

The wait is over!

We've been listening to requests for new features from our users and we're happy to announce that we have launched two new tools for Stathead Baseball: The Team Pitching and Batting Span Finders.

The Team Span Finder is a powerful research tool that allows you to search and compare team stats based on spans of games. You can further refine the search and specify the span to be either from the start or end of a season.

Here's a few examples of each type of search to get you started:

The biggest run differential in any 162-game span is +446, done by the 1901-02 Pirates and 1938-39 Yankees.

The most shutouts thrown by a team in its first 50 games of a season is 14, by the 1969 Cubs.

Did you know? Since 1901, 137 teams have lost at least 15 of their final 20 games of a season. Only one of them made the postseason: 2000 Yankees (and they won the World Series, too!).

We hope you really enjoy this addition to Stathead. If you're interested in a subscription to the service, you can sign up for a free trial here!

Maggie Walsh Deaver has joined Sports Reference as Marketing Director and will manage SR's marketing and customer service functions. Maggie previously worked at Volo Sports as Director of National Brand and Marketing. She's a fan of Boston sports and Bill Belichick's hoodies. Follow her on twitter at @maggiewdeaver.

Andrew Chong has joined Sports Reference as a QA/Testing Engineer. Andrew previously worked for Chatham Financial and resides in the Philadelphia area. He follows the Phillies, DePaul basketball, and Korean players across any sport. He's on twitter at @testthesoftware.

At the beginning of the WNBA's 25th season, we announced a huge expansion of the advanced stats and features available in our WNBA coverage on Basketball Reference. We are still working on more features, and today we're happy to announce the addition of transaction history to WNBA players and teams.

For example, you can now take a look at the 2021 league transactions page and catch up on big moves like all the trades that happened on February 10, including Natasha Howard to the New York Liberty and Kia Nurse plus Megan Walker to the Phoenix Mercury. One player with a lot of transactions added to her page is Shey Peddy. The draft pick she was selected with was traded twice, including a 5-team trade in 2011. Then, in 2019 and 2020 she made it through many 7-day contracts before finally signing a rest-of-season contract with the Mercury. Peddy went on to even hit the game-winner in a playoff game against her former team that season.

This transactions addition includes a couple of transaction types unique to the WNBA, such as 7-day contracts and contract suspensions. The latter is used in the WNBA to give teams flexibility and allow players to pursue international tournaments; Katie Lou Samuelson is a recent example of this transaction type.

We want to give special thanks to our data developer Charlotte Eisenberg and intern Christina Wiech for collecting and formatting this data, thus making this addition possible. We're constantly working to improve our coverage of the WNBA and the other leagues we track on Basketball-Reference, so if you have any suggestions or feedback, send us your thoughts via our feedback form.

We are happy to announce the latest addition to Basketball Reference: we now have women's Olympics statistics back to 1976, the first Summer Olympics to have a women's basketball tournament. This complements our existing men's Olympic basketball data.

In the Teams section of our International index, a table has been added with each country's historical performance at the Olympics, in case you wanted to clear up how dominant the United States' women's team has been in this competition. There is also a women's Olympics seasons table that shows who got which medal in each competition.

We also have box scores for every women's Olympic match, from the first round robin games in the 1976 Olympics to the 2016 gold medal game between the United States and Spain. Players who participated in the Olympic Games, such as Lauren Jackson and Diana Taurasi, now have international pages.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.