Sports Reference Blog

Basketball-Reference is now utilizing BPM 2.0, an improved version of Box Plus-Minus. Like the original BPM, BPM 2.0 is a statistic created by Daniel Myers which aims to estimate a player's performance relative to league average by using a player's box score information and his team's overall performance. On the site, BPM 2.0 will appear just as BPM did. On player pages it can be found in 'Advanced' section with columns dedicated to OBPM (Offensive Box Plus-Minus), DBPM, (Defensive Box-Plus Minus), BPM (Box Plus-Minus) and VORP (Value Over Replacement Player). OBPM and DBPM, when summed, equal BPM. They are all rate stats. VORP is a counting stat since its inputs are BPM and playing time. As before, these statistics are all available back to the 1973-74 season (though we're hopeful to eventually extend the measure back to 1951), when critical statistics such as blocked shots, steals and offensive/defensive rebounds were first officially tracked. For the nitty-gritty details on BPM 2.0, please see Daniel Myers's explainer.

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Thanks to the efforts of our friends at Retrosheet, we have added box scores back to the 1904 season to Baseball Reference. Previously, our game log coverage was back to 1908. Additionally, we have added partial play-by-play coverage for games games as far back as 1918. Previously, our oldest play-by-plays were from 1925. Since our last major Retrosheet update, the final two missing full play-by-plays of 1973 were added which means we now have complete PBP data back to that season now. 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.

Here are some examples of the new information/searches available on the site.

• With box scores back to 1904, we now have game logs for the full careers of Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson.
• We now have partial play-by-play coverage in all of Babe Ruth's seasons with the Yankees plus his final two with the Red Sox. This can be used in a lot of ways like seeing how well he did against various pitchers.
• Additionally, incomplete splits have been generated for player seasons from 1918 to 1924. In Babe Ruth's 1923 MVP season, from the play-by-play we have available he recorded a 1.554 OPS with runners in scoring position, a mark only Barry Bonds has reached since (min. 100 PA in this situation). Splits determined by play-by-play are searchable back to 1918 and more basic split data (home/away, month, etc) are searchable back to 1904 now.
• League-wide batting splits and pitching splits have been fleshed out with the new play-by-play data back for the years 1918-24.
• Batting Game Finder and Pitching Game Finder searches are now opened up back to 1904.
• Batting and Pitching Event Finder searches have also been opened up back to 1918. Of the games we have PBP for in 1918, Wally Pipp leads with 3 walkoff hits that season, for instance.
• Searches in the player and team streak finders now go back to 1904
• Win Probability, Baserunning, Situational and Batting Against tables are all available back to 1918 now.

If you have any questions about our data coverage, you can always see it here.

We're very excited about these new additions and hope you enjoy them, as well. Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

And thanks again to Retrosheet!

After years poring over play-by-plays, watching videos (tough, I know) and reading thousands of game stories in newspaper archives, Basketball-Reference has compiled the first comprehensive list of every buzzer-beating game-winning shot in the history of the NBA and the BAA. To date, there have been 772 such shots in NBA history, including free throws with time expired. I'm defining game-winning buzzer-beaters as successful shots taken with the shooter's team tied or trailing which left no time on the clock after going through the net. These are true game-enders leaving no opportunity for the opponent to respond. As Tim Duncan knows, there are no such thing as game-winning buzzer-beaters that leave even 0.4 seconds on the clock.

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We have compiled every game-winning buzzer-beater in NCAA Tournament history. Since you cannot advance the ball to half-court with a timeout in college basketball, we have been lenient with how we define "buzzer-beating game-winner" and included all shots in the final 2.0 seconds of a game that put the winning team in the lead (so either tied or trailing at time of shot, and leading afterwards). However, it wasn't until the 1993-94 season that the clock automatically stopped on makes in late-game situations. Consequently, we have included some shots from 1993 and earlier that were made with more than 2 seconds left, but which left the opponent with 2 seconds or fewer left to respond by the time they chased down the make to inbound or call a timeout. An additional wrinkle is that the NCAA added tenths of a second to the clock for the 1990-91 season, but just had whole numbers for earlier seasons. One notable exception is Tate George's buzzer-beater against Clemson, since that was played in an NBA arena (The Meadowlands).

A few notes about how this data was compiled:

• • • • We read recaps or watched video of every NCAA Tournament game decided by three points or fewer. It's possible there was a game with free throws shot after time expired due to a technical foul (or something else) that we missed because the final margin ended up being 4+ points. Same with a three-pointer made at the buzzer on which the player was also fouled or a team that scored multiple times in the final two seconds.
      • The distances and assists listed are unofficial, gathered from play-by-plays, video review and newspaper accounts. Distances sometimes varied in different accounts, so we used the distances listed in the most comprehensive game stories we could find.

    If you have any additions to this data, please
    let us know

Earlier this season, there was some buzz that LeBron James had lost to Kemba Walker for the first time in their 29 head-to-head appearances. However, did you ever consider who LeBron loses most often to? If you set a minimum of 10 head-to-heads (regular season and playoffs), that would be Patrick McCaw, who is 4-1 against James in the regular season and 8-1 against him in the playoffs.

This is now more easily searchable thanks to Basketball-Reference's new Teammates And Opponents tool, located in the Frivolities section of the site. This will produce a list of either every player your choice, in this case, LeBron, has played against, or played with. As an example of the teammates function, here's a link to every player Russell Westbrook has played with. You may be surprised that among players who've been in 50 games with Westbrook, Hasheem Thabeet has the highest winning percentage with him.

So try out our new Teammates and Opponents tool and see what interesting results you can find! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

On our sites that cover the pro sports, we at Sports Reference make an effort to include portraits of the players being covered, as there is power to attaching a name and stats to a face. With that in mind, we're happy to announce both the addition of headshots for players currently participating in the 2019-20 college basketball season, as well as pictures for 500 major historical players.

If you're subscribed to our College Basketball Stathead daily recap newsletter, you may have noticed we recently added the headshots of the top 5 players for each night to give your inbox a splash of color. (And if you're not subscribed but are interested, sign up here!) Luka Garza, Markus Howard, Xavier Tillman, they've all got their faces on the site now.

As for the historical players, check out Bill Walton when he was playing college ball instead of commentating on it, or Tony Bennett's big smile back when he was shooting threes for Green Bay instead of coaching the Cavaliers. Charles Barkley when he had hair, or David Thompson rocking the 'fro at NC State are also choice additions.

We do plan to incorporate historical coach headshots in the near future as well. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form. Thanks for following us!

For April 2017, MLB awarded Reliever of the Month honors to Greg Holland (NL) and Tommy Kahnle (AL) and has kept up this award through the 2019 season. With 3 years of the award in the books, we have added it to Baseball-Reference's repertoire of awards history. This will appear in the Leaderboards, Awards and Honors section of player pages as Monthly Awards. Here's a link to Edwin Diaz, who currently leads with 5 Reliever of the Month honors.

Check out the full list of Reliever of the Month recipients at Baseball-Reference.com. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form or Baseball Reference's official Twitter account. Thanks for following us!

As part of our partnership with StatsBomb, FBref continues to incorporate more advanced statistics for players in the major international leagues. Additions have included expected goals, passing data and plus/minus, which you can read more about in this blog post. We have now added post-shot expected goals for goalkeepers, which uses expected goals on on-target shots to measure the shot-stopping ability of goalkeepers.

This information is available in competitions' advanced goalkeeping page. For example, here is a link to the advanced goalkeeping table for the 2019-20 English Premier League. You can read FBref's xG explainer as well as Statsbomb's PSxG explainer for more information on how these figures are calculated.

You can keep up with the latest additions of competitions coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for the This Week in Sports Reference mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

The NFL began handing out Player of the Week awards in 1984, but before then the Associated Press handed out their own Player of the Week awards. Thanks to compilation work by John Turney, we now have that award's history from 1963 to 1973. Notably, before 1970 there was an AFL and NFL version of the award. Len Dawson and John Hadl lead the way with 8 AP Player of the Week honors. The AP was also liberal enough with its criteria to award entire units, such as the Raiders Linebackers in Week 2 of 1973, or the entire Fearsome Foursome of Merlin Olsen, Deacon Jones, Lamar Lundy and Roger Brown in Week 14 of 1967.

Check out the full list of Player of the Week recipients at Pro-Football-Reference.com. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form or Pro Football Reference's official Twitter account. Thanks for following us!

With the season concluded, we're pleased to report that we've added 2019 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 and All-Pro rosters are finalized. However, there's already some interesting preliminary information to take a look at.

As of now, Lamar Jackson is the clear AV leader at 26, tied for the all-time record with LaDainian Tomlinson's 2006 MVP season. Michael Thomas, Patrick Mahomes, Dont'a Hightower and Dak Prescott round out the top 5.

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. Feel free to send us feedback via our site's form.