Sports Reference Blog

One of the more requested features for Basketball-Reference has been a way to easily compare coaches in a given season. So, we've added a Coaches section to our season summary pages that give vital information such as who coached in that season, what their record was not only in that season but also with the franchise and for their career. We are also showing the coaches' playoff records for that season as well as their franchise tenures and their full career.

Here's a link to the 2018-19 Coaches page, where we can take a quick look at who's leading a couple of these categories. Raptors head coach Nick Nurse leads this season with 34 wins, but these are also the first 34 wins of his career. Gregg Popovich, Doc Rivers, Rick Carlisle and Mike D'Antoni make up the top 4 in career wins among active coaches, although if you sort by just with their current franchise, the top 4 shifts to Popovich, Erik Spoelstra, Carlisle and Terry Stotts.

Go back to past seasons as well and explore what the coaching landscape looked like at the time. Maybe check out Popovich's first season as a head coach as a starting point. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

The next new country to get their domestic league added to FBref's continuously expanding coverage is Greece! We now have Super League Greece statistics for the ongoing 2018-19 season, all the way back to the 2000-01 season when the league was known as the Alpha Ethniki. We have the 21st century history of Greek stalwarts like Olympiacos and Panathinaikos. Napoli goalkeeper Orestis Karnezis and Arsenal defender Sokratis Papastathopoulos are among the players in the major European leagues that now have their early years in the Greek League covered with this addition. You can also take a look at young stars currently rising in the Greek Super League, like the current league leading goal scorer Efthimis Koulouris, or the current league leader in clean sheets, Vasilios Barkas.

We will continue to announce new country additions on our Sports-Reference Blog, but you can also get availability updates directly to your inbox if you sign up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

People have been betting on football for decades, and the data surrounding that industry can give us valuable context by informing who was favored at the time and by how much. Because of that, Pro-Football-Reference included all Super Bowl point spreads in the big game's history, as well as all regular season and postseason games since 1977. And now, with a big thanks to SportsOddsHistory.com, we have now extended our postseason point spread data to cover the full Super Bowl era (since 1966).

That covers a lot of historic playoff matchups that PFR previously did not have point spread information on. For example, the 1967 NFL Championship, known today as The Ice Bowl, had the Packers favored by 7 going into the game; that game-winning sneak by Bart Starr was not enough to cover. There's the 1972 AFC Divisional matchup between the Raiders and the Steelers, who were actually 2-point underdogs at home but escaped with the win thanks to the Immaculate Reception by Franco Harris. And then there's the 1975 Vikings, who were favored by 8 points when they fell to the Cowboys in the 1975 divisional round thanks to Roger Staubach's Hail Mary to Drew Pearson.

This newly added data is searchable in the Team Game Finder section of the Play Index. One search you could look for is biggest home underdogs in the playoffs by point spread, and that search would reveal that the 1966 Cowboys, who were 7-point underdogs at home in the 1966 NFL Championship, held that mark until the 2010 Seahawks took their place atop the leaderboard. The 2010 Seahawks covered, while the '66 Cowboys ended up pushing.

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

One of Pro-Football-Reference's Play Index tools is the Player Game Finder, which can do many kinds of game-level searches. A new filter we've just added to the form is searching just for games where the player started or games where the player did not start. We have this information back to 1999 for offensive and defensive players.

Some examples of searches you can now do with this new feature:

Derrick Henry had a monster 47.8 fantasy points (standard scoring) in Week 14 against the Jaguars this year, but Dion Lewis was the starting running back for the Titans that night. Since 1999, Henry's game is the most fantasy points by a non-starter.

Amobi Okoye started the first game of the 2007 season for the Texans at 20 years and 91 days old, while Tremaine Edmunds' first start this year, also a Week 1 situation, came at 20 years and 130 days old. Those two are the youngest players to start an NFL game since 1999.

Elvis Dumervil has 105.5 sacks in his career, 42 of those coming in games he didn't start. He edges out Robert Mathis for most sacks in relief since 1999.

If you want to weed out QBs brought in for trick plays and only focus on QBs who were targeted as a receiver in a game they started at QB, you can do that now. Drew Brees leads with 9 QB starts where he was targeted, and Donovan McNabb with 8 such starts.

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

With last week's announcement of the 2018 All-Pro teams, we're pleased to report that we've added 2018 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 are finalized. However, there's already some interesting preliminary information to take a look at.

As of now, Patrick Mahomes is the clear AV leader at 22, with Jared Goff, Tyreek Hill, Mitchell Schwartz and Darius Leonard tied at 18. Leonard currently has the second-highest AV by a defensive rookie since 1960, only trailing Patrick Peterson's 20-AV season in 2011. As for Mahomes, his AV is second only to Priest Holmes' 2002 season in Kansas City Chiefs history.

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. For this year's full AV leaderboard, go here.

Happy New Year! FBref has already gotten far since we first launched in June, expanding to cover 20 major national competitions. The 20th addition is Croatia, as we now have 1. HNL (or First Football League) statistics back to the league's 2007-08 season. One of our major added features in 2018 was getting current-season statistics running, and we also have that for 1. HNL, where on the league's 2018-19 page you can see the current league table, as well as goal leaders, clean sheet leaders and most common nationalities in the league.

As we add more countries we also get to complete more players' professional beginnings, and Croatia is no exception. Luka Modrić has been a key piece of Real Madrid for years, and now we have his age-21 season with Dinamo Zagreb. Elsewhere, Mario Mandžukić won championships with Bayern Munich and Juventus, but before then he was part of three championship squads in Zagreb.

FBref will continue to grow in 2019, and you can keep up with the latest additions of country coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

Our latest addition to FBref's statistical coverage is the Ukrainian Premier League, which the site tracks from the 2003-04 season, back when it was the Ukrainian Top League, up to the currently active season. Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv's domestic dominance can now be properly dug into with this newly added coverage.

We continue to fill in the backstories of current Big Five players with country additions, and here with Ukraine we get to see West Ham United's Andriy Yarmolenko and his multiple double-digit goalscoring seasons with Dynamo Kyiv, as well as current Schalke 04 forward Yevhen Konoplyanka's time with Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. We will continue to announce new country additions on our Sports-Reference Blog, but you can also get availability updates directly to your inbox if you sign up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

Perhaps you've already noticed this, but beginning with the 2018-19 season Basketball Reference's current-season data is official NBA data as provided by SportRadar, which is the official statistics provider of the NBA. Our data has always been sound, but with our SportRadar partnership we will be able to apply statistical changes more seamlessly.

In the last few seasons, the NBA has decided to greatly increase the number of statistical corrections that they make in the days (sometimes weeks) after the completion of games. Thanks to this new partnership, these corrections will be applied to our site within 24 hours of these corrections being made. This applies to our box scores, our seasonal stats and to our play-by-plays.

We have added a new tool the Frivolities section of Basketball Reference: The Franchise Milestone Watch. This new tool will allow you to quickly select any active franchise and see if any players are approaching franchise records or are due to pass someone in the franchise record books. We are currently tracking most box score stats in this tool, with separate lists for the regular season and playoffs.

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All of our player pages on Sports-Reference have a newsfeed section where you can check up on player news and relevant blog posts that discuss the player. If you want your site to appear in those newsfeeds, you can follow the Add Your Blog Posts Here link next to every Player News section or click here to find instructions for the site you're interested in linking to.

We have now added this capability for FBref player pages as well, so if you're interested in appearing on FBref newsfeeds, you can read how to add the FBref Linker bookmarklet here. Once you've begun using the linker on your blog posts, contact us through our feedback form with the name of your site (at most 25 characters), the URL for your RSS feed (which must be a full text feed), a contact e-mail address and the URL of a page that uses the FBref linker.

We're happy for people to use FBref like their site's statistics partner, so if you help your readers find our content, we're glad to help our users find yours. If you have any other questions, you can also use the feedback form to get more information.