Sports Reference Blog

There have been several updates to Basketball-Reference.com over the last few weeks, so I thought I should take some time to summarize them here:

• I have added partial box scores for the 1981-82 season. We now have complete box scores (box scores with rebounds, assists, etc.) dating back to the 1985-86 season and partial box scores (box scores with field goals, free throws, and points) dating back to the 1981-82 season.
• Related to the above, I also added partial player game logs and splits for the 1981-82 season.
• Also related to the first item, I added partial composite box scores for the 1982 playoffs.
• Thanks to a lot of assistance from Neil Paine, detailed positions (i.e., PG, SG, SF, PF, C) have been added to the team pages. Assigning positions is more art than science, so we've done the best we could with players who did not have an obvious fit. The positions have been "proofed" back to the 1977-78 season, meaning that Neil and I have gone though the data and made sure that each position for each team has no less than 8 percent of the team's total minutes and no more than 32 percent of the team's total minutes. We'll continue to work on this, but for obvious reasons it becomes much more difficult as we go back in time. The detailed positional data will be added to other pages (e.g., the player pages) in the coming weeks.
• Thanks in part to Pete Palmer, I have added composite box scores for all NBA Finals dating back to 1950. There are some holes in the data: minutes played are missing for the 1952-1954 and 1956 Finals; field goal attempts are missing for the 1950 Finals; rebounds are missing for the 1953 and 1954 Finals; and assists are missing for the 1950, 1953, 1954, and 1957-1959 Finals. If you can help us fill in any of these missing values we would love to hear from you.
• Finally, we have received many, many complaints about the Elo Player Rater. While we have done our best to block automated voting and other nefarious techniques, there are still some really wacky results (e.g., as I type this Kobe Bryant is ranked outside the top 200). Over the next few weeks I am going to think about the best way to address this, and my hope is to implement some sort of "patch" early in 2013.

Well, that should do it for now. I don't know if I'll be posting again in 2012, so let me take this opportunity to wish you and yours a Happy Hairston Jrue Holiday.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2012 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.