Sports Reference Blog

Small Additions to Basketball-Reference

Posted by Neil on October 17, 2013

You may have noticed we've made a few small additions to the site in preparation for the upcoming 2013-14 NBA season:

  • Added "series stats" links to yearly playoff pages, and added advanced stats to series summaries.
  • Added 2-pointers made/attempted & 2P% to stat tables. - Now you can see that Shaq did in fact shoot much better on 2-pointers (58.3%) than 1-pointers (52.7%) in his career.
  • Added Free Throw Rate to advanced stats. - Borrowing from my old Blog-tionary... "FTr = (FTA / FGA). Free throw rate is the ratio of free throws attempted per field goal attempted. It's useful to assess where the bulk of a player's shots are coming from -- low ratios usually indicate a lot of jump shots (fouls are less prevalent the further away from the basket you get), while high rates are the province of inside players who often take strong shots in traffic down low. A variation on FTr is Bob Bellotti's old Rice-Scott Index (RSI), which is just FGA / (FGA + FTA) (so named because when the stat was developed, long-range bombers Glen Rice and Dennis Scott had extremely high RSIs)."
  • Added 3-Point Attempt Rate to advanced stats. - 3PAr = (3PA / FGA), and is a measure of what % of a player's shots come from long-distance, another good gauge of how they're utilized offensively. Note that 3PAr and FTr also appear on team & league pages (so you can see what the league averages were).
  • Added Plus/Minus (and re-added Game Score) to player gamelog pages. - Plus/Minus represents the team's scoring differential while the player was on the floor, and is available going back to the 2000-01 season. Game Score is a John Hollinger method of evaluating single-game performances.
  • Added Advanced Stats to player splits pages. - Splits pages now feature the player's True Shooting %, Usage %, Dean Oliver individual Offensive/Defensive Ratings, and Plus/Minus per 100 possessions in each split.
  • Added franchise summaries under player stat tables. - Underneath each player's stat tables, you'll now see career totals & averages for every franchise and league they played for/in (when applicable).

    • A few more tweaks are forthcoming before the season, and as always, email us any additional ideas/suggestions/requests you might have, and we'll see what we can do.

    Related posts:

    1. BBR: “Sticky” Menus on Player, Team, and Season Pages
    2. SV%+ Calculation Poll
    3. BBR: New Look for Basketball Reference
    4. Extensive Uniform Additions — Baseball-Reference.com
    5. SV%+ Is Now GA%-

    This entry was posted on Thursday, October 17th, 2013 at 4:46 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.

8 Responses to “Small Additions to Basketball-Reference”

  1. Don Michaels Says: October 18th, 2013 at 11:49 am

    Would it be possible to add an option to search for 4-point plays?

  2. Neil Says: October 18th, 2013 at 3:29 pm

    That might be a little tough. Would be something for the Event Finder, so at some point we'll try to look into it.

  3. Ty Says: October 18th, 2013 at 3:33 pm

    I looked at the league average FG% of 2 pointers made and compared it to 3's.

    The average points per 2-point shot: 0.97
    The average points per 3-point shot: 1.08

    Obviously, there are other things that need to be taken into account (frequency of being open vs. guarded, where the shots are taken), but it seems that teams should be taking more 3's (although the rate of 3PA have been rising, and shot up quite a bit last season).

  4. Neil Says: October 18th, 2013 at 3:36 pm

    And there's also the fact that 2-point attempts are a lot more likely to lead to free throws, which are even more efficient on a per-possession basis than the average 3-pointer.

  5. Frank Says: October 19th, 2013 at 2:05 am

    Great work, thanks as always.

    1) Are you going to add 2PM/2PA/2P% to the PI tool and leaderboards?
    2) All NBA Finals pages from 1984 and earlier seem to be broken as of this new update.

    Love the gold medallions next to championship playoff runs too, great stuff.

  6. Izzy Says: October 21st, 2013 at 2:44 pm

    this is incredible.

    two questions: Is it possible to look at someone's stats for an arbitrary period/split, e.g., John Wall's stats (averages, advanced, etc.) from February 23rd 2013 to March 29th 2013, how would I do that?

    Also, is it possible to look up one players stats when another player plays (also, this would also be good for an arbitrary split e.g. Bradley Beal's 3pt% and ppg when sharing the court with Wall in the aformentioned time period)

  7. Sean Forman Says: October 23rd, 2013 at 4:43 pm

    Izzy,

    If you go to Beal's lineup page (link is above his stats). We have his stats when on the floor withWall.

    http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/b/bealbr01/lineups/2013/#lineups-2-man::none

    To get Wall's #'s for a span (in a single season). Go to his gamelog and then click on the first row and then the second row and it will sum the rows between that for you.

  8. Sean Forman Says: October 23rd, 2013 at 4:44 pm

    Neil,

    What about the fact you get more offensive rebounds on missed 3 pointers? That might be an interesting then to compute. Pts after attempt that takes into account points after an offensive rebound.

    sean