Sports Reference Blog

Just wanted to show off a couple new features that we've recently introduced...

When you find yourself on our team season pages look for the "Game-by-game roster status" links:

These will bring you to a Roster Status page with a color-coded visualization of each player's roster status for the 82 regular season games, and the playoffs. Designations include Starter, Reserve, DNP, Inactive, and Suspended. Note that a player's status is also noted on boxscores and our player gamelogs. Notable in 2014-15 are the Raptors, Bulls, and Magic, all of whom maintained a stable roster throughout the season. The Sixers page is a lot of fun to look at, too.

We've published these going back to 2013-14, and should hopefully extend that period at some point.

The other new feature is a historical time series of roster continuity for each currently-active franchise. Our accounting begins with 1952-53 given that the season prior is the first for which we have Minutes Played data for every league player.

Several years ago former colleague Neil Paine published some musings on our blog about Team Continuity, and Dean Oliver devotes a couple pages in his Basketball on Paper book in the context of historically bad teams. The Spurs are well-noted stalwarts of year-to-year stability - on the other hand, the Cavaliers and Mavericks show that it's possible to turn over most of your minutes and not come apart at the seams, especially if one of your newcomers is LeBron James.

You can find a link to this page on our Frivolous Pages index, under Roster Continuity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2015 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Advanced Stats, Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, Data. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.