Sports Reference Blog

Archive for June, 2015

Get Ready for the 2015 NBA Draft

23rd June 2015

The 2015 NBA Draft will take place Thursday night, June 25. Here's some draft info you should check out before, during & after the draft:

And don't forget to read up on some recent draft-related additions to the Play Index.

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, Draft | Comments Off on Get Ready for the 2015 NBA Draft

Enhancements to Hockey Reference Player Game Finder

19th June 2015

We're excited to introduce a couple of fantastic enhancements to the Hockey Reference Player Game Finder. This tool allows you to search through game-level player stats for every NHL game since 1987-88.

The huge addition is the option to search by cumulative games, which allows you to search for statistics over a specific span of games. Use this option by selecting "Search for Cumulative Games" in the yellow section directly below "Search Form." This tool opens up capabilities to do informative searches never before possible on Hockey Reference. Here are some examples to give you the gist:

You'll also notice that we've added an option to search for games on a player's birthday. So you can now search for things like birthday Hat Tricks.

Or you can even combine these new features and find the players with the most career birthday goals or the most career playoff birthday goals.

Posted in Announcement, Data, Features, Hockey-Reference.com, Play Index | 2 Comments »

2015 MLB Draft Results Posted

18th June 2015

Just wanted to quickly mention that the results of the 2015 June Draft are now posted to Baseball Reference. You can adjust the various filters at the top of the page to slice and dice draft data. Like all picks by a particular team or all players picked at a specific position.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, Draft | Comments Off on 2015 MLB Draft Results Posted

NBA Draft-related Additions to Basketball Reference Play Index

18th June 2015

With the NBA Draft a week away, we wanted to briefly introduce some subtle, but useful additions to the Play Index.

First up, is a tweak to the Player Season Finder, which now allows for customized statistical searches by player draft year. You'll notice there's now a filter for BAA/NBA Draft Year. Utilizing this, you can now search for things such as:

Additionally, we have made some enhancements to the Draft Finder. The biggest change is that you can now filter by the draftees' NBA/BAA position (please note that we don't have positions in the DB for many drafted players who never went on to play in the league). But, for instance, here are centers drafted in 2014. Additionally, you'll notice that player ages on draft day and birth country now display in the results. Again, this data is unavailable for many players who never played in the league.

We hope you find these new tools useful.

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, Draft, History, Play Index | 1 Comment »

Introducing the NHL Draft Finder

18th June 2015

With the 2015 NHL Draft coming up on June 26 & 27, we're happy to introduce a new tool to the Hockey Reference Play Index: The Draft Finder. Fans of our sites will find that this tool is similar to the ones found on Basketball Reference & Pro Football Reference.

With this tool, users can search through every NHL draft pick since 1963, utilizing a variety of filters and sorts. Users can set a custom range of years and specify things like position, team, birth country, round of selection, overall pick number and whether or not the player selected went on to play in the NHL.

Additionally, users can apply filters for what amateur program a player came from (whether this was the amateur team he was with at the time of the draft, or after the draft).

Here's a few sample searches for concrete examples of what the Draft Finder can do. However, you'll find this is merely the tip of the iceberg and we'd love it if you explore the options and let us know what you think.

We hope you enjoy this new feature.

Posted in Announcement, Data, Draft, Features, History, Hockey-Reference.com, Play Index | Comments Off on Introducing the NHL Draft Finder

Hockey Reference Adds Amateur Alumni Info

9th June 2015

Hockey-reference.com has added a section called "Amateurs," that contains information on Amateur Teams with alumni in the NHL.

The landing page for "Amateurs" shows all NCAA, Major Junior and Canadian College (CIS) teams with an alumnus who played in the NHL. Clicking on those teams will show a list of all alumni, and their career NHL stats.

For example, the major teams with the most alumni in the NHL are the Kitchener Rangers and Peterborough Petes. The NCAA teams with the most are Minnesota and Michigan.

In addition, each player page now displays which amateur teams that player played for, hyper-linked to that team page showing all of its alumni.

Please keep your eyes peeled for further updates built off of this data.

Posted in Announcement, Data, Features, History, Hockey-Reference.com | Comments Off on Hockey Reference Adds Amateur Alumni Info

Hockey Reference Adds Captains Index & Pages

8th June 2015

Hockey-reference.com has added a tab to each season page, showing the list of captains for each team.

In addition, the captain is now indicated in each team's roster, for any season, with a "C" next to their name.

The current list of all captains can be found here.

The captains for any particular season can be found, for example, here. To see a different season of captains, just change the year in the URL or use the next/previous seasons links on the page.

Each franchise also has a page which shows their all-time captains. For example, the Chicago Blackhawks' is here.

We've long had this info, but we hope these tweaks and additional pages make this info easier to access.

Posted in Announcement, Features, History, Hockey-Reference.com | Comments Off on Hockey Reference Adds Captains Index & Pages

2015 MLB Draft Tools

4th June 2015

The 2015 MLB Draft begins Monday, June 8, so here are some tools to get you ready:

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, Draft, Features, History | 2 Comments »

Find NBA Finals Data on Basketball-Reference

4th June 2015

With the NBA Finals (finally) tipping off tonight, we just wanted to quickly link to some of the NBA Finals data & tools we have on the site.

  • For a full list of NBA Champions, Finals MVPs & annual top playoff performers click here.
  • For greater detail on the performance of Finals MVPs, check out this list. LeBron James is 1 of just 10 players with multiple NBA Finals MVPs. Only Jordan, Duncan, Magic & Shaq have more than 2.
  • For a full list of every Playoff series in NBA history click here. You can also click on any series on that list to see a cumulative box score for that series, with links to every game. Here is the 2014 NBA Finals, for instance.
  • If counting "ringz" is your thing, check out our list of the players with the most championships. As you can see, LeBron James has a chance to match another all-time great SF, Larry Bird, with 3 titles.
  • Additionally, you can use our Play Index to run searches specifically for NBA Finals games. In the Team Game Finder or Player Game Finder, just set the game type filter to Playoffs and the round filter to Finals like in the image:

NBA Finals search

 

We hope you find these tools useful as you enjoy the 2015 NBA Finals.

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History, Play Index, Playoffs | 3 Comments »