Sports Reference Blog
Detailed Data Coverage Maps Added to Basketball Reference
Posted by Mike Lynch on February 14, 2019
The Basketball Reference database contains box scores for every game in NBA/BAA/ABA history. However, the completeness of these box scores is variable. The boxes are more or less complete back to 1983-84, but only player points, field goals and free throws are complete all the way back to the start of the BAA in 1946-47. However, we are constantly fleshing out older box scores to make the data on the site more complete (with big assists from Todd Spehr, Sean Burrill and Matt Shuh). Since this is constantly changing, we have added a data coverage summary so that users know how complete our data is when running a search. As you can see, the page has four different tabs: Games, Playoff Games, Regular Seasons and Playoffs.
There is a row for each season. The columns are then mostly statistical categories. However, the second column (total) is the total number of player games or player seasons in that given season. So in 1946-47, for instance, there were a total of 6,477 player games played. The FG column says "0", which means that we're not missing FG for any of those player games. FGA, however, says 6,427, which means we only have FGA for 50 out of the 6,477 player games that season. The other column titles are self explanatory, but it should be pointed out that ToC means "time on court" (minutes played). If a cell has a "-" through it rather than a number that indicates that the statistic was not yet officially tracked.
Please let us know if you have any questions on this data.
Awesome! How are you going about filing in these missing data?
Many teams have sent us PDFs of their official scorer's reports. We've been able to unearth many other box scores on services like newspapers.com
So, let me get this straight, you post complete NHL box scores prior to 1988 all the way back to the beginning of the NHL in 1918....then remove the pre 1988 NHL box scores without so much as an explanation two weeks later....and now you're posting incomplete NBA box scores? What gives? When are the NHL box scores coming back? If not....why? Why does your site absolutely refuse to answer this simple question?
Trust us, we'd love to republish the info. We can't really comment on it, unfortunately.
Mike, are we talking about pre 1987-88 NHL box scores or nuclear secrets?
Large portions of the 1982-83 NBA season box scores are sourced from USA Today, namely most games played Sunday through Thursday, since the paper does not publish on Saturday or Sunday. The newspaper offered full statistical coverage of NBA games from its inception in 1982. The newspaper does not have its historical archives online for viewing of the microfilm image at this time. However, there are also a lot of other newspapers used for this research and data entry.
We plan to elaborate more on the sources for the 1982-83 season once the data for that season is more complete.
In regards to college basketball in Sports Reference, are there any plans on adding box scores and player game logs prior to 2010-2011?
A lot of us stat heads would love to see this data added to the website, but considering there were roughly 300-350 Division 1 teams per season, I can see where the task can be daunting.
Is it on the burner and is help needed? I'd be more than happy to research and key enter my alma mater for you.
I wouldn't rule it out in the future, but it's not on the horizon