Sports Reference Blog

While Basketball Reference has been creating unique player pages for everyone selected in the NBA draft for the past couple of years, many people who never played in the NBA but were selected in the draft could only find their names in our draft tables. We have decided to rectify this by creating player pages for every draftee in NBA history, dating back to the inaugural 1947 BAA Draft. Due to historical drafts being much longer than the current two-round format, this has led to almost 4000 new player pages. These player pages include biographical information, links to relevant college/international pages and family connections where available.

Some notable people that are getting pages as a result of this addition:

- Len Bias, 2nd overall pick in the 1986 draft who tragically passed away days later
- Lusia Harris, 137th overall pick in the 1977 draft and the first woman ever selected
- Terry Stotts, 38th overall pick in the 1980 draft who went on to coach the Portland Trail Blazers
- Carl Lewis, 208th overall pick in the 1984 draft who had set Olympic track and field records
- Phil Elderkin, 205th overall pick in the 1973 draft who was a reporter selected as a joke by the Cavaliers' Bill Fitch
- Dave Winfield, 79th overall pick in the 1973 draft who went on to have a Hall of Fame career in Major League Baseball.
- Jay Bilas, 108th overall pick in the 1986 draft who went on to be a successful college basketball broadcaster

We give big thanks to data developer Charlotte Eisenberg for her time organizing and collecting data for this project.

Please let us know via our feedback form if you have any questions or comments.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 9th, 2021 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, Draft, Features, History, Trivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.