Sports Reference Blog

Archive for October, 2023

Major Improvements to Men’s College Basketball Leaderboards

31st October 2023

Thanks to some recent data expansions, we have vastly improved the coverage of seasons on our men's college basketball leaderboards on the Sports Reference College Basketball site. This will make the most comprehensive online archive of college basketball statistics even more robust. One thing to note is that in some cases this allows for our leaderboards to be even more comprehensive than what is included in the NCAA Record Book. This is because many schools tracked statistics such as blocks, steals and assists long before they became 'official' NCAA categories. Below is a breakdown of some of these changes.

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Posted in Announcement, CBB at Sports Reference, Data, Features, History, Leaders | 1 Comment »

Expanded Data Added to Team Executives on Basketball Reference

31st October 2023

Basketball Reference has added new details to our Executives pages to provide greater context on the careers of the NBA's main decision makers.

While we have long had lists of transactions made by each of these execs on their pages, we have now mirrored the statistics that we show for NBA head coaches on these pages and added a sortable register.

So, for instance, you can now sort the details of all of these execs to see that Red Auerbach (who stayed on in the Celtics front office years after he retired from coaching) is the all-time leader in seasons (34), games (2,667), wins (1,738), playoff games (342), playoff wins (206), playoff losses (136) and championships (15).

Another sortable column on the table shows how many games each exec is over or under .500, which combines success with longevity. Five execs in NBA history are at least 150 games over .500: Auerbach, R.C. Buford, Jerry West, Pat Williams and Daryl Morey. It should also come as no surprise that one exec is more than twice as many games under .500 as any other in NBA history: Elgin Baylor.

Basketball Reference defines 'Executive' in this use case to be the executive in charge of player personnel decisions. For much of history, this was generally the front office employee with the 'General Manager' title, but this is often a 'President of Basketball Operations' or something similar now and was often the owner in the earliest days of the league. Sometimes this is hard to define and so we rely on beat reporters and league/team employees for their best judgments on who is making the calls in a given front office. If you have disagreements with any of the decisions made here, please let us know.

 

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Thousands of Updates, Additions and Improvements to Men’s College Basketball Data

9th October 2023

Sports Reference has incorporated thousands of updates, additions and improvements to its Men's College Basketball data on the Sports Reference College Basketball site thanks to the efforts of Dave Quinn.

This expansion of data runs from 1950-51 through 2006-07, with a particular concentration in 1998-99 and 1999-00 (with over 20,000 new datapoints added to those seasons). The most-impacted statistics are Minutes Played (9,165 additions), Defensive Rebounds (8,910 additions), Offensive Rebounds (7,060 additions), Turnovers (5,283 additions), Personal Fouls (3,573 additions) and Games Started (3,072 additions). Every statistical category had over 100 updates or additions. Read the rest of this entry

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