Sports Reference Blog

In June Pro Football Reference extended its game-by-game coverage of player fumbles, fumbles recoveries and fumble return yards back to 1989. Today we're happy to announce that we've added two more seasons of coverage (1988 and 1987) thanks to the research of Ken Pullis. In 1988 Randall Cunningham led the NFL with 12 fumbles. You can now see which games those came in in his game logs for that season. Similarly, you can see Dan Marino's league-leading eight fumble recoveries in his game logs. Fumble return yardage also shows up in the game logs back to 1987. Such as Reggie White's 70-yd return in 1987 against Washington. This information also appears in the box scores.

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Hockey-Reference has recently joined many of our other Sports-Reference sites in featuring nicknames for players on the site. Nicknames for over 2,300 players have been added to the site. These range from legends like Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr and Toe Blake to stars like Rod Brind'Amour and brawlers like Dave Schultz. We would like to thank our 2023 summer intern Brendan Avey for his thorough research in finding these nicknames and readying them for insertion into our dB. We would also like to thank Doug Reynolds of The Hockey Databank for allowing us to use the hundreds of nicknames already in his database. We hope you enjoy this new feature and please let us know if there are any others we're missing that you think are worthy of inclusion.

Basketball Reference has added assistant coaches to our WNBA team pages and also created pages for these assistant coaches and added assistant coaching stints to pages for head coaches. We would like to thank one of our 2023 summer interns, Alison Gilmore, for her exhaustive research in tracking these down. This information was difficult to find in many cases, but she was able to add over 1,000 datapoints. If you notice that we're missing any of these coaching stints, please let us know.

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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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.

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

While player turnovers have only been officially tracked in NBA games since 1977-78, team turnovers have been tracked in official scorer's reports for nearly a decade longer. Per the official NBA Guide, team turnovers have been compiled since 1970-71. However, the official NBA Guide also only shows team and opponent turnovers comprehensively since 1973-74. Team and opponent turnover totals for the 1970-71, 1971-72 and 1972-73 seasons have always been a bit of a mystery. Ostensibly the NBA has these totals, but for some reason they have never been printed in NBA Guides.

Well, we're proud to announce that this mystery has been solved and there's one man to thank: Harvey Pollack.

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We are pleased to announce that our partnership with Stats Perform Opta has expanded to include six new leagues of advanced data.  This data not only includes the current seasons, but also 3-4 historical seasons.

The new leagues are

• Germany's 2.Bundesliga
• France's Ligue 2
• Italy's Serie B
• Spain's La Segunda (La Liga 2)
• Belgium's Jupiler Pro League, and
• Argentina's Primera Division and Copa de la Liga

These pair with

• England's Championship
• United States and Canada's MLS
• Mexico's Liga MX
• Brazil's Serie A
• The Netherlands' Eredivisie
• Portugal's Primeira Liga
• Conmebol's Copa Libertadores
• UEFA's Europa Conference League

To form our Next 14 tier for scouting reports and the like.   This is all described on our scouting reports explainer.

Thank you for your support.  It allows use to expand our stats in more directions and continue to serve you better.

Hockey Reference recently extended its season-level Time on Ice coverage back through the 1997-98 season. Before this update, our coverage went back to the 1998-99 season. In conjunction with this update, we also cleaned up many season-level Time on Ice totals from 1998-99 through 2007-08 that were discrepant with the game-level totals. Our season-level TOI now matches the sum of our game-level TOI, which was first recorded in 1997-98. You can see the 1997-98 NHL Time on Ice leaders here (Ray Bourque led the league).

We've added a brand new stat to PFR. It's Success Rate, one of the coolest and most interesting new advanced stats to enter the football discussion in the last few years.

Success Rate starts with the idea that not all plays in football have the same objective. On first and 10, a two-yard run would be considered a bad result; on third and one, that same two-yard run would be celebrated for moving the chains. This means we can't just use stats like yards to measure how effective an offense is. Instead, Success Rate shows us how effective players and teams are at staying on schedule and creating productive plays.

As a result, a successful play depends on the context. We define it as a play that gains at least 40% of yards required on 1st down, 60% of yards required on 2nd down, and 100% on 3rd or 4th down.

As mentioned, it can be measured for both players and teams, for passing, rushing, and receiving. For example, here are the leaders in 2022 in rushing yards per attempt: