Sports Reference Blog

Last October, when we converted over from StatsBomb to Stats Perform Opta data one of the stats that we had to stop carrying on the site was Progressive Carries. Thanks to help from Michael Caley of the Double Pivot Podcast, we are pleased to reintroduce Progressive Carries to the site. Given our expanded data coverage from Opta, we now have this stat for over 20 competitions (for both current and historical seasons) including most of the top women's football leagues.

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Basketball Reference has tracked player call-ups and send-downs between the NBA and the G-League for many seasons. Given the lack of popularity of this feature (plus the time it takes to track these frequent transactions), we have decided to stop documenting these transactions and will be deleting all such transactions for 2022-23 from our database. We will still carry statistics for all G-League players.

From time to time Baseball-Reference receives updates to the historical record from trusted sources. These are transmitted to us via the Chadwick Baseball Bureau, which obtains updates from the legendary sports researcher Pete Palmer.

Generally these sorts of updates are most numerous when our friends at Retrosheet release new seasons worth of data. However, earlier this month we loaded a smaller update that deserves a mention and some further reflection on our part on how to best proceed.
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Over the past few months, we have significantly bolstered our Engineering team with four new full-time hires.

• Ben Wozniak, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference towards the end of 2022. Ben lives in Milwaukee and previously worked at Brady Corporation as a Software Engineer. He is primarily a Chicago sports fan, particularly the Cubs and Bears. Follow him on Twitter at @ben_woz.
• Jonathan Moore, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference towards the end of 2022. He attended Illinois State University and Tufts University. Jonathan lives in Boston and previously worked at Left Hook, Inc. as an Integrations Engineer. He is originally from Bloomington-Normal, IL and is a Chicago Sports fan.
• Matthew Carr, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2023. He lives in Toronto, Canada and previously worked as a full stack developer in the healthcare industry. He was in attendance for Joey Bats’ bat flip and is a fan of the Raptors, Jays and Leafs.
• Joe Zobel, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2023 after interning the summer of 2022. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Computer Engineering. He is a Chicago and Purdue sports fan.

Welcome to the team, Ben, Jonathan, Matthew, and Joe!

Joe is an example of our summer intern program leading to a full-time hire. If you're interested in our intern program, we are currently hiring seven summer interns for 2023 (in Data, Engineering, Marketing, and Product). These are paid internships.

If you're a Stathead user, you're probably already familiar with the Player Span Finders, which give you the option to search player stats over a span of games. Well, now we're excited to roll out the team version of this tool to all the Stathead sports!

Previously, Baseball users had a Team Span Finder, but now the option is there for Basketball, Football, and Hockey as well. With the Team Span Finder, you can:

• Search for combined stat totals over a consecutive span of games
• See records like "the most points in any 10-game span"
• Filter spans by ranges like the beginning or end of a season, or narrow the search by team, game circumstances, and more
• Use a Postseason filter to search for Postseason spans

In short, all the same great functionality and search options that you had in the Player Span Finder are now available on the team level. Search any and every span of games to uncover remarkable records in Stathead, your all-access pass to the Sports Reference database.

One of Stathead Basketball's most powerful tools just got even better.

The Player Span Finder now has WNBA stats. This tool gives you the power to search for player stats over any consecutive span of games from any point in their career. Now, with WNBA spans, you can answer questions like "Who had the most points in any 20-game span in WNBA history". Read the rest of this entry

We're excited to announce a new tool for Stathead Football, and it's one of our most-requested features.

The Player Span Finder gives you the power to search for player stats over any consecutive span of games from any point in their career. We've often had users ask for tools to answer questions like "Who had the most passing touchdowns in any 16 game span since the merger". Now, with the Span Finder, you can look that up. Unlike the Streak Finder, it will give you cumulative stats over every game in the span, regardless of if it fits the streak. And unlike the Game Finder, it can search every single possible span. Read the rest of this entry

Basketball Reference has added NBA Coach of the Year voting back to 1995-96 thanks to work of Noureddine Hourani, a researcher who passed this information along to us.

This new information can be found on coach pages such as Phil Jackson and Monty Williams. Additionally, if you visit our page with the full history of the NBA Coach of the Year Award, you will see a 'v' link in the rows for years where we have voting. Those links will lead to a page with voting summaries for all of the awards for which we have data for that season. For instance, here's the 1995-96 NBA Award voting summary.

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Thanks to the research of Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has added player statistics (passing, rushing, receiving, defensive interceptions, kicking, punting and kick/punt returns) to every box score in AAFC history. This means we now have, for instance, complete passing logs for Hall of Famer Otto Graham, rushing logs for Hall of Famer Marion Motley, receiving logs for Hall of Famer Mac Speedie, kick/punt return logs for Chet Mutryn,  kicking logs for Hall of Famer Lou Groza, and the whole nine yards from Spec Sanders, who passed, ran, received, returned, punted AND intercepted during his outstanding AAFC career.

These statistics can be found in our AAFC box scores, as well as on player game log pages like the ones mentioned above.

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We're excited to announce the addition of a new tool to Stathead Hockey: the Player Span Finder!

The Span Finder is one of the most powerful tools in the Stathead arsenal. It gives you the ability to search for combined stat totals over a span of games. For hockey, that means you now have the ability to search for things like the most goals in *any* ten game span.

Additionally, there are filters that give you the ability to narrow down your search, if you're looking for different kinds of spans. You can look for the start or end of a season, the start or end of a player's career, or the start or end of a player's time with a team or franchise. If someone gets traded and has a hot start with his new team, the Span Finder is the tool to use.

There are more filters to give you the ability to narrow by team, game circumstances, position, rookie status, and more. You can also toggle from regular season to postseason and look for spans in the playoffs.

If you've never tried Stathead Hockey before, now is the perfect time! The season is in full swing and the Span Finder will give you more ways to explore hockey stats than ever before. Learn more about Stathead Hockey, your all-access pass to the Hockey Reference database