If you're like me, you were a bit annoyed when the NCAA made the decision to re-name several of the early rounds of the 2011 NCAA Tournament. All of a sudden, the First Round had become the Second Round and the Second Round had become the Third Round. The First Round, meanwhile, had become what we'd previously derided as play-in games (or what been officially known as the Opening Round). Talking about the tournament with friends somehow became a frustrating exercise, as the common nomenclature had been ruined. It was impossible to clearly communicate with people what round you were actually referring to. Notes like "Team X has won Y straight First Round games" now didn't make much sense. This also made it very difficult to run searches as intended in our NCAA Tournament Game Finder tool.

Fortunately, the NCAA corrected its mistake by returning to the original round names in 2016, but the damage was done. From 2011-2015, the Round of 64 and Round of 32 had different names than they'd had for all other years.

However, we've now upgraded our round search in the NCAA Tournament Game Finder to make it possible to run the searches that NCAA Tournament buffs actually want to run.

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You may have noticed that we added projections for 2018 to player and team pages last month. We have now added a register with all 2018 projections. See the batting projections here and the pitching projections here. These projections are very simple and are done in an automated way using Tom Tango's Marcels forecasting system, which you can read about here.

At Hockey Reference, we calculate adjusted stats in order to more accurately compare players from different eras and different goal scoring environments. With Alex Ovechkin approaching his 600th career goal, there has been some chatter about Ovi being the greatest goal scorer in NHL history.

So we thought this made for a good time to introduce the adjusted scoring statistics into the Player Season Finder tool in order to test this hypothesis. As it turns out, Ovechkin is easily the NHL leader in "adjusted goals" through 13 seasons of play. If you click on the link, you'll see he has 691 adjusted goals (through 1/15/18), while Wayne Gretzky had 607 adjusted goals through 13 seasons.

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With last week's announcement of the 2017 All-Pro teams, we're pleased to report that we've added 2017 Approximate Value (AV) numbers to the site for all NFL players. Note that these numbers are just provisional right now; the final numbers will be released after the Pro Bowl rosters are finalized. However, there's already some interesting preliminary information to dig through.

As of right now, Tom Brady and Todd Gurley are co-AV leaders at 19. For Brady, this represents the best season in NFL history by a player in his 40s. Gurley, meanwhile, is the youngest RB to hit that mark since Steven Jackson in 2006.

Not sure what AV is? To learn more about PFR's attempt to put a single number on each player-season since 1960 (for the purposes of comparing players across position and era), check out this link. For this year's full AV leaderboard, go here.

Users, your voices have been heard! After much clamoring, we have added a Player Batting Comparison Finder and a Player Pitching Comparison Finder to the Baseball Reference Play Index. With these new tools, you can compare the statistics for any season or set of seasons for up to six players at a time. For instance, here's the top six vote getters in the 2017 AL MVP race.

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We just wanted to quickly announce that we have added 2017 stats for the Pecos League and the Pacific Association. You can see all 35 leagues we have 2017 coverage for here.

Thanks to recent additions to our historical box scores, we now have full points and rebounds for every career meeting between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. See all of them here, via our Head2Head Finder.

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We are thrilled to announce the addition of two incredible new tools to the Baseball Reference Play Index:

The Team Batting Season Finder and the Team Season Pitching Finder.

These new tools will allow Play Index subscribers to create customized leaderboards for all team pitching/batting stats in Major League history.  In addition to standard team stats, we've also opened up searches for value stats, advanced stats, win probability stats, ratio stats, baserunning stats, situational stats, and stats in various pitch counts.

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Thanks to the tireless efforts of SABR, we have recently added a new Major League baseball player to our database. However, you won't find this player on our list of recent debuts. That's because this "new" player was actually a player in the 1884 Union Association.

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We're happy to announce that we've added a page that should answer one of our most frequently asked questions.

No, we haven't penned a detailed description of why we hate your favorite team (yet).

Rather, we've added a page with every no-hitter and perfect game in MLB history. You'll find the list is sortable, contains a leaderboard and also has a separate table for the 11 combined no-nos (where the no-hitter was a combined effort).

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