We're pleased to announce the newest video in our series showing how to get the most out of our websites. Today's video is all about the stat tables themselves. We've programmed several ways for the site to reorganize and add up stats on the tables for you, just by clicking a button or two. However, many users don't realize these hacks exist. Hopefully, this video will save you some time and also illustrate how to answer questions like "What was Bryce Harper's OPS over his last 10 games" Read the rest of this entry

After an unusually eventful final week of the season that saw Moe Harkless going to great lengths to get paid, featured thrilling closing arguments from all four NBA MVP candidates in what may be the closest race in history, and ended with Dion Waiters and the Miami Heat falling painfully short in their late push for a playoff spot, the field is set for the 2017 NBA Playoffs.

The question that has loomed over the NBA all season is whether any team had the quality to challenge the Golden State Warriors or Cleveland Cavaliers, or if this year would be one long preamble to a third showdown between those teams. While we won't know the answer with certainty until June, there's plenty of reasons to expect that the playoffs won't be a cake-walk for the either the defending champs or their rivals in the East Bay. In fact, in Cleveland's case, by both raw win-loss record and more advanced stats like Simple Rating System or Net Rating, they haven't even been the best team in the East this year.

Still, the playoffs are a different animal from the regular season, and before those teams can think about replaying the 2016 NBA Finals, they have to win their first round matchups, no sure thing given that both the Warriors and Cavaliers are facing a little uncertainty at the moment. For the former, they're tasked with re-integrating Kevin Durant into their offense after finding a major groove in his absence. For the latter, the problems are more severe: in the second half of the season, only the Minnesota Timberwolves and Los Angeles Lakers have been worse on defense than the defending champs.

For Warriors and Cavs fans, as well as those cheering on the Boston Celtics and San Antonio Spurs, a loss in the first round would be a devastating outcome for a season that seemed so promising. Fortunately, this kind of thing rarely happens. Since 2002-03, the year that the NBA changed to its current playoff format with a Best of Seven series in the first round, only four top-two-seeds out of fifty-six have lost in round one.

Today, we're going to take a look at what went wrong for those teams, and what went right for the underdogs who managed to pull off the unthinkable. Read the rest of this entry

We're just a couple of weeks away from the most glorious period of the annual sports calendar, the NBA Playoffs. However, there's still one huge piece of unfinished business to settle before we get there: the race for NBA MVP. This year's race is going down to the wire as LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden all remain in contention with just a few games remaining on the NBA schedule.

In the big picture, very little has changed since the last time we checked in on the race: Russell Westbrook is still averaging a triple-double, James Harden is still combining efficiency, volume, and playmaking to an unprecedented extent, LeBron James is still looking like Magic Johnson 2.0, and Kawhi Leonard remains the best two-way player in the league while dominating the ball and shouldering the offensive load in a way that no Spurs player has since Gregg Popovich took over as head coach. Read the rest of this entry

If you're viewing this site on Internet Explorer 11, chances are you're having a frustrating experience. In recent weeks, we've received voluminous feedback about our sites not loading properly. The common denominator to this feedback is that the users are almost all part of the small portion of our traffic from users on IE11. It seems that IE11 is unable to render many of our pages, probably due to some ad code. Nothing we have tried so far to resolve this seems to have worked. To fix this issue, we may try removing ads on IE11 to see if performance improves. As we're dependent on advertising to keep our sites afloat, this isn't a decision we relish.

Until we figure out what the issue is, we highly recommend user a superior (and free!) browser such as Google Chrome or Firefox.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

We're excited to post the latest video in our How To series, showing you some secrets and hacks that will help to get the most out of the Sports-Reference family of sites. Today's video is all about sharing. While many users know how to find the data they're look for, fewer know the different ways of sharing it. From embedding tables on a website or blog, to posting them to Reddit, to downloading directly to your computer as a spreadsheet, this video will show you the different ways that you share all the info you find on our sites:

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We know that a lot of you are interested in grabbing data from our site and reusing it in excel and generating reports on your own. We got our start doing that.

The redesign complicates that because we add some helper elements to the page that are relevant for the vast majority of users and helpful in their use of the site. I'll call this material Mobile Formatting. It includes the frozen left column on wide tables, the max width of the page and side scrolling, the use of interior table header rows and sort direction indicators. So to make sorting easier, I've added an option to the "Share & more" menu to strip this content out in one click.
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On the old version of the site on the front page, we placed the cursor into the search box automatically which could cause some issues if you had already scrolled down the page. Your browser would then be jerked back to the top of the page. On the site redesign, all you have to do is (once the page has loaded) hit the tab key one time and you'll be put into the search box. Lickety Split.

In November, we announced that we were no longer able to support automatic export of our tables to Excel. This was due to newer browsers not behaving in ways we expected, making it difficult to support the feature. We're happy to announce that we've figured this out, however.

Today, the automatic Excel export feature has returned to all of our sites. To export any of our tables to Excel, please hover over "Share & more" above the table you'd like to export. Once you hover, you'll see a dropdown where you can select "Get as Excel Workbook (experimental)", which will download the table into an xls file you can open with Excel.

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Russell Westbrook has broken a lot of things this year: triple-double records, Basketball Twitter, the lengthy drought of NBA players failing to appear on-stage with Migos. However, there's something a little less well-publicized than those that we can add to the list: Basketball-Reference's MVP Projections.

The MVP Projection uses a model that's based on previous MVP winners to use stats like points, rebounds, and assists, as well as team win-loss record, to determine which players voters are likely to target this year. And, as you can see below, it has a minor disagreement with the consensus on Westbrook's odds: Read the rest of this entry

LeBron's mad at his team, the New York Knicks are weighing a number of absurd trades, and Lance Stephenson is on a roster. That can only mean one thing: It's February in the NBA and everybody could use a break.

Fortunately, we've made it to All-Star Weekend! While it's a bummer to have to survive a few days without real, competitive basketball, All-Star Weekend gives us the chance to take a breather, take stock of the season, and see the NBA's biggest stars in a looser environment.

The highlight of this weekend, of course, will be the NBA All-Star Game, now in it's 66th year of existence. The event and the league have both come a long way from 1951, when George Mikan went 4-17 as the West fell to the East 111-94.

So, to get ready for Sunday night, we're going to take a look back at a few NBA All-Star Game records. Some of these have stood for decades while others were just set in the last few years. And for each one, I'll identify a couple of players who just might manage to break them this year. Read the rest of this entry