Last year, to great fanfare and critical acclaim, we announced the Baseball Reference Tonsorial Consulting Service, a feature that allowed the segment of our users who also happen to be baseball players to experiment with new directions for their hairstyle and/or facial hair. The results were astonishing. While we're not at liberty to divulge the names of our clients, we think you will agree that 2015 was an excellent year for hair in baseball.

We want to thank everyone who participated in our pilot program. We're pleased to announce that for 2016, the B-R Tonsorial Consulting Service will be expanding to the professional basketball!

Go to any active player (and some retired one) and give yourself a new look free of charge.

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Once a day, the Basketball Reference Twitter account sends out a message like this one:

Kevin Durant has a 4.6% chance at the MVP if the season ended today. See the top ten: https://t.co/B8MtBhiJPK

— Basketball Reference (@bball_ref) February 29, 2016

If you click on the link, it takes you to the Basketball Reference MVP projections. Using a model based on previous voting results, the MVP Tracker projects the odds that every player has of winning the 2016 NBA MVP race, if voting were held today. Here's how it shapes up today:

Invariably, that Tweet gets replies like this:

@bball_ref seems high. 0.0% is pretty much everyone but Curry.

— Nicholas Blas (@NickBlas) March 1, 2016

Or, when it pulls from the bottom half of the Top 10, ones like this:

@bball_ref lol ya ok

— Troll4MVP (@Troll4MVP) February 24, 2016

At the risk of making things awkward during Sports Reference lunch breaks, I largely agree with the replies. Stephen Curry could probably sit out the rest of the season, declare that he believes Seth Curry would beat Oscar Robertson one-on-one, and announce that his favorite Star Wars movie is The Phantom Menace and still win the NBA MVP Award.

At the same time, I think these projections do tell us a lot about which players voters have targeted in the past and why certain candidates might or might not be catching on.

So, with that said, let's go through some of the major candidates, what their case for MVP is, and what our projection system thinks of them. I'll try to apply my own, imperfect human brain to the matter and see if I can bridge the gap between man and machine.

Chef Curry

So let's start with Stephen Curry. The model gives Steph a 76.2% chance of winning MVP. His case is simple: he's the best player, on the best team, having one of the best seasons of all-time.

Curry's eFG% of .643 is not only the best ever by a 30 PPG scorer, it's also the first time a 30 PPG scorer has even broken .600. His Player Efficiency Rating is the best ever, while his WS/48 are merely the 2nd best ever. Oh, and his team has already clinched a playoff spot, 2 months out. So, what the heck, computer?

For starters, the best player doesn't always win. MVP voters are very smart, but they aren't necessarily looking at stats like PER. Steph would hardly be the first 30 PPG scorer to lose MVP and, even if you factor in his bonkers efficiency, the 1990 MVP race featured 2 players (MJ and Malone) scoring 30+ PPG and shooting over 51% from the field and neither won.

Of course, neither of those players were on the best team in their conference that year, let alone one that would challenge for the best record in history. The MVP projection accounts for the Warriors' record, but not the historic implications of it or the fact that they have a shot at the best record of all-time.

This gets at, perhaps, the biggest difference between the projections and the perceptions: there's no way a model can adequately account for narrative. On paper, the Warriors are just 4 games up in their conference, yet that dramatically undersells their once-in-a-generation dominance.

They have the best record in NBA history through 59 games, they haven't lost to a title contender all season, and they blew out the Spurs the one time they played. Because none of that is going into the model, the Warriors' lead seems larger to us than the projection can recognize.

It also can't account for the tactical advantage that Steph's off-the-dribble shooting gives the Warriors. When someone can do this, it bends defenses past their breaking point, creating easy looks for teammates. Steph's jump shooting is the flux capacitor that powers the entire Warriors Machine.

At the same time, I don't want to undersell the model. Weird things happen, voters do get MVP wrong sometimes (just ask any Kobe or LeBron fan about the 2006 MVP race), and the model wants to account for that. 76.2% seems low to me, but it's still very, very high for a (rather conservative) projection system.

A Sound of Thunder

2nd and 3rd in the projections are Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, which is in itself another reason why Steph's chances are higher than they may appear. If there were a convincing 2nd option (say, KD putting up his numbers on a team with the Spurs record), we might be more willing to accept the idea of Curry's odds sitting at 75%.

However, KD and Russ are running so close that neither one has a huge advantage to us as observers. The projections don't account for the fact that they're teammates, but that will likely lead to vote-splitting, further solidifying Curry's lead. Seeing which one you prefer, however, presents a fascinating Rorschach Test.

Westbrook's famously reckless game is among the NBA's great aesthetic joys. However, after Durant's injury, Westbrook found a way to amp up the production without sanding down his edges. The result is that Westbrook has risen from supporting actor to lead.

He has 9 triple-doubles this year, trailing only Draymond (and he's the first player since Jason Kidd in 06-07 and 07-08 to have 2 seasons in row with at least 9). He's 2nd behind Rajon Rondo in Assists Per Game, while also scoring twice as many points as The Yoga Instructor and out-rebounding him. Barring a slowdown, Russell Westbrook will be the 1st player not named Oscar Robertson to average 24 PPG, 10 APG, and 7 RPG in a season.

Durant's game is less like a Swiss Army Machete and more like a lightsaber. He's scoring 27.9 PPG with an eFG% of .575 and a True Shooting Percentage of .635, both of which are historic achievements we'd be able to more fully appreciate if Steph weren't regularly lighting basketball courts on fire.

KD's precision and efficiency mean that some advanced stats, like Offensive Rating and WS/48, prefer him to Westbrook. Of course, Westbrook leads in PER and the Thunder's Net Rating is 13.7 points per 100 possessions better when Russ is on the floor, versus 11.2 for KD

Durant's getting blocks while Russ is getting steals; Westbrook crashes the boards on offense while KD cleans the defensive glass. The question, as it is, seems to come down to quantity vs quality. You could say that Westbrook does (ever so slightly) more, while KD does less, but does it all (ever so slightly) better.

In that case, the projection backs Westbrook because, traditionally, the voters are looking for that quantity. Only 4 players have won MVP while putting up numbers at or below KD's mark of 8.1 rebounds per game and 4.6 assists. 3 of them outscored Durant in points per game, 3 played all 82 games, and 3 played more minutes per game than KD is averaging.

Westbrook and Durant are as close to a true elite partnership, without a clear alpha dog, as we've seen. Unfortunately, that fact will probably cost both of them any kind of shot at MVP.

How Much Should Defense Matter?

Despite being ranked 4th, Kawhi Leonard may have a clearer path to 2nd in the MVP voting than either Westbrook or Durant, thanks to context. In his favor are two things that our model can't really account for.

First, Leonard is probably the NBA's best defender. However, he does it in ways that are largely absent from box scores. His 1.8 steals and 0.9 blocks are impressive, but Paul Millsap actually has better box score numbers.

What Millsap doesn't do is hold opposing teams to 96.1 points per 100 possessions when he's on the floor. That's Kawhi's mark and the only one that's better this year is Tim Duncan, who's spent roughly 2/3 of the time on the floor this year that Leonard has. And that's what's quantifiable by advanced stats. Watching the games, it's clear that Leonard's hard work and shutdown-D is the linchpin of the best defense of the last 10 years.

What's important to note, however, is that ignoring defense is probably the correct approach for a projection system to take. For instance, here are three candidates from a recent MVP race:

Player 1 is LeBron James, just months removed from The Decision and the "Not 4, Not 5, Not 6" pep rally. Player 3 is 2010-11 MVP Derrick Rose. And Player 2 is Dwight Howard. Given how close the race is on the numbers, Dwight's earth-shattering defense (he had a 94 Defensive Rating that year) should have put him over the top, but voters largely ignored it, in favor of Rose's superior offensive burden.

In general, voters emphasize offensive production over defense. You can argue this is changing, or that Kawhi's once in a lifetime talent could transcend this pattern, but the projection system can't hear you.

The second factor is a more tactical one. The race between KD and Westbrook is so close that, even if a voter were likely to pick one, it's not clear which one they'd pick. It's not hard to see them splitting the vote, or even that lack of a clear choice pushing voters to Kawhi.

It's also unlikely that a voter would pick one member of the Thunder and then turn around and vote for the other in 3rd place. Since the MVP award was created in 1956, only one pair of teammates -- Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain in the 1972 MVP race -- have both finished in the top 3.

Our model is trying to predict who will win, not necessarily predicting the Top 5 in order, which means it isn't interested in accounting for the fact that MVP voters tend to spread the love among multiple teams as they work their way down the ballot.

Kawhi's MVP case is even more interesting when set against someone who isn't getting very much buzz at all: LeBron James.

LeBron is currently in 6th in the MVP projections, with just a 2.2% chance of winning. Yet he looks a lot more like a traditional MVP than Kawhi. Here they are, side by side:

You can see Kawhi's only real advantage on box score numbers is his efficiency. LeBron is scoring more, rebounding more, and assisting more. He's running fairly close on steals and blocks. What about the narrative that LeBron is somewhat coasting through the regular season to save his production for the playoffs? That could be true, but he's playing more minutes per game, and more games, than Kawhi.

What we have is basically the KD-Westbrook debate with 2 new variables, one that the model picks up and one it doesn't. On the one hand, Kawhi has a massive advantage in defense, which historically hasn't factored in voting that much. On the other, there's the fact that Kawhi's team is 8 games ahead of LeBron's, something which has historically mattered a great deal to voters. As a result, the model has Kawhi ahead, matching the conventional wisdom.

But wait, there's one more multi-positional defensive wizard who needs to have a say in this discussion. The model gives Draymond Green a 2.8% shot at the trophy, which paradoxically feels both high and low to me.

It's high for the simple reason that Steph is going to beat him in MVP voting. With that out of the way, however, I'd like to argue that Draymond is more deserving of consideration than he's getting. It's Green's freakish positional versatility that fuels Golden State's Death Star lineup. Green leads the league in triple-doubles, is the first player in nearly 20 years to average 13/9/7, and has played more minutes this year than Curry.

The model doesn't consider the fact that Green and Curry are teammates (other than the fact that it won't include more than 2 players from any team), but it's helpful to look at the Bulls. In years where both Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen were eligible, and both received votes, Scottie finished 9th, 5th, 11th, and 10th in the MVP race. The only year he cracked the Top 8 was 1995-96, a year when the Bulls finished with a record you might be familiar with.

Like Pippen, Green's contributions are largely off the box score and secondary to the transcendent scorer he plays with. Kawhi gives us a look at what it would look like if a Pippen/Draymond type player was the best player on a transcendent team. While the model is probably underrating his ranking relative to the competition, it is also correctly assessing that his defensive contributions aren't typically valued highly enough by voters to make him a real threat to Steph's coronation.

Some years you get a close MVP race, and some years Stephen Curry does things no one has ever seen on a basketball court before. But there's value in projecting out an MVP field that's 10 candidates deep, just like there's value in voting for a Top 5 for MVP, instead of just a winner.

Durant, Westbrook, and Leonard are all having historic seasons in their way. LeBron is adding another amazing year to an astonishing career. Draymond is the glue that holds the Warriors beautiful art project in place. And that's not to mention what guys like Kyle Lowry, Damian Lillard, and Chris Paul are doing.

The 2016 NBA Trade Deadline has, is, or will be passing as you read this. The long term consequences will shake out over the next few months and even years, but we can look back at past deadlines to determine just how important deadline deals tend to be.

Last year's Trade Deadline shows that it takes a few years to be able to truly evaluate the impact of a trade. At the time, the best deal of the day seemed to be the Goran Dragic Trade. Miami picked up Dragic, the reigning MIP who had been worth nearly 23 NBA Win Shares in his career with Phoenix up to that point, for two 1st rounders and mostly filler players.

Since the trade, Goran Dragic has contributed 5 WS to Miami, but he's also signed a big new contract. His scoring and his efficiency have plummeted this season and, as Miami's roster ages, those two draft picks are starting to look more valuable.

Compare that to another trade involving a Phoenix Suns PG. In a 3-teamer, the Celtics acquired Isaiah Thomas and Jonas Jerebko for a Cavaliers' 1st rounder and not much else. Most agreed at the time that Dragic was the more valuable player, but Thomas has outperformed him. Since the trade, Thomas has been worth 9 WS and his scoring has leapt up 6 PPG. Even Jerebko has been worth 3 WS, not much less than what Miami has received from Dragic.

So let's take a look back at some of the biggest NBA trade deadline deals, using the benefit of hindsight to see who really gained the most from making them. It's not necessarily fair to say one team or the other "won", since, as you'll see, a lot of these trades rely on things that the front offices making them couldn't have possibly known at the time. But, perhaps, there are lessons here that GMs can take into future dealings.

A couple of notes before we start. I'm using a generous definition of the Trade Deadline to include any trade that happened in mid-January, February, or March, because it's my column and I can do what I want. To quantify value, I'm using Win Shares, a metric that Basketball Reference adapted from the baseball stat devised by Bill James. WS is a stat that awards portions of every team win to every player on the team, based on how much they contributed (positively or negatively) to said win.

The biggest trades, as defined on this list, are the ones with 100 or more Win Shares in past or future value. In other words, every trade on this list is one where all the players involved had contributed 100 WS to the teams trading them or where they would go on to contribute 100 WS to the teams that acquired them. These are trades where franchise players moved on, where teams acquired a new franchise player, or where both happened.

For each trade, we'll show the past WS of all the players in the trade for the team that traded them (so, for example, the number for Rasheed Wallace doesn't include his WS in Portland) and the future WS the player would accumulate for the team that traded for them (so, for example, Seattle's WS in the Ray Allen trade won't reflect his time in Boston). I've also included, in parentheses, the percentage of past WS each team sent and the percentage of future WS each team acquired. You can think of that as a rough measure of who "won" the trade.

Got it? Then let's get started.

Lesson 1: Selling a legend is tricky

• The Dominique Wilkins Trade

Los Angeles Clippers Receive: Dominique Wilkins, 1994 1st Round Pick (Greg Minor). 31 Past WS sent (22.4%), 2.6 Future WS received (66.7%)

Atlanta Hawks Receive: Danny Manning.  107.4 Past WS sent (77.6%), 1.3 Future WS received (33.3%)

• The Clyde Drexler Trade

Houston Rockets Receive: Clyde Drexler and Tracy Murray. 54.5 Past WS sent (32.8%), 26.9 Future WS received (89.4%)

Portland Trail Blazers Receive: Otis Thorpe, Marcelo Nicola, 1995 1st Round Pick (Randolph Childress). 111.9 Past WS sent (67.2%), 3.2 Future WS received (10.6%)

Dominique Wilkins was in his 12th year with the Atlanta Hawks when the franchise decided they'd rather trade him than give him a massive new contract. Unfortunately, because of that impending new contract, and Wilkins' age, the Hawks couldn't get back more than a Win Share. This trade makes the list because of Wilkins' lengthy tenure, but in terms of return, it left much to be desired.

Still, given that Wilkins's career was nearly over, the Hawks got a better share of the overall WS pie than the Trail Blazers did, when they traded Clyde Drexler. Drexler is still the Blazers' all-time Win Shares leader and in return they got Thorpe, who would be gone months later, Nicola, who never came to the US, and a pick that would go to a player who logged 375 total minutes for Portland. At least Clyde got a ring, though!

Lesson 2: But if you get it right, it's worth it

• The Gary Payton Trade

Milwaukee Bucks Receive: Desmond Mason, Gary Payton. 56.1 Past WS sent (29.6%), 16.3 Future WS received (22.9%)

Seattle Supersonics Receive: Ray Allen, Ronald Murray, Kevin Ollie, 2003 1st Round Pick (Luke Ridnour). 133.4 Past WS sent (70.4%), 54.9 Future WS received (77.1%)

Gary Payton was having an All-Star year when Seattle, apparently concerned about re-signing him, shipped him to Milwaukee. In exchange, they got the best shooter of his generation. Ray Allen would go on to chip in 38.2 WS as a Sonic before being sent to Boston, while GP would leave for LA in free agency, contributing just 2.9 WS to the Bucks.

Lesson 3: Good drafting can make a trade

• The Truck Robinson Trade

Atlanta Hawks Receive: Tom Henderson, 1977 1st Round Pick (Greg Ballard). 6.6 Past WS sent (39.5%), 62.9 Future WS received (51.7%)

Washington Bullets Receive: Truck Robinson, 1977 1st Round Pick (Tree Rollins). 10.1 Past WS sent (60.5%), 58.8 Future WS received (48.3%)

• The Sam Cassell Trade

Milwaukee Bucks Receive: Sam Cassell, Chris Gatling, Paul Grant. 10.7 Past WS sent (27.8%), 36.7 Future WS received (30.4%)

New Jersey Nets Receive: Elliot Perry, Chris Carr, Stephon Marbury, Bill Curley. 13.9 Past WS sent (36.0%), 20.0 Future WS received (16.6%)

Minnesota Timberwolves Receive: Terrell Brandon, Brian Evans, 1999 1st Round Pick (Wally Szczerbiak). 14.0 Past WS sent (36.2%), 64.0 Future WS received (53.0%)

• (One of) The Rasheed Wallace Trade(s) 

Detroit Pistons Receive: Rasheed Wallace, Mike James. 41.7 Past WS sent (91.9%), 38.7 Future WS received (37.7%)

Atlanta Hawks Receive: Chris Mills, Zeljko Rebraca, Bob Sura, 2004 1st Round Pick (Josh Smith). -0.1 Past WS sent (-0.3%), 50.2 Future WS received (48.9%)

Boston Celtics Receive: Chucky Atkins, Lindsey Hunter, 2004 1st Round Pick (Tony Allen). 3.8 Past WS sent (8.4%), 13.8 Future WS received (13.4%)

If you ask any fan who remembers the 2004 Trade Deadline who the biggest acquisition that year was, they'd say Sheed and Sheed a 2nd time. And, from a historic perspective, they'd be right, since Wallace helped the Detroit Pistons win a title. However, the player who had the biggest on-court impact for the team that traded for him in 2004 wasn't even in the NBA at the time.

Although the players who travelled to Atlanta in the Sheed trade didn't amount to much, they did make the most of the draft pick they got. While Josh Smith has fallen on tough times, he contributed 47.6 WS to the Hawks, more than the 37.3 Sheed racked up as a Piston. Thanks to the pick, and their smart use of it, the Hawks actually won the largest percentage of future WS in the Rasheed Wallace trade (of course, it doesn't look quite as good if you factor in the 14 WS they gave up to acquire Wallace for one game).

None of the trades in this section would have made the list based on the players who were actually in the trade. Instead, smart drafting helped some of these teams turn average-seeming trades into big wins.

4. You can't really predict how a trade will impact you

• The Brendan Haywood Trade

Washington Wizards Receive: Drew Gooden, Josh Howard, Quinton Ross and James Singleton. 67.4 Past WS sent (60.7%), 4.6 Future WS received (27.4%)

Dallas Mavericks Receive: Caron Butler, Brendan Haywood and DeShawn Stevenson. 43.6 Past WS sent (39.3%), 12.2 Future WS received (72.6%)

On paper, this move seemed to bring Dallas the missing piece they needed to win a championship: Caron Butler. Yet, one year after this trade, when the Mavericks made their Finals run, Butler was in a suit, injured and unable to play. On paper, DeShawn Stevenson was a throw-in. Yet, in the 2011 NBA Finals, it was Stevenson whose 3s and D helped lead to the Mavs' upset victory over the Miami Heat. The Mavericks wouldn't have won the Finals without this trade, just not for the reason they were expecting when they made it.

5. The Rudy Gay Trade was weird

• The Rudy Gay Trade

Toronto Raptors Receive: Rudy Gay, Hamed Haddadi. 56.1 Past WS sent (39.0%), 1.9 Future WS received (12.9%)

Memphis Grizzlies Receive: Austin Daye, Tayshaun Prince, Ed Davis, 2013 2nd Round Pick (Jamaal Franklin). 30.8 Past WS sent (21.4%), 9.8 Future WS received (66.7%) 

Detroit Pistons Receive: Jose Calderon. 60.3 Past WS sent (42.0%), 3 Future WS received (20.4%)

This trade makes our list because it involved 3 players who amassed over 25 WS for their respective franchises changing teams. However, it serves as a warning that, in the NBA, your past accomplishments can fade very quickly. Prince and Calderon, who accounted for over 98 of the past Win Shares in this trade, were basically just salary figures used to match the money on Rudy Gay's monster contract.

The Grizzlies "win" this trade, by virtue of the fact that Prince stayed in town till 2014 and averaged 27 MPG for a playoff team and by virtue of the fact that Rudy Gay would spend less than a year in The True North. However, it's tough to argue anyone here really won.

6. It's very, very tough to get good value back for a superstar

• The Wilt Chamberlain Trade

Philadelphia 76ers Receive: Wilt Chamberlain. 26.3 Past WS sent (19.0%), 71.2 Future WS received (84.6%)

San Francisco Warriors Receive: Connie Dierking, Paul Neumann, Lee Shaffer, cash. 112.4 Past WS sent (81.0%), 13 Future WS received (15.4%)

Honestly, the most amazing part of this trade may be that Wilt accumulated 71.2 WS in just 3 and a half years as a 76er. Things had gotten bad for Wilt in San Francisco, but that's a tough return for one of the greatest to ever play the game

7. But it's not impossible

• The Pau Gasol Trade

Los Angeles Lakers Receive: Pau Gasol, 2010 2nd Round Pick (Devin Ebanks). 6.2 Past WS sent (10.3%), 59.7 Future WS received (48.7%)

Memphis Grizzlies Receive: Kwame Brown, Javaris Crittenton, Marc Gasol, Aaron McKie, 2008 1st Round Pick (Donte Greene), 2010 1st Round Pick (Greivis Vasquez). 53.8 Past WS sent (89.7%), 62.8 Future WS received (51.3%)

• The Carmelo Anthony Trade

New York Knicks Receive: Carmelo Anthony, Chauncey Billups, Anthony Carter, Renaldo Balkman, Shelden Williams, Corey Brewer. 34.8 Past WS sent (27.1%), 40.2 Future WS received (42.9%)

Denver Nuggets Receive: Wilson Chandler, Raymond Felton, Danilo Gallinari, Timofey Mozgov, Kosta Koufos cash, 2012 2nd Round Pick (Quincy Miller), 2013 2nd Round Pick (Romero Osby) and a 2014 1st Round Pick (traded). 91.5 Past WS sent (71.4%), 51.8 Future WS received (55.3%)

Minnesota Timberwolves Receive: Anthony Randolph, Eddy Curry. 1.9 Past WS sent (1.5%), 1.7 Future WS received (1.8%)

The Pau Gasol trade, at the time, seemed like one of the biggest steals in NBA history. Now, almost a decade later, by percentage of future Win Shares, Memphis actually won the trade. Lakers fans probably won't complain too much about a trade that convinced Kobe to stay and got them 2 rings, but Pau's 59.2 WS as a Laker are a little behind Marc's 62.2 in Memphis. In fact, the younger Gasol has been worth more WS as Grizzly than the older one was, making this the rare trade where a team dealt a superstar and improved their long-term situation.

The jury is actually still out on the Melo Trade, since Anthony, Gallinari, and Chandler remain on the teams that acquired them, but, at this point, Denver has an over-10 WS lead. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that the Knicks may have given up too much for a player they'd be able to sign as a free agent over the summer. Unlike the Gasol trade, the Win Shares seem to bear that out in this case.

8. Being a Cavs fan sucks 

• The Kevin Johnson Trade

Phoenix Suns Receive: Tyrone Corbin, Kevin Johnson, Mark West, 1988 1st Round Pick (Dan Majerle), 1988 2nd Round Pick (Dean Garrett), and a 1989 2nd Round Pick (Greg Grant). 62.1 Past WS sent (85.2%), 179.8 Future WS received (73.7%)

Cleveland Cavaliers Receive: Larry Nance, Mike Sanders, 1988 1st Round Pick (Randolph Keys). 10.8 Past WS sent (14.8%), 64.3 Future WS received (26.3%)

• The Bill Laimbeer Trade

Detroit Pistons Receive: Kenny Carr and Bill Laimbeer. 10 Past WS sent (34.4%), 99 Future WS received (74.9%)

Cleveland Cavaliers Receive: Phil Hubbard, Paul Mokeski, 1982 1st Round Pick (John Bagley), 1982 2nd Round Pick (Dave Magley). 19.1 Past WS Sent (65.6%), 33.2 Future WS Received (25.1%)

• The Antawn Jamison Trade

Cleveland Cavaliers Receive: Antawn Jamison, Sebastian Telfair. 63.4 Past WS sent (58.3%), 7.8 Future WS received (67.8%)

Washington Wizards Receive: Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Emir Preldzic, Al Thornton, 2010 1st Round Pick (Lazar Hayward). 41.4 Past WS sent (38.1%), 2 Future WS received (17.4%)

Los Angeles Clippers Receive: Drew Gooden. 4 Past WS sent (3.7%), 1.7 Future WS received (14.8%)

There are three trades on this list that involve the Cavs. Two of them are trades that the Cavs soundly lost, including the Kevin Johnson trade, where Cleveland gave up the largest total future value of any trade on this list. You know a trade is bad, when it cost you more Win Shares than trading away Wilt Chamberlain.

Then there's the Jamison trade, a win for the Cavs, but one that only calls to mind 2010-2012, a period where Cleveland lost in a 2nd-round shocker, watched LeBron James announce he was leaving on live TV, and spent the next 2 years as one of the worst teams in the league.

Is there a trade you think is missing from the list? Or are you just interested in reading more about past trade deadlines? Either way, make sure to check out the Trade Tool at Basketball-Reference.com, where you can explore every trade in NBA history.

Last year we added nearly every box score in ABA history to the site, but we were missing the inaugural 1967-68 season. We're now happy to announce that we have added the 1967-68 season, as well, meaning we now have box scores and game logs for the entire run of the league. This is once again thanks to the research of Michael Hamel, who has allowed us to show this data.

Among the cool new features are game logs for 1967-68 ABA MVP Connie Hawkins. You can also find his splits here. Additionally, you can find team splits and game logs.

This data has not yet been incorporated into player game finder searches or other play index tools, but that's something we'll be looking into in the future.

We hope everyone enjoys this new addition and thanks again to Michael Hamel for his permission to use this data and for his excellent research.

In 1951, the 20 biggest stars in the NBA gathered at the Boston Garden to play an exhibition. The hometown hero, Ed Macauley, scored 20 points, leading the East to victory in the very 1st NBA All-Star Game.

This Sunday, the 2016 NBA All-Star Game will be going down just about 550 miles, and one national border, away. In addition to the normal spectacle of All-Star Weekend, this year's edition could be a historically important one. It will be Kobe Bryant's final ASG, and could be the first of many for young stars like Draymond Green and Kawhi Leonard. Read the rest of this entry

The 2016 NBA All-Star Game is coming up this weekend in Toronto and whether you're looking forward to Kobe's final All-Star start, want to see Steph and Kawhi play on the same team, or just happen to be a really big Sting fan, there's plenty to watch for this year. But this post is about the stars of All-Star Games past. Read the rest of this entry

Last month, we added full box scores for the 1983 & 1984 NBA Playoffs. Now, once again thanks to the help of Sean Burrill, we have added full box scores and game logs for the 1983-84 & 1984-85 NBA seasons. This means we now have a full box score for Michael Jordan's NBA debut (in which he was only the fourth leading scorer for his own team!). We also now have full game logs for Jordan's rookie season. This means we now have a stat line for pretty much every game Michael Jordan has played in since high school. Please let us know if you have any of his Tune Squad box scores, though.

We have also synched these box scores into the Play Index, allowing for searches further back in many non-scoring categories in the Player Game Finder and the Team Game Finder. Some sample searches now possible:

• Moses Malone's 27 rebounds against the Celtics on March 25, 1984 were the most in a single game in 1983-84.
• The most assists in a game in 1984-85 was 25 by Isiah Thomas on Feb. 13, 1985 against the Mavericks (led by 40 points from Thomas's friend Mark Aguirre).
• Ralph Sampson, who debuted in 1983-84, double-doubled in his first nine career games. Shaquille O'Neal is the only player to match that feat since.

These new box scores also add new seasons available for search in the Player Streak Finder, the Team Streak Finder, and the Head2Head Finder. For instance, we now have full game logs and stats for every matchup between 1984 Draft class rivals Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley.

Additionally, we have extended the single-game leaders links in our Leaders Index back to 1983-84. Kevin McHale's 56-point effort on March 3, 1985 now ranks as the fifth-best Game Score in our database. And we also now have the full Celtics box score from 9 days later, when Larry Bird one-upped his teammate with a 60-point game.

As a reminder, we do have every box score in NBA history on the site. They can be accessed via this menu. However, many of the older box scores are limited to only player FGs, FTs, and points. With our update, the boxes are complete back to 1983-84, though.

We also want to mention that there are a handful of games for 1983-84 and 1984-85 for which we are missing a few statistical categories. If you are able to help fill in any of the blanks, please let us know.

Here are the games with some missing columns of data (games with strike-throughs have been completed since the original blog post):

• Lakers at Blazers on November 19, 1983
• Nets at Spurs on November 19, 1983
• Bulls at Jazz on November 23, 1983
• Warriors at Clippers on December 2, 1983
• Pistons at Blazers on December 9, 1983
• Pistons at Bullets on January 3, 1984
• Spurs at Lakers on January 6, 1984
• Suns at Kings on January 7, 1984
• Mavericks at Rockets on February 2, 1984
• Nets at Bulls on February 4, 1984
• Clippers at Cavaliers on February 4, 1984
• Suns at Warriors on February 4, 1984
• Knicks at Rockets on February 4, 1984
• Bucks at Jazz on February 4, 1984
• Pacers at Bullets on February 4, 1984
• 76ers at Hawks on February 4, 1984
• Suns at Rockets on February 18, 1984
• Spurs at Sonics on March 16, 1984
• Warriors at Blazers on March 17, 1984
• Celtics at Knicks on March 22, 1984
• Hawks at Pacers on April 11, 1984
• Jazz at Suns on May 10, 1984
• Suns at Warriors on October 26, 1984
• Jazz at Warriors on November 3, 1984
• Nuggets at Rockets on February 2, 1985
• Clippers at Pistons on March 11, 1985
• Suns at Warriors on March 23, 1985
• Kings at Warriors on April 6, 1985

LeBron James has moved his career VORP total to 104.46 and now narrowly leads Michael Jordan's 104.44 for most in NBA history. It should be noted that VORP can only be calculated since 1973-74, so Wilt Chamberlain's career is not included (nor are the first four seasons of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's career). VORP was created by Daniel Myers, in conjunction with Box Plus/Minus. Descriptions of the statistics and how they are calculated can be found here.

A comparison of some of their career regular-season advanced statistics can be seen below:

Today, we finalized the purchase of basketballreference.com from the folks at Rotowire (thanks guys!). This really doesn't do much for you as an end user, but I thought I'd also mention that there are some domain name tricks that can help you.

The main one is that each site has a shortened url of 5-6 characters that can save some typing on your end. This is especially useful on your phones.

bbref.com => baseball-reference.com
bkref.com => basketball-reference.com
hkref.com => hockey-reference.com
pfref.com => pro-football-reference.com
cfbref.com => sports-reference.com/cfb
cbbref.com => sports-reference.com/cbb
olyref.com => sports-reference.com/olympics

We're excited to announce a new Play Index feature at College Basketball Reference, which allows users to search for results of all matchups between Division I schools since 1949-50: the Matchup Finder.

There's a lot of cool new searches you can make with this tool, so let's show some examples:

• Find every meeting between two schools since 1949-50. For example, here's every Duke vs North Carolina game in that span in chronological order.
• Or maybe you only want to see the meetings where both schools were ranked in the AP Poll.
• Or games that went to overtime.
• But you don't have to strictly look for matchups between two explicit opponents. You can also do more generalized searches. For instance, we have integrated AP Poll data back to 1949-50 in the search, so you can find the largest margins of victory in wins over the top-ranked team.
• Or the largest wins by an unranked team over AP #1.
• Or meetings between #1 and #2 in the AP Poll.
• You can also look for things like wins by your favorite team over AP Top 10 opponents.

In conjunction with the addition of the Matchup Finder, we have also enhanced the Team Game Finder. The Team Game Finder allows for more specific statistical searches than the Matchup Finder, but it only goes back to 2010-11 (the first season for which have all box scores) rather than 1949-50. The enhancement we've now made to this feature is that the AP Rankings are also synced into the search table. So you can now find things like best FG% against the AP #1 team since 2010-11. Or most wins vs ranked opponents since 2010-11.

The other addition we've made with syncing of the AP Rankings are matrices for each season showing all of the ranked vs ranked games. For instance, here's the Top 25 Matchups matrix for the 2014-15 season. Click on any of the hyperlinks to be taken to a matchup finder link showing the list of games in that season fitting the criteria. These matrices go all the way back to 1950.

We'd also like to mention a few inaccuracies we uncovered in the NCAA Record Book in preparing this tool. The record book lists all of the wins over AP #1 teams. However, it includes 2 wins which were actually over schools ranked #2 by the AP at the time of the game (DePaul's win over St. John's on January 17, 1950 and Virginia Tech's win over Memphis State on January 10, 1983). Consequently, we've removed those two games from our list of wins over AP #1. The record book also lists every meeting of #1 vs #2 in the AP Poll. However, it is missing the 1999 Final Four matchup between Michigan State and Duke, which can be found with our tool.

We should mention, however, that in dealing with such a large dataset, there are probably some minor inaccuracies in this data. This is likely mostly with dates, since schools often publish dates that are odds with one another in media guides. If you notice any issues, please let us know and we will work to confirm and fix. Another wrinkle is that prior to 1995-96, the games are almost exclusively limited to Division I vs Division I. We added Virginia's December 1982 loss to Chaminade manually, but you won't be able to find things like Georgetown's "rivalry" vs St. Leo. If you're looking for the Hoyas against Syracuse, though, we've got you covered.