You may already know that we track box score stats for the NBA D-League, meaning that you can keep an eye on the progress of prospects, potential future NBA players, and post-hype sleepers who play in the NBA's minor league. However, in addition to basic stats like points and rebounds, we've also started tracking advanced stats for all D-Leaguers. That includes numbers like PER, BPM, WS, and USG%, among others. So, for example, you can see that right now, Erick Green leads all D-Leaguers in WS:

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The first quarter of the 2015-16 NBA season has been dominated by one team: the Golden State Warriors. At 25-1, they've posted the best start in NBA history, with the longest winning streak to start a season and the most wins by a team through its first 26 games. What's transformed the Warriors from an already great team to, potentially, one of the best ever?

You can point to any number of reasons, but a big one is the rise of their unstoppable small-ball lineup. Though an injury to Harrison Barnes caused them to temporarily shelve the lineup, the Warriors' small-ball group has been one of the major stories of the season and figuring out how to stop it will be the main task of any team hoping to unseat the champs. So let's go inside the NBA's equivalent of the Death Star and witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational lineup.

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We just wanted to quickly note that we've added the ability to search by day to the Basketball Reference Player Game Finder in the Play Index.

With this addition, you can now run searches such as:

• Most Points on Christmas since 1963-64 (Bernard King)
• Most Games Played on Christmas since 1963-64 (Kobe Bryant)
• Most Career Rebounds on April Fool's Day since 1985-86 (Karl Malone)

Now that you know that the Mailman always delivered on April Fool's Day, you can go about the rest of your day.

We hope you enjoy this new addition.

Thanks to the research of Sean Burrill, we're happy to announce that we now have complete box scores for the 1984 NBA Playoffs, and mostly complete box scores for the 1983 NBA Playoffs. Previously, these box scores were mostly restricted to player scoring and shooting statistics.

Additionally, 1984 Playoff games are now searchable in the Play Index. For instance, here's a list of triple-doubles in the 1984 Playoffs and most 3-pointers made by a team in 1984 Playoff games.

1983 Playoff box scores are also updated, but not searchable in the Play Index because we're missing some statistics from these games (please contact us if you are able to fill in any of these gaps):

Game 2, Boston at Atlanta: three-point attempts, offensive rebounding, turnovers, steals

Game 2, Milwaukee at Boston: offensive rebounding

Game 2, Portland at Los Angeles: offensive rebounding

Game 3, Los Angeles at Portland: offensive rebounding

Game 3, San Antonio at Denver: offensive rebounding

Game 3, Los Angeles at San Antonio: offensive rebounding

Game 5, San Antonio at Los Angeles: offensive rebounding, turnovers

Game 6, Los Angeles at San Antonio: offensive rebounding, turnovers

The NBA season is in full swing so our playoff and MVP probabilities pages are live. The playoff probabilities project the odds a team has of making the playoffs; while the MVP projections show the likelihood a given player has of winning MVP if voting happened today. On the playoff side, it looks like the Rockets and Pelicans are in trouble, while the Suns and Celtics are early season surprises. Sixers and Lakers fans can also track their odds of winning the lottery. Here's more info on how the projections are made and where we get the projected draft order from.

Oh, and as far as MVP goes, Stephen Curry is really really good

It's hard to believe, but we're under 2 weeks away from the start of the NBA season. That means it's also time to unveil the SPS projections for 2015-16!

What is Simple Projection System? Simply put, SPS is a very basic method for projecting basketball stats. SPS weighs the last 3 seasons by a factor of 6/3/1 and factors age and a little regression to the mean to project what a player will do in the upcoming season (you can read a more detailed explanation of how it's calculated on this page). If this rings a bell, it may be because you're a baseball fan who is familiar with Tom Tango's Marcel projection system. This quote from Tango pretty succinctly describes his projection system's raison d'etre (and why it's called "Marcel"):

"[I]t is the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible. So, that's the allusion to the monkey."

SPS applies the same general principles to basketball, though the name has no connection to a 1990s sitcom. As the name would suggest, SPS' calculation is relatively simple, but it also does a pretty decent job and holds its own, even compared to more sophisticated projection systems. Of course, SPS can't take into account contextual changes such as a player moving to a new team, changing coaches, or getting new teammates, but it's a fun starting point as we gear up for another NBA season. It's also important to note that SPS' numbers are per 36 minutes.

So, without further ado, here's who SPS projects to lead the NBA in points per 36 minutes:

SPS is looking at strong bounceback seasons for KD and Carmelo, while expecting James Harden to outscore Stephen Curry again. Here's the rebound leaders, where SPS projects big things for Hassan Whiteside following his 2014-15 breakout:

Finally, here are the projected leaders in assists per 36 minutes:

If you're anything like me, you were probably surprised to see Kendall Marshall there, but his per 36 assist numbers have been crazy good for the last 3 seasons.

In case you're curious about how SPS has done in the past, we have tables for SPS going back to 1980-81 showing what the projections would be and how they'd compare to the actual results. For example, here's how the projections for last season's two MVP frontrunners, Stephen Curry and James Harden, compared to their actual 2014-15 numbers. Some things, like Harden's 3-pt % or Steph's turnovers, it got almost exactly right. Other stats, like both players' field goal attempts, were a little further off:

And here are the SPS projections for Michael Jordan's last season with the Bulls, just because:

You can also see a player's 2015-16 projections at the top of their player page. Here's Carmelo Anthony's:

While you're getting ready for the season, don't forget that we also have the full preseason schedule with box scores, an updated free agent tracker with all of this summer's big and small player moves, a detailed injury report, and of course the most comprehensive basketball stats database on the web!

With the 2015-16 Liga ACB basketball season is underway in Spain, we'd like to make a couple of announcements.

First of all, you can find box scores, standings, player and team stats at our Liga ACB landing page. As you'll see, Barcelona's Ante Tomic got off to a hot start with 23 points on 10-for-11 shooting in a win over Zaragoza. Tomic was drafted by the Jazz in 2008 and they still retain his NBA rights. You can check out some of the other top players in this table with sortable stats for every player in the league. Don't forget to bookmark this page to keep up with perhaps the world's premier basketball league outside of the NBA all season long.

Our other big announcement is that we have added statistics for past Liga ACB seasons all the way back to 1983-84, which was the first season in the modern history of the league. This means we now have awesome things like vintage Arvydas Sabonis stats:

This addition also gives us statistics for Drazen Petrovic's season in Spain, the year before he started his NBA career in Portland. That year, he set a still-standing league record with 1,026 points in the regular season. You can access all sorts of leaderboards for various Euro leagues via this link. Among the cool nuggets you can uncover is the fact that the legendary Oscar Schmidt still owns the league record for three-pointers made in a single regular season with 160, with one of the most energetic players in NBA history coming in second on the list.

We hope you enjoy this addition to our site. College basketball fans will likely enjoy seeing statistics for college stars they had lost track of after they disappeared from the NBA. Now that these new pages have been created, we will continually be working on linking them up with already existing NBA pages for players who played in both leagues and/or have pages on our college site.

We recently published the game logs for Michael Jordan's high school, amateur, and NBA career, with every exhibition and charity game along the way.

This awesome feature is the product of research by author and hoops maven Todd Spehr (@toddspehr35). Todd had previously donated a decade of NBA All-Star Legends Game box scores to our site. Most recently, he is the author of Drazen: The Remarkable Life and Legacy of the Mozart of Basketball.

The records begin with Jordan's 1978-79 Junior Varsity effort with Wilmington, North Carolina's Laney High School, then continues with his varsity career and high-school showcase games like the McDonald's All-American game. Along the way, it includes every game of his UNC career, and every pre-season and international effort, including his Dream Team performances, and much much more. It really is an awesome effort, so we've included a permanent link at the top of our main Jordan page so that it's always easy to find.

Jonah Gardner joined the Sports Reference crew (working out of Philly) a few weeks ago as our Social Media Coordinator bringing SR's head count to seven full-time staff. Jonah brings experience working in social media for The Human Solution in Austin and also for several musical acts and record labels. He's an Atlanta Braves fan, backs Everton FC (the Braves of the EPL), and is a big NBA fan (see his Kevin Garnett Trade Voltron). Jonah will be leading our change on social media for Sports Reference and you'll see us on much more active on twitter and joining additional platforms in the near future.

Today is the 8th anniversary of the Kevin Garnett trade. Of course, there have now been 3 Kevin Garnett trades, but you know the one I'm talking about. In 2007, the Minnesota Timberwolves changed NBA history by sending KG to Boston in exchange for Al Jefferson, Ryan Gomes, Gerald Green, Sebastian Telfair, Theo Ratliff, and the picks that would be come Wayne Ellington and Jonny Flynn.

As you know, that trade went much better for Boston and KG than it did for the Timberwolves, who haven't been to the playoffs since. It's easy to criticize this trade, but Minnesota was in a difficult position for two reasons. First, Kevin Garnett is a once-in-a-generation talent, so almost no trade could have brought back a fair return. And, second, they couldn't build a Voltron out of the players they received in the trade.

While there's nothing we can do about the former, we decided to celebrate the anniversary of the trade by doing the latter. I give you, the Kevin Garnett Trade Voltron: Read the rest of this entry