For the 2013-14 College Basketball season, we've added a few new features:

• Seasonal Coaching Lists - These pages list every coach who was active during the season in question along with their record that season, plus their career record (both overall and at the school they coached) through the season in question. This means, for instance, that you'll see Bob Knight as the 4th-winningest active coach through, say, 1994, but he'll be #1 through 2002. This list can be accessed from the "Seasons" dropdown on any page, as well as the individual season pages themselves.
• 2-Point Shooting Stats - Just like we did for Basketball-Reference, we added 2-point shooting numbers (2P/2PA/2P%) to the player stat tables. These are also now on team pages and are searchable in the Play Index Season Finder for years since 1998.

Sports Reference has hired two new web developers/engineers/programmers to their burgeoning staff of now five.

David Corby joined us the last week of October and thus far has been shepherding the NBA and College Basketball sites. (Yes, we did give him a lot of time to get settled.) He is a UVA grad who worked in commercial operations at JetBlue. He's a largely self-taught developer with a wide range of development work. David once played against David Wright in a HS baseball game, and he went 4-4 with 4 doubles (Wright did, that is). He is largely a New York fan -- especially a Yankees fan, which proves we stand by our company policy that we don't discriminate on the basis of sports franchise affinity.

Hans Van Slooten (@cantpitch) will be joining us in December, working out of our newly-established Minneapolis branch, coincidentally located in Hans' home (note we do not offer company tours at this branch). Hans will be working on the hockey site and number of new projects/items from our wish list that we previously haven't had the bandwidth to work on. He joins us from OLSON (where he was a technical director) and, previous to that, comScore. He's a Twins and Vikings fan and will also help me source locally produced lefse and lutefisk for the Sports-Reference Christmas party.

With the 2013-14 NBA season starting next week it's time for a reminder to check out the Basketball-Reference Play Index. In case you don't already know about the PI, it's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. With the PI, you can:

• Use the Player Season Finder to search through all NBA, ABA, & BAA players' regular season and playoff statistics for performances that match your criteria.
• Use the Player Game Finder to search through NBA players' regular season and playoff game logs (since 1985-86) for games matching your criteria.
• Use the Head-to-Head Finder to search for games in which two selected players played against each other.
• Search for player and team consecutive-game streaks that match your criteria using the Streak Finders.
• Search for team performances that meet your criteria with the Team Season Finder and Team Game Finder.
• Use the Draft Finder to search through every NBA/BAA draft for picks that match your criteria.
• Use the Player Comparison Finder to compare the stats of up to four players through (or in) a given season.

Also, take a look at the Play Index Plus for even more data-searching goodness. The PI+ lets you sift through the play-by-play data of every game since 2001, making it possible to look for specific events, lineup data, and shooting stats (including clutch shots and shot breakdowns by distance).

Best of all, these features are 100% free to use! So go ahead, give them a try, and you'll wonder how you ever got along without them.

You may have noticed we've made a few small additions to the site in preparation for the upcoming 2013-14 NBA season:

• Added "series stats" links to yearly playoff pages, and added advanced stats to series summaries.
• Added 2-pointers made/attempted & 2P% to stat tables. - Now you can see that Shaq did in fact shoot much better on 2-pointers (58.3%) than 1-pointers (52.7%) in his career.
• Added Free Throw Rate to advanced stats. - Borrowing from my old Blog-tionary... "FTr = (FTA / FGA). Free throw rate is the ratio of free throws attempted per field goal attempted. It's useful to assess where the bulk of a player's shots are coming from -- low ratios usually indicate a lot of jump shots (fouls are less prevalent the further away from the basket you get), while high rates are the province of inside players who often take strong shots in traffic down low. A variation on FTr is Bob Bellotti's old Rice-Scott Index (RSI), which is just FGA / (FGA + FTA) (so named because when the stat was developed, long-range bombers Glen Rice and Dennis Scott had extremely high RSIs)."
• Added 3-Point Attempt Rate to advanced stats. - 3PAr = (3PA / FGA), and is a measure of what % of a player's shots come from long-distance, another good gauge of how they're utilized offensively. Note that 3PAr and FTr also appear on team & league pages (so you can see what the league averages were).
• Added Plus/Minus (and re-added Game Score) to player gamelog pages. - Plus/Minus represents the team's scoring differential while the player was on the floor, and is available going back to the 2000-01 season. Game Score is a John Hollinger method of evaluating single-game performances.
• Added Advanced Stats to player splits pages. - Splits pages now feature the player's True Shooting %, Usage %, Dean Oliver individual Offensive/Defensive Ratings, and Plus/Minus per 100 possessions in each split.
• Added franchise summaries under player stat tables. - Underneath each player's stat tables, you'll now see career totals & averages for every franchise and league they played for/in (when applicable).

A few more tweaks are forthcoming before the season, and as always, email us any additional ideas/suggestions/requests you might have, and we'll see what we can do.

Just a quick note that our NBA Playoff Series pages now have advanced stats tables, so you can learn that, for instance, Chris Andersen and Chauncey Billups both had Offensive Ratings north of 150 in this 2009 playoff series.

We also added Four Factors tables to the series summary pages, wherein you'll find nuggets like Phoenix's ridiculous 122.7 team Offensive Rating against the Warriors in this 1994 series. Enjoy!

Recently, a BBR user posed a question we get on occasion:

"[I] noticed that the team rebound totals for every team appear to be incorrect from 1956-57 to 1967-68. They are correct in 1968-69. For example in 1956-57 it shows the Celtics led the league in rebounds with 4963. When you add up the rebounds for every player on their roster the total comes to 4578. The points and assists totals match exactly. [...] It is only the rebound total that is off, and it is off for every team by a significant margin."

He's right -- you can see this by adding up the team rebound totals for each league-season and comparing it to the sum of individual player rebounds... It changes around 1968:

+---------+-------+----------+------------+
| year_id | lg_id | team_trb | player_trb |
+---------+-------+----------+------------+
|    2013 | NBA   |   103575 |     103575 |
|    2012 | NBA   |    83513 |      83513 |
|    2011 | NBA   |   101816 |     101816 |
|    2010 | NBA   |   102640 |     102640 |
|    2009 | NBA   |   101586 |     101586 |
|    2008 | NBA   |   103271 |     103271 |
|    2007 | NBA   |   100994 |     100994 |
|    2006 | NBA   |   100754 |     100754 |
|    2005 | NBA   |   102970 |     102970 |
|    2004 | NBA   |   100361 |     100361 |
|    2003 | NBA   |   100604 |     100604 |
|    2002 | NBA   |   100829 |     100829 |
|    2001 | NBA   |   100988 |     100988 |
|    2000 | NBA   |   102062 |     102062 |
|    1999 | NBA   |    60395 |      60395 |
|    1998 | NBA   |    98798 |      98798 |
|    1997 | NBA   |    97703 |      97703 |
|    1996 | NBA   |    98099 |      98099 |
|    1995 | NBA   |    92006 |      92006 |
|    1994 | NBA   |    95192 |      95192 |
|    1993 | NBA   |    95504 |      95504 |
|    1992 | NBA   |    96680 |      96680 |
|    1991 | NBA   |    95776 |      95776 |
|    1990 | NBA   |    95518 |      95518 |
|    1989 | NBA   |    90031 |      90031 |
|    1988 | NBA   |    81828 |      81828 |
|    1987 | NBA   |    83020 |      83020 |
|    1986 | NBA   |    82161 |      82161 |
|    1985 | NBA   |    82008 |      82008 |
|    1984 | NBA   |    81150 |      81150 |
|    1983 | NBA   |    83853 |      83853 |
|    1982 | NBA   |    81987 |      81987 |
|    1981 | NBA   |    82010 |      82010 |
|    1980 | NBA   |    81065 |      81065 |
|    1979 | NBA   |    81564 |      81564 |
|    1978 | NBA   |    84984 |      84984 |
|    1977 | NBA   |    84886 |      84886 |
|    1976 | NBA   |    69960 |      69960 |
|    1976 | ABA   |    30815 |      30815 |
|    1975 | NBA   |    69468 |      69468 |
|    1975 | ABA   |    40239 |      40239 |
|    1974 | NBA   |    67230 |      67230 |
|    1974 | ABA   |    40705 |      40705 |
|    1973 | NBA   |    70555 |      70555 |
|    1973 | ABA   |    41062 |      41062 |
|    1972 | NBA   |    71299 |      71299 |
|    1972 | ABA   |    48429 |      48429 |
|    1971 | NBA   |    74059 |      74059 |
|    1971 | ABA   |    50234 |      50234 |
|    1970 | NBA   |    60697 |      60697 |
|    1970 | ABA   |    49991 |      49991 |
|    1969 | NBA   |    65324 |      65324 |
|    1969 | ABA   |    46674 |      46674 |
|    1968 | NBA   |    65166 |      56999 |
|    1968 | ABA   |    46957 |      46957 |
|    1967 | NBA   |    54536 |      48095 |
|    1966 | NBA   |    49118 |      43250 |
|    1965 | NBA   |    48433 |      42563 |
|    1964 | NBA   |    47423 |      41894 |
|    1963 | NBA   |    48044 |      41418 |
|    1962 | NBA   |    51415 |      43183 |
|    1961 | NBA   |    46314 |      40732 |
|    1960 | NBA   |    44104 |      37401 |
|    1959 | NBA   |    40343 |      34794 |
|    1958 | NBA   |    41279 |      35814 |
|    1957 | NBA   |    35948 |      32136 |
|    1956 | NBA   |    34616 |      31395 |
|    1955 | NBA   |    32292 |      28777 |
|    1954 | NBA   |    32987 |      29808 |
|    1953 | NBA   |    36168 |      32314 |
|    1952 | NBA   |    35977 |      31209 |
|    1951 | NBA   |    35019 |      30621 |
+---------+-------+----------+------------+

So what's the deal? Is this a bug in our database?

Actually, no. It's just a matter of accounting by the official scorer, because technically speaking, for every missed shot there has to be a rebound.

Starting in 1968-69 (1967-68 in the ABA), so-called "team" rebounds (rebounds where there was no clear individual who should receive credit) were no longer counted toward a team's overall rebounding total. Before that, "team rebounds" were credited at the team level, but they (obviously) didn't make it into individual rebounding totals. This is what caused the massive discrepancies between teams' rebounds and the sum of their individual players' rebounds.

Nowadays, those "team rebounds" are thrown into their own bucket, neither allocated to individuals nor to teams for the purpose of overall stat totals.

Mystery solved!

NBA & ABA Trailers | Basketball-Reference.com.

Just a fun add to the site that didn't take too much time. Of course it probably isn't fun if you are the all-time worst FG% shooter.

I am sad to announce that after six years, five websites, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code, my tenure at Sports Reference will come to an end this week. More information can be found on my new blog, Statitudes. Thanks to all of the users who have supported the sites that I ran.

Jobs @ Sports Reference.

Sports Reference has an immediate opening for a web developer. Please see our job advertisement for all of the details. We will begin reviewing applications on August 26th.

Just in case you missed this last month year, we now offer the option to search for double- and triple-doubles using the Player Game Finder tool. Under "Additional Criteria", just check the box next to "Double-Double" or "Triple-Double", and you'll be able to find games that match any combination of points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks that meet the criteria you're looking for.

As an example, here are the career leaders in Triple-Doubles since 1985-86 (the first year we have complete boxscore data):

Read the rest of this entry