Games Started have been officially tracked as an NBA statistic since 1970-71, but comprehensive season-level data on games started is only currently in the public realm back to 1981-82. Thanks to old media guides we have been able to flesh out this coverage for some players and teams (most notably the 76ers due to the legendary efforts of Harvey Pollack). Basketball Reference is happy to announce that we have added regular season starts for the Knicks back to the 1964-65 season. So, for instance, we are now able to present that Willis Reed started 613 of his 650 Knicks games and that Walt Frazier started 666 of his 759 games with the franchise. It is also interesting to note the pattern of the number of starts for Bill Bradley and Cazzie Russell during the Knicks glory years of the late 60s and early 70s. This information is thankfully printed in the Knicks media guide and we should be able to add playoff starts for the franchise back to 1954, as well. Though starts have only been 'officially' tracked since 1970-71, obviously it was something that teams could reliably compile for earlier years, as the Knicks have done. Additionally, we have recently found games started for the Chicago Bulls back to 1970-71, so we hope to soon have an extra decade of starts coverage for the Bulls.

Thanks to our friends at Retrosheet, we have added Play-by-Play for 3,868 games from 1912 to 1972. The additions mean we now have Play-by-Play for all games back to 1969. Before this update our coverage was 100% back to 1973. Additionally, we have Play-by-Play coverage for over 99% of games in each season back through 1957. You can see our full NL/AL/Federal League Play-by-Play coverage map by season here.

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We are excited to announce that Sports Reference's College Basketball site has added 14 new seasons worth of player and team statistics for Division I women's basketball. This takes our coverage all the way back to 1987-88, when a balanced Louisiana Tech squad featuring the likes of Teresa Weatherspoon, Venus Lacy and Erica Westbrooks won the National Championship, while Weatherspoon, Sue Wicks and Michelle Edwards shared the various national player of the year honors. Some of the most notable players in basketball history have had their statistics added to the site with this update. They include, among others: Lisa Leslie, Dawn Staley, Sheryl Swoopes, Rebecca Lobo, Chamique Holdsclaw and Tamika Catchings. Read the rest of this entry

Pro Football Reference is pleased to announce that it has added full game-by-game (and also year-by-year) Sack Yards Lost data for all passers (NFL, AFL and AAFC) back to 1947, which was the first season Sack Yards Lost were tracked separately and not merely removed from rushing yardage (which is why many passers before 1947 had negative rushing yards). Read the rest of this entry

Most Valuable Player Awards in the National and American Leagues date back to 1911, when the Chalmers Award was voted on by a writer from each league city to reward the player in each league who "should prove himself as the most important and useful player to his club and to the league at large in point of deportment and value of services rendered." The reward for winning was an automobile. The award was created in 1910, but was for winning the batting title and ended in controversy. So from 1911-14 the award went to an MVP from each league. Interest in the award waned, and so from 1915-21 no MVPs were awarded. Read the rest of this entry

Here at Basketball Reference we take our frivolities very seriously. So seriously that we have made a new addition to our Frivolities section: season-by-season breakdowns of how the Eastern and Western Conferences have fared against each other.

You can see, for instance, that the West has the upper hand thus far in 2023-24 after the East won the series for each of the last two seasons. Before those two seasons, the West won the series in 12 straight seasons and 21 of the previous 22. You can also see how dominant the East was from mid-50s through the 60s, and also for all of the 1980s.

One technical point to bear in mind with this data is that before the 1970-71 season, the NBA was split into Eastern and Western 'divisions' instead of 'conferences.'

Thanks to some recent data expansions, we have vastly improved the coverage of seasons on our men's college basketball leaderboards on the Sports Reference College Basketball site. This will make the most comprehensive online archive of college basketball statistics even more robust. One thing to note is that in some cases this allows for our leaderboards to be even more comprehensive than what is included in the NCAA Record Book. This is because many schools tracked statistics such as blocks, steals and assists long before they became 'official' NCAA categories. Below is a breakdown of some of these changes.

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Thanks to the research of Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has added game-by-game coverage of player fumbles for the 1989 season. For instance, you can now see which games all of Randall Cunningham's career-high 17 fumbles occurred in in the 1989 season via his 1989 gamelogs.

Last fall Pro Football Reference added a suite of new punting statistics going back to 1976. We have recently extended many of these statistics back to the 1970 merger thanks to the work of Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis.

This means that we now have coverage for return yards against, net punting yards, net yards per punt, touchbacks and touchback% for all punters back to 1970. Punts inside the 20 coverage, however, still only extends back t0 1976. Bobby Walden's page is a good example of the variable statistical coverage for punters since he punted from 1964 to 1977. You'll notice 1976 and 1977 have the broadest statistical coverage but that 1970-75 is now nearly on par with 1976 and beyond. Pre-merger punting stats, however, remain limited to punts, punt yards, long punts, etc.

Thanks to the work of researcher and former NFL official scorer Pete Palmer and fellow research Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has made slight fixes to 150 player single-game passing, rushing or receiving totals in the 1960s. For NFL games, these were generally changes that we made after the fact and impacted some single-game totals for teammates. Most of the fixes were in the AFL from 1960-1965. No team or season NFL statistics were changed.